3D Printing ... What does it really mean

I have been thinking for some time now about the nature of work. What will the future look like? What skills are needed to be successful 5, 10 and 15 years? I have 3 grandchildren and I realize the world they will enter at adulthood will be very different from the one they play in now. It's hard enough trying to forecast what may be in 5 years ... but 15 is nearly impossible. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is the skill of 'learning quickly' will be at the top of the list. You'll just need to master new knowledge in record time. Knowing what to learn, how to find and discern relevant information, and how to integrate with everything else you know is "the" skill.

Oh, 3D printing ... that's where I started. Here is a whole new industry poised to take off in the next 5 years. In 10 years, we will envision nearly everything capable of local manufacturing ... from wrenches to food to drugs to clothing ... you name it. After all, its all made from the same star stuff found on earth. In 15 years, it will simply be the way to get stuff. You may still go to Amazon to look for product, but when you hit the One-Click button you'll simply get the file that defines the product. Your local 3d printer will do the rest.

How does this impact work. Will the new jobs be in making 3d printers? Transporting them around the world? Fixing them as they break? The answer is ... these functions will require very few people. The jobs will be in design ... creating those files that define a product, drug, food, clothing ... and nearly anything else you can think of. New products will simply be new designs.

We will become a bit based world where bits move around the planet at the speed of light. Hard products will take on the economics of digital music, movies, social media, etc. Very little fixed cost with almost no variable cost (except at the consumer end in making a copy) ... yielding very low prices. The cost of a design will be a function of difficulty to develop and size of audience to consume. Hmm ... 99 cents sounds like a good price for a design if the potential market is in the millions.

With industries racing toward smart digitization, robotics, and automation the future of work will be in creative and collaborative skills that can leverage a world of plenty ... that is plenty of very low cost resources from which services can be created. No one quite knows exactly how it will all play out ... but we do know that it will be faster than most can imagine. Think exponentially ... become an exponologist ... commit to life long constant learning.

The Lesson of Exponential Growth: Rice and the Chess Board

The inventor of chess, Sessa, pleased the current king so much, that he was asked to name his own prize. His request seemed modest. One grain of rice doubled for each square on the board.

"If a chessboard were to have rice placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?"

On the first half of the board, a total of 4,294,967,295 (2³² − 1) grains of rice, or about 100,000 kg of rice (assuming 25 mg as the mass of one grain of rice) were counted. India's annual rice output is about 1,200,000 times that amount. Not that bad.

Thinking Exponentially

If I accomplish one thing, I hope it is to get you to think exponentially. It's not easy. Most of us use the past to predict the future.

For example, 5 years ago we did not have an iPhone. So, you can say in that period of time, we went from the coolest phone being a Motorola Razor (because it was thin) to the iPhone 4s that comes with Siri. That is a lot of change. Hundreds of thousands apps, a dual core processor, centralized storage of music, apps, pictures, etc. (iCloud) ... the list goes on.

What does this tell us about the future?