If anything defines a community, it is the place or space it occupies. And if anything defines the strength of a community, it is the degree to which the people within look out for each other. There are many expressions of this sentiment, a popular biblical one being, ’love thy neighbor’. Good neighbors are there for each other. If two people share a community, they are neighbors. If the community is strong, the people have each others’ backs. If it is weak, poor, then people fall through the cracks. Another popular saying is, we can all be a better neighbor. The fact of this is testament to the reality we face: we often don’t know how to be a better neighbor in the face of life. We have only so much time, energy, and people.

The first prototypical community world piece computer in local scope was built to address the homelessness problem in Anchorage, Alaska, called the Anchorage homeless-world piece computer. This was in part due to a longstanding personal interest the inventor held dear, but also for a very practical reason: it doesn’t matter what your ideology was; we could all rally together to solve homelessness, even if we were inclined to say not-so-nice things about each other in the confines of our private spaces.

Average people of average-and-above intelligence (that is, the 81% of people above the lower standard deviation(⁠1) from average) were quite capable all-along of understanding that solving homelessness was not as simple as just saying, ’get a job’, or, ’get lost’. We could not export our social problems, and we could not force people to do things. The homelessness problem in Anchorage was a safe way to introduce the concept of the world piece computer to the community of Alaska at large, then eventually the nation and globe.

Before this prototype was erected, only a few seeds of personal, individual world piece computers had been scattered to the wind, hopefully still running and developing independently. The inventor noticed that attempting to cater to the average consumer first was not the way to promote individual mass-adoption. Reflecting back to the advent of the electronic digital computer, it was clear that the laptop and desktop and smartphone devices that we know as ’computer’ spawned from a long line of scientists and engineers creating large special-purpose computers to solve extremely specific, yet difficult problems.

So in other words, the electronic computer did not start as a box that lets one draft documents or check one’s email. The electronic computer started as massive machines devoted to solving specific types of extremely  hard problems. These problems were usually modeling complicated physical systems for engineering design. They were often for optimizing solutions to systems with many variables, just like the piece computer optimizes the arrangement of pieces in a world. This historic way of using computers proved so valuable that it motivated the miniaturization and improvement of modern computer technology to the tipping point—mass adoption.

Tipping into the era of the general electronic computer that most people think of only came about because the electronic computer proved it could do the hardest things first. Everything else followed. This wisdom is actually quite common in the world of entrepreneurship. In the general case, if one wished to create a general product for mass-adoption, that product concept must first be tested and tried on the outliers and extreme cases. If we can accomodate the outliers and atypical and extreme cases, then we can accomodate everyone.

We had to start somewhere. Homelessness seemed like a worthy challenge.

FOOTNOTES:

1 standard deviation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

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