Printing Stuff: The Future of Manufactoring

The third industrial revolution

If you mention to people that in the future you can print everyday objects such as plastic cups, shoes, toys, and even clothing, they would find you going a little too far in your imagination. It is easy to understand printing letters or pictures on a paper, but objects is something else. The only misleading part about printing objects is that it is not something that you’ll have to wait for to happen in the future. Printing objects is not so new and is certainly possible today. When 3D printing matures and becomes mainstream, it will cause a huge disruption. Manufacturing is becoming digital.

So how does it work? 3D printing is a process of creating 3 dimensional objects. There are basically two ways to create objects. First is subtractive process where solid material is cut until the remaining object is revealed. This is not hard to image. The problem is that lot of material gets wasted. The second process is additive process. There are several ways this can be done but the basic principle is that objects are created by adding layer after layer of material until the final object is created.

Here is an example of a 3D printer from a company called Makerbot. The Replicator printer costs just $1.749.

http://youtu.be/euZivv8ySyA

3D printing has entered the consumer level. There are also many industrial printers that can print 3D models of design, for example cars. In fact, the early use of 3D printing is to make rapid prototypes of industrial objects. The Economist reports that a firm is working on printing wings on drone airplanes. Objects that could not be manufactured using traditional manufacturing can easily be created using CAD software and 3D printing. Researchers have even printed a life jellyfish.

The impact of 3D printing will be huge. The manufacturing process is becoming a digital process run by software. CAD software has existed for years but now we are seeing designs become standards that can be shared easily. Thingiverse (http://www.thingiverse.com/) is a web site where users can upload their own design as well as download them. We can expect new jobs where people will become designers of everyday objects. We can also expect jobs in traditional manufacturing to get disrupted and disappear.

The whole economics of manufacturing is about to change. In the 20th century we saw how production of scale could lower prices for consumer goods. Now economics of scales become irrelevant. Each individual will just print their copy and even customise it to their own taste. The third industrial revolution is about to begin.

Image from: http://www.continuumfashion.com/shoes.html

IGI Meetup: Video Games relationship with Media

IGI Meetup on Video Games and the Media (late review)

This IGI meetup was held early in June 2012 

News of video games are very simple in the media: games are violent and teens get addicted to bad games. A typical news item would be about some study that shows negative impact of compter games on teenage boys. Clearly there are many misconceptions about video games in the media. The impression is that video games are violent shooter games played by 18 year old males. Yet, the average age of gamers is 37 and 82% of people who play video games are older than 18. Only a small fraction of games are violent, most game are clean, educational and fun to play. IGI Meetup, organised by Jóhannes Sigurðsson and Þóroddur Guðmundsson focused on discussing how video games are perceived by the media and the public.

Video games are for everyone. Things have changed since the days of simple games when there was no internet (the first game was actually OXO, a tic-tac-toe game developed on an EDSAC computer in 1952, since you asked. It was not wide-spread since there were not that many EDSACs laying around).  The audience shared stories of typing in code of games from magazines, saving them on cassettes and hoping they would run, only to realize that the game was not so good. There were even stories of the Quest series. Today, you can talk to people of all ages (who think they don’t play video games) about the games they play or have played. In 2009 the increase on Facebook of women over 55 was 175%. And what did they do: play games.

The meeting was very interactive with stories and examples of games. It seems to be that more people play games than realize they are playing games. To them it is something else and the people that play video games are playing on PS3 and xBox some shooter war games. But games are for everyone and the media is not taking the opportunity to cover games as an entertainment form. They could be covering new innovation in games, releases of games and featuring big hit games. Just like music and films, the audience for games is huge. Some games are actually have bigger budgets that Hollywood films and get more revenues than big moves at the box office. Gamers want to read about games and the stories of the games. In fact, games are all about stories. Even Angry Bird has a story (did you ever wonder why the birds are angry?).

There was also discussion on if games are good for people. Do games improve any skills? In his book, Grown up digital, Don Tabscott talks about one study. It turns out that people that play a lot of video games can track more objects at one time than people that don’t. Second, they are better at monitoring a cluttered world; they can more quickly identify a target briefly presented in the field of clutter. And third, the experienced game players are better at processing rapid stream of visual information. Then think about the future of jobs when the traditional business organisations are getting disrupted with rapid technological innovations. Who are you going to hire?

So, make sure your kids play more video games.

 

 

An Optimist in Reykjavík

Matt Ridley’s Lecture at University of Iceland

Zoologist and author Dr. Matt Ridlay recently gave a lecture at University of Iceland in Reykjavík hosted by the Research Center for Innovation and Economic Growth. Ridley is known as an author of several books, the lastest from 2010, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. His talk teaches us to take nothing for granted and question everything – in particular the common beliefs. It also teaches us that mankind will solve problems and adopt to the changing environment – thus the reason to be optimistic.

Ridley’s talk was full of interesting facts and observations. As a university teacher of technology trends (at Reykjavík University), what I was most interested in was his research on technology evolution. Here are few points that I got from this talk.

First was his study of ancient human behaviour. It shows that human evolution is closely tied to exchange. In societies where free exchange of goods and ideas is allowed, there is prosperity. Ridley used the rise of the Roman Empire, Florence during the Renaissance and England during the industrial revolution as examples. This is similar view as presented by Steven Johnson in his book Where Good Ideas come from. Indeed, Johnson uses the English industrial revolution and the rise  of the Coffee House as example of places where ideas are exchanged. The term Johnson uses is the liquid network.

The second point was on how technology evolves. Much like human evolution, which is based upon sexual reproduction, ideas feed on other ideas to create new ones (Ridley’s TED talk was called When ideas have sex). This is exactly the view presented in my New Technology course where I talk about technology evolution and in particular the adjacent possible, another term Steven Johnson talks about in his book.

The third point is how dependent we are on technology. As an example Ridley compares the computer mouse with a ancient stone tool made for cutting. Both are sized to fit the palm of your hand, but one is made up of so many sophisticated parts that one single person couldn’t possibly know how to make a mouse. If that is the case with a simple object like mouse, what about all the other stuff we take for granted. Even a simplistic toaster is impossible to make without ready-to-use parts. This was dramatically demonstrated by Thomas Thwaites in his Toaster Project.

The fourth and last point I got from this talk has to do wit optimism. His book form 2010 is titled the rational optimist. Ridley is challenging common pessimistic views that tend to dominate. When we read the newspapers and listen to the discussions on the radio, we get the feeling that everything is getting worse. Most studies seem to look at negative impact of things, totally ignoring the relevance of any negative impact in the whole of things. Maybe scientist that compete for research grants are more successful if the subject is negative. Who would fund a study about the joy of computer games?

I think the real message from Ridley is that mankind will always find ways to adapt to changing environment. This is why we have survived for so long. When things look bleak, the pressure will be to come up with solutions to fix things. Take for example the evolution of computers. Every 18 months or so, computing power doubles and has done so since the beginning of the first electric computers. Computers have gone though several paradigms, from vacuum tubes to relay switches to transistores to integrated circuits. When each paradigm is running out of steam, research builds up and the collective brainpower behind the problem ends up with a new solution. We are now nearing the end of the current paragdim with silicon based circuits and, indeed, much research is into alternatives.

This is why we should be optimistic about the future. In fact, I’m convinced that in the coming years and decades we will see more innovation than we have in any period of mankind. This will be in, to name a few subjects, fields such as energy, food production, computing, transportation, communication, education, pollution, medicine and cure for diseases. If we should be worried, it is about governments that impose restrictions and fail to prioritize with innovation of the individual in mind.

Here is a sad example of government restrictions: example 1.