In a different HN thread, I was talking about "permatech". This was a term that some friends and I were exploring as a generalization of permacomputing. However

In a different HN thread, I was talking about "permatech". This was a term that some friends and I were exploring as a generalization of permacomputing. However, we had yet to come up with anything coherent. Rodney Brook's articulation of these laws of robotics is the first thing I have come across that seems to point the way to formulating something for permatech. That is, if we generalize "robots" to any kind of automation that may have to interface with humans. The first principle, that the form of automation makes a promise to humans, reminds me a lot of both Christopher Alexander's ideas on architecture, as well as Mark Burgess's Promise Theory. Alexander has a lot of ideas on design that goes beyond buildings, and is very influential to the Human-Computer Interface design and OOP. Burgess's ideas speaks a lot about how systems of agents (both human and machine) can voluntarily cooperate and coordinate together. The second principle about agency connects to a lot of things. Among them, I can draw connection to the Living Systems world view, in contrast to the Machine World view. The former retains meaning and purpose for humans, and the latter can be summed up as "beat to fit and paint to match". The third principle struck me as practical yet narrow in scope. On a second pass, I think there's something more general that can be teased out of it. I'm not exactly sure what it is. In some ways, it reminds me of how software can be improved iteratively, or what Alexander had wrote about "unfolding", where designs can change to suit inhabitants of a building.