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.

MacBook Pros for a Nickel by 2028

Scale is probably one of the most important skills necessary to become an exponential thinker. Recently Sal Kahn, the founder of KahnAcademy, came out with a video explaining exponential growth. It's worth watching. He shows how for many periods in the past, growth from a very small number seems imperceptible but at some point explodes with huge increments of change ... even though the rate of change remains constant.

Exponential Growth


In the real world you may have seen some of the terms in the chart below. It shows both expansion and decay based on exponential change. You will hear a lot about nano technology in months and years ahead. It is effectively 1 billionth of a meter. This is very small.
The promise is it will lead to fundamental changes in everything from energy to manufacturing. Since computing power is on a course to double every 20 months or so, in 15 years we will see it grow from a relative 1 to 2^15 which equals 32,768. By the way, that would make a $1000 MacBook Pro worth less than a Nickel. 

That amount of computing power for the same price we pay for a single unit will lead to  a level of progress in Nanotechnology that is hard to comprehend.

SI multiples for metre (m)

Submultiples				Multiples
Value	Symbol	Name		Value	Symbol	Name
10−1 m	dm	decimetre		101 m	dam	decametre
10−2 m	cm	centimetre		102 m	hm	hectometre
10−3 m	mm	millimetre		103 m	km	kilometre
10−6 m	µm	micrometre		106 m	Mm	megametre
10−9 m	nm	nanometre		109 m	Gm	gigametre
10−12 m	pm	picometre		1012 m	Tm	terametre
10−15 m	fm	femtometre		1015 m	Pm	petametre
10−18 m	am	attometre		1018 m	Em	exametre
10−21 m	zm	zeptometre		1021 m	Zm	zettametre
10−24 m	ym	yoctometre		1024 m	Ym	yottametre
Common prefixed units are in bold face.

So, this is why an understanding of scale and exponential growth and decay is so critical. Every individual and enterprise will be faced with an amount of change that will challenge the status quo. It's not in 100 years, it's around the corner.