Economic futures round up for Thanksgiving

Because everyone has nothing better to do today than hang around on the web reading articles, I've included below a few good articles that bear on economic futures (not to be confused with the stock market term).

1. "A Skeptic's Guide to 3D Printing": as I was saying on Twitter a couple of days ago when this article got posted, this is the best starting point for exploring the futures of 3D printing I have seen yet. And as I've said in previous posts, in its full suite digital fabrication clearly will play in interesting role in rewiring some of our economic life, but the current hype around 3D printing is animated a bit more by people's excitement and imagination than by critical examinations of the development and diffusion of a new technology, which is something this article does well.
2. "Google Enters 3D Printing Arena": Follow the digital fab vein, this short article as an announcement about a development agreement between Google (dba Motorola Mobility LLC :) ) and 3D Systems to build a high speed digital fabrication and fulfillment system to support Motorola's mobile device customization project, Project Ara.  As a colleague has often said, take a quick peek at anything Google gets into.
3. "The Reluctant Visionary": This is a review-of-sorts of Eric Drexler's new book, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, which returns us to an examination of what Drexler now calls "atomically precise manufacturing."  Nanotechnology has had its own massive hype in decades past, but in various forms the science and engineering continue to advance and, as always, the promise of what manipulation at the atomic level could mean for human economy is nothing short of revolutionary.
4. "How Google's "Deep Learning" Is Outsmarting Its Human Employees": The last article is from Fast Company and takes us back to Google and into the realms of neural networks and machine learning to look at how Google's system for deep learning is evolving capacities to distinguish objects in the world around it that it's programmers never provided.  Augmentation of human capabilities with machines and the replacement of human effort with machine effort, both fundamental aspects of technological change since the beginning, will of course portend even greater changes in economic life.

And for our early work from last year on framing many of these larger economic shifts:

The Infinite Economy from Richard Lum

A 3D Printer in Every Home

One of the most prevalent images in the mass conciousness about 3D printing is the image of a small MakerBot/Solidoodle appliance on a counter top in every home in America.  It's not hard to see why this image spreads so readily.  But I suspect the analogy people are intuitively using to forecast this image, namely the historical trajectory of the inkjet printer, fails us at some point in the process.

What I matters to this image of 3D printers as household objects is really a couple of linked things: advances in materials for additive manufacturing and the overall ease-of-use.

I don't think many people really dispute the need for a broader array of materials as feedstock to make 3D printing realize its very-hyped potential to fabricate most any object that can be designed.  Advances are clearly being made in this arena, but a think much more needs to developed to make these appliances truly versatile enough for the average household to become a must-have for each family.

On the ease-of-use side, we can in fact use the analogy of the inkjet printer to consider what needs to develop in order for 3D printers to be used by every household.  The modern, ubiquitous inkjet printer requires virtually no manual maintenance on the part of users, they are cheap to acquire, their feedstocks are widely available, and putting them to work requires very little technical know how on the part of users: just being able to write a Word document or double-click on a picture positions the user to making quick and easy use of their printer.

Essentially, 3D printers, as part of an ecosystem of allied services and products, will need to become equally easy for the average non-techy, non-maker enthusiast to use before this particular slice of technology can become ubiquitous at the level of the household.