June 28, 2015

EMPHASIS ON "YOU":

3D Printing And The New Economics Of Manufacturing (Rick Smith, 6/28/15, Forbes)

3D printing production is just scratching the surface of the multi-trillion dollar global manufacturing industry.  But its dominance is already inevitable.

This is because modern manufacturing, despite numerous technological and process advances over the last century, is still a very inefficient global system. Today's world of mass production is based on one simple rule: the more things you make, the lower the cost of each of those things. We have literally pushed this equation to its extreme limits. [...]

Ford mastered mass production and created the world's first mass consumer product. But there is another reason why Ford is such an important figure historically.  Henry Ford literally punctuated the industrial revolution. We have all been taught about the industrial revolution as if it were a binary switch. There was a before and an after. We all believe we live safely in the after. This IS the future.

But what if that's wrong?  What if mass production is not the end of this story, but rather just a stop along the way to something completely different? What if a technology came along that could turn everything upside down all over again?

3D printing is a technology that allows you to create things differently, from the ground up, layer by layer until you have a fully formed 3 dimensional object. Just like you now send a computer file of a document to a printer in your home or office, you can now send a computer file of an object to a 3D printer, and out comes that physical object. Eventually, you will be able to print almost anything you can imagine.

And will have ample time to do so.

Posted by at June 28, 2015 8:24 AM
  

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