Table of Contents

• The Agency Agency

• Design your own coins

• Learning from Artisans and Makers

• Hey AI Devices

The Agency Agency

“The advantage to A.I. that is, in some ways, a countervailing force here…is that it will increase the amount of agency for individual people.” That’s what Ben Buchanan told Ezra Klein on the New York Times podcast last week, The Government Knows AGI is Coming.

Ben Buchanan was the top AI adviser in the Biden administration. Buchanan and Klein were talking about how the government may be using AI — how it could be used against citizens or against citizens of other countries. Governments want to have control over AI and be able to use it for its purposes, some of which could be good and others, well, not so good. The Central Intelligence Agency in the US wants access to the best AI as do the Chinese.

Buchanan made the point that many of today’s technologies were first developed by the government or through the government’s funding. Think nuclear power. Think of the movie “Oppenheimer”. Two weeks ago I visited the Lawrence Berkeley Lab at UC Berkeley, a national lab. It was once known as Radlab. Or space flight, or the Internet. Artificial Intelligence, on other hand, has been developed in Silicon Valley with entrepreneurs using private funding to fund its development. It’s also meant that there are a few big companies that will control the AI future.

When Klein expressed his worries about centralization, and how governments see it as a force for their own control and power, Buchanan responded by naming as a “countervailing force” the power of agency that it gave individuals. “So I do think we will be in a world in which the 19-year-old or the 25-year-old will be able to use a system to do things they were not able to do before. And insofar as the thesis we’re batting around here is that intelligence will become a little bit more commoditized, what will stand out more in that world is agency and the capacity to do things. And I think that could, in the aggregate, lead to a pretty dynamic economy.”

This reminded me so much of why I value makers; they were among the first to figure out how to use tools to do something they wanted to do. They learned from each other. They developed the capacity to do things. Makers possess agency, though they may not call it that, and it empowers them to take on challenges. Maybe there’s an even brighter future for the next generation of makers, creators of the Collective Intelligence Agency.

Agency has always struck me as a fancy word for having the inclination to do things and just doing it, in particular DIY. I’m rather surprised and saddened to read about people who don’t have think they have agency. I’ve always thought of it as a default in human nature.

I was speaking to an educator this week and we were talking about how AI could be transformative for students — they are living in a Golden Age of access to information and learning. She agreed that it could be but she expressed her disappointment at how passive some kids are; they aren’t motivated; they don’t take advantage of new opportunities presented to them. They’ve been trained in an educational system organized around requirements, not choice, and they adapt by being passive. How do you break that pattern?

I believe maker education offers a way for students to discover their own motivation and there’s an even fancier word for it, which I just learned from Jurriaan Rexwinkel, an educator from the Netherlands. It is heutagogy, or self-determined learning.

“Heutagogy emphasizes the ability of learners to take control of their own learning journey. In a heutagogical approach, learners are not only responsible for what they learn but also how they learn it. This fits perfectly with maker education, which is grounded in exploration and self-directed inquiry.” From Making Education More Than Just Craft: Why Making Is More Than Technology by Jurriaan Rexwinkel. Another source said that the word was coined by “Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon "to describe self-learning independent of formal teaching." So, the self-taught or the autodidacts.

In the past, to be self-taught usually meant you could find books to read that could teach you want you wanted to know. If you had a book, you didn’t need a teacher who would basically explain what was in the book. A self-taught learner could learn directly from the source material.

The Internet and now AI give us many new ways to learn. Rexwinkel’s point is that you not only get to choose what to learn but how you learn it. Motivation matters almost more than intelligence. If nothing else, what matters most is what you want to do with what you learn — knowing what to create or make and what it is intended for remains a very human thing to do.

Adam Kumpf, a maker and professional prototyper from Delaware Ohio, writes on LinkedIn that AI is BS: “AI may seem impressive, but the power of creativity, invention, and progress has always been in the prompt itself, not the fidelity of the instantiation.” Kumpf’s point is in this emerging era of AI we are undervaluing what humans can do but humans have to choose to do the creative work.

Design your own coins

Forget meme coins. If the US government does not want to make pennies, why not open the job for others to? A citizen mint.

Benjamin Franklin designed the first US coin, known as the fugio cent. It had a sun and a sundial. Its motto was “Mind Your Own Business.” Remarkable. Some say he meant something like “tend your own business” but he might have meant “just leave me alone.” The early copper coins were made from melting “the bands used to hold together powder kegs that the French government sent to the United States during the American Revolution.” 

Why not authorize makers to manufacture pennies from recycled metals? A penny for your thoughts.

Learning from Artisans and Makers

In February, I visited Dickinson Glass, Michael Dickinson’s glassblowing studio located in a pastoral setting in Sebastopol, California. I’ve gotten to know Michael because he’s been at Maker Faire Bay Area at Mare Island the last two years. He and his father built his studio is a converted horse barn.

Michael makes and sells his own creations, specializing in hand-blown Venetian glassware. An important part of his business is offering glass blowing classes in the studio. He designed a large table that seats 8 people or so. Each seat provides access to a glass-blowing torch.

Michael even offer free classes at various times through the year as well. They help to bring people to see his work. He said that people are really happy to have the opportunity to use the tools and learn how to make something. While he usually has eight people, he’s had couples ask for private classes.

Celeste Flores of Clay and Steele is a blacksmith in Richmond, California who has also been at the Maker Faire Bay Area on Mare Island the last two years. Celeste used to work at The Crucible before going out on her own. Now, she’s expanded the space in her Richmond workshop and said that her classes are selling out. She told me also that group classes have produced a meaningful portion of her income.

Classes in glassblowing and blacksmithing are immersive learning experiences that are valued by lots of people. Showing people how to make something can be as much a business as getting people to buy something you make.

Hey AI Devices

For a future issue of Make:, we are looking to write about new kinds of AI-powered devices (other than smartphones). If you know and like something, tell our [email protected]. We’d love to have project build for a unique AI device for a specialized application.

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I’d love to hear from you if you have ideas, projects or news items about the maker community. Email me - [email protected].