Captain Picard turns to a recessed panel on the wall. “Tea, Earl Gray, hot,” he commands. Within seconds, a steaming cup of hot tea
appears on the tray, which he takes to his desk to ponder the daily reports.
In my last column (Revolution No. 10), I mentioned that the revolution is
already here, and indeed it is. It may
be difficult to see just yet, but it is growing rapidly and within a decade or
two will completely transform every aspect of our lives in ways we can only
just begin to imagine.
Let’s play one of our fun little thought experiments so you
can see the revolution in action.
You live in Future City, a planned community of 10,000
people or so, though you’d hardly know it.
The houses are designed to blend completely into the surrounding trees
and natural setting. This provides
maximum privacy, as well as a quiet and aesthetic place to live.
You don’t often run into your neighbors during the week,
unless one of them happens to be gong to the rec center at the same time. Today, you meet up with Dan who lives two doors
down. He’s taking his rec cart down to
the center, as well.
“Hey Dan! Mind if I
tag along? I’m heading to the rec
myself,” you say as you catch up to him.
“Please do! How’s the
wife and kids?” he asks with genuine interest.
“All doing great! Angie
just composed a new synth-phony for her recital on Wednesday. Hope you and Susan can come down and join
us,” you reply.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Dan says.
“You don’t have much rec there, Dan. Just needed a break?”
“I’m on the way to pick up the new steam engine I’ve been
working on,” he beams. “Finally got the
prototyping stage. I’ve managed to
increase efficiency 3.7% while reducing the overall weight by 2 kilos! I’m hoping this will get me over the 160kpm
mark.”
“Good God, man! I can
already drive your cars for a month without refilling the water tank! When will you rest?” you ask, half-jokingly.
“Can’t. Got an order
from a guy in China for 10 cars if I can get them up to 315 kilometers per
liter of distilled,” he says, looking slightly distracted by deep thoughts. "He wants me to print by the 10th."
You both arrive at the rec center. There are bins labeled “plastic,” “glass,”
“rubber,” and so on. You both dutifully
toss your rubbish into the appropriate hole.
One of the key selling points of Future City was that it had
an additive manufacturing center at the heart of the community. The machine keeps track of how much raw
material you throw into the rec center, and then off-sets that against your
‘printing’ costs.
You follow your neighbor around to the claims counter. The bubbly teenaged girl behind the counter
recognizes Dan and disappears into the store room. In minutes, she re-appears with the engine.
“Here you are Mr. Faber.
The printing cost was 100 Future bucks, which we deducted from your account. Thanks and have a great day,” she says
enthusiastically.
Back at the house, as you walk in, your spouse reminds you
of the leaking drain under the bathroom sink.
“Blast,” you think, “Forgot about that.”
You jump on the computer and pull up the house’s owner
manual. You select “master bath,”
“sink,” and “drain pipe with trap”. A
photo pops up on the screen and you verify that’s the one your want, then click
the “print” button. You put a note on
the desktop to pick up the pipe when you take the compost down to the rec
center later in the evening.
Hopefully, Dan will be out testing his new prototype then.
Additive manufacturing or 3-D printing is set to change the
world completely. If suddenly all
manufacturing is done in your neighborhood, then it fundamentally changes the
basis of all economic activity, and the implications are enormous.
If, like Star Trek, you can simply click a button and
‘print’ any device, piece of clothing, mode of transportation, piece of
furniture, spare part, toy, or possibly even food, then overnight there is no
need for large factories, mass shipping, department stores, warehouses,
dealerships, and dozens of other jobs and businesses would vanish.
Instantly, the economy would shift to one of ideas with
every human being potentially being an inventor. If I design something you like, you can pay
me and I click ‘print’ to your local 3-D printer. Within hours, or even minutes, I could
deliver my product to you anywhere in the world without using an ounce of fuel.
How close are we to this kind of world?
The printers have been around for a couple of decades now,
but in the last few years the technology has improved tremendously and the
price tag has shrunk at the same time.
If the key technology of turning post-consumer waste into raw materials
for new products comes along, then the sky’s the limit.
The more you ponder such a world, the more profound the
changes you perceive. Micro communities
built around industrial-sized 3-D printers.
Micro economies with successful groups issuing their own currencies,
producing their own renewable energy, and marketing products globally with no
more effort than sending an email.
For every product, there would be thousands, if not
millions, of potential manufacturers.
The pressure to innovate would be incredible. The ability of governments to regulate or
corporations to monopolize would vaporize instantly. Almost every human on Earth would become a
producer of something, whether it was art, or music, or clothing, or brooms.
But, you ask, suppose the 3-D printer broke down?
Try this out…you buy a new printer. You plug it in, turn it on and immediately,
it creates an exact copy of itself, which you put away. If the printer breaks, you plug in the new
one, which immediately creates and exact copy of itself, while you turn the old
one into scrap and feed it back into the machine for raw materials.
Anything would be potential raw materials – grass clippings,
scrap wood, left-overs from dinner, old clothes – just chuck it all into the
hopper and crank out new stuff.
Hook the whole thing up to solar, wind or other renewable
power source, and you have a near-perfect system that is pollution-free and
virtually without cost to operate, while at the same time creating useful
products that are infinitely customizable and can be pumped out in as great or
as few numbers as desired at any location on Earth.
Truly stunning possibilities, when you think about it. And we are very close to having thiscapability right now.
As Henry Ford famously said about his Model T cars, “You can
have any color you want, as long as it’s black.”
Now, mass production is precariously close to being able to
customize any product for any individual without additional cost or effort or
re-tooling. Just modify the blue print
in CAD and ‘print’.
No more need for nation-states, regulatory bodies, central
banks, or transnational corporations.
Just thousands of autonomous regions competing with design, innovation
and aesthetics in a truly global marketplace.
This kind of revolution has no precedent in all of human history. There would be nothing like it to compare to
or learn from. We would be on virgin
territory having to grope our way into this brave new world.
Since this kind of change would be uncharacteristic of
anything before it, perhaps we should do something uncharacteristic and prepare
before it gets here.
