The art of solving unsolvable problems

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Mick Ebeling is a filmmaker, producer, entrepreneur and philanthropist. In 2014 he entered the top 50 most creative people on the planet. Ebeling is the founder of the Not Impossible Lab, which aims to adapt cutting-edge technologies to address the specific problems of individuals. In this article, you will learn how the amazing Mick Ebeling makes the impossible possible, and you can also read an excerpt from his book, first published in Russian by the Potpourri publishing house.

You all know (Stephen Hawking). He has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Paralysis and muscle atrophy can lead to complete immobility, breathing difficulties and loss of speech. Hawking has a special speech-synthesizing device. But, if you are not an outstanding physicist, it is unlikely that you will be able to acquire it.

Mick Ebeling learned about this when he met an artist named Tempt. He also has ALS, and for seven years he could not communicate with loved ones. Ebeling figured out how to solve this problem. Here's what he said at the TED conference.

Mick wrote a book about how he decided to do "impossible" altruistic acts. On the one hand, it is a DIY tutorial, and on the other, it is a gripping artwork written in the first person and full of emotions.

We present to your attention an excerpt from this book. It is dedicated to the maker's movement. When people refuse to buy ready-made things, but simply print them on a 3D printer. Mick Ebeling was able to adapt this idea to create prostheses for children affected by the Sudan war.

Impossible is possible

After the laser projection of Tempt, I realized that we were part of something that had intrigued me for a long time. I mean the makers movement. This happened just a few years before Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, wrote Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, a manifesto for this movement, signs of which were already visible everywhere.

The maker movement has replaced the hacker movement. The birth of the era of personal computers in the early seventies of the last century led to the emergence of a subculture of young people who created such amazing inventions in the virtual world that even large companies could not compete. They could hack, alter, improve any program and adapt it to their own needs. To the uninitiated, they seemed anarchists; in their own circle they were considered revolutionaries, people who seized the means of production - virtual production - and subordinated them to their goals. Now the makers were doing the same thing, only in the real world. It's one thing to create new online commerce or business tools, the Windows graphical user interface and a million other virtual inventions that have emerged over the past thirty years, and it is quite another to bring these inventions into the real world.

I will be landing in Johannesburg in a few hours. At best, it will take me a week to learn how to 3D print prostheses - a technology that my staff have developed and refined over the past few months.

So where exactly were we headed? Richard Van As tried to cool our careless enthusiasm with a dose of harsh reality. It was a bitter pill, I must say.

In plain text, he warned us that being in a combat zone is much more dangerous than we imagined; that, stepping on the land of Sudan, we immediately become living targets; that we will be taken hostage and that we will have to face unimaginable horrors. But I also knew that somewhere out there a child was waiting for me - a child like mine - who had no one else to help but people willing to take risks. As always, my mantra supported me:

When, if not now? And who if not me?

In January 2014, The New Yorker published a very informative article by Evgeny Morozov about the history of the maker movement, rooted in the days of artisans and inventors at the beginning of the last century. And although they failed to make the worker the owner of the final results of production, they sowed the seeds that Morozov calls "a triumph of simplicity, a call for archaism and inventive consumerism as a form of political activity." And these seeds sprouted in 1968 after the publication of Stuart Brand's book "The Catalog of the Whole Earth", addressed to people who fell out of the mainstream. What some of us forget about Brand is that, along with promoting subsistence farming, wood-burning stoves and handicraft production, he considered the latest technology to be the most important tool for a revolutionary - the personal computer. It was Brand who popularized the term "hacker".

Morozov writes: “In 1972, Brand's article“Space War”appeared in Rolling Stone about the artificial intelligence laboratory at Stanford University. In it, he pitted hackers against planners - technocrats with rigid thinking and a complete lack of imagination - and said that "hackers will make their mark when computers become public." For Brand, hackers were the nascent mobile elite."

The students beaten by the cops weren't real radicals, Morozov notes, quoting Brand. The real radicals were the “anarchists from the hackerdom. The hacker does not recognize any authorities and subjects everything worthwhile to creative processing, improving and adapting it to the delight of all of us. " When Brand was asked who today carries the flag of the subculture, he replied: "The movement of makers - people who take everything that, it would seem, cannot be disassembled, shake out all the filling from there and begin to make something out of it".

Sounds familiar. In The Makers, Chris Anderson casts a rallying cry to all of our crazy brethren: “The past ten years have been dedicated to discovering new ways to collaborate, develop and work on the Internet,” he writes. “The next ten years will have to implement these lessons in the real world.” Indeed, the widespread adoption of computer and internet technologies over the past decade has led to astounding advances in communication, creativity and interactive interaction. The people I work with are scattered across the globe; we exchange ideas, drawings, sketches of articles and hundreds of other things with each other that seemed absolutely impossible in my parents' days.

However, our ability to benefit from this kind of collaboration and limitless creativity is constrained, in my opinion, by two factors.

The first is our inherent greed.

The Internet originated from the idea that information should be free; people began to write different things and put them on the Web, sharing them with other users.

The writer watched as his ideas spread around the world at the speed of a virus, inspire other people and transform into new ideas. Governments have been overthrown, revolutions have taken place - all thanks to freedom of information. But when it comes to physical things, we, as a society, are much less willing to admit that the ideas behind these things should also be free.

The second deterrent that we have been able to free ourselves from is a prison called “economies of scale”. Anderson explains this phenomenon with the Rubber Duckie trademark. Let's say you want to start a Rubber Duckie rubber boots business. Start-up costs (development of design and purchase of equipment) will amount to 10 thousand dollars. If you produce just one pair of shoes, it will cost you 10 thousand, but as the scale of production increases, the cost per unit of production will steadily decrease and with a production volume of 10 thousand pairs, the cost of one pair will be relatively low.

In the world of makers, things are different. The design of boots can be developed directly on the computer - and immediately start producing them. All you need is a 3D printer connected to your computer. You just click on "print" and go to dinner, and when you return, you find glamorous boots on your table. That's all. You can go to the market and sell them for a couple of bucks, and if anyone buys them, print more. No investment in equipment (except for the printer and plastic, the costs of which are decreasing every month), no marketing research, no economies of scale.

This is what we are trying to do at Not Impossible.

I would like people to have more access to medical devices, communications and other necessities that they cannot afford. We, the makers, have challenged the market and made cutting-edge technology available to everyone.

What we are doing can be called a "revolution against the absurd." Anyone who has ever tried to get medical equipment for their loved ones knows how absurd a maze of providers, hospitals, lawyers and insurance companies can be. It is absurd that these days an ALS patient is forced to communicate with his parents, watching them run their fingers over the paper. It's like watching someone rub a tree on a tree and thinking, "Hey, someone has to invent matches for these people."

"", Mick Ebeling