The Information Age’s mid-life crisis | Hacker News Reader

The Information Age’s mid-life crisis

bitoftech.mkronline.com

5 pointsmkr-hn5 comments

I'm not sure if I agree with the thesis, but I really loved this line and agree with it "Our education system put math and science over research, reading, and writing skills when we needed the latter three for an information economy."

I want to be an industrialist (informationalist?) in this revolution, and I need as much input as I can get. I want to hear your thoughts, even (and especially) if you have some disagreements.

My thinking is the we've been talking about the information age since Toffler circa 1980 (thirty years ago) -- the next revolution will be in micro-manufacturing. Right now we're mass producing things in China because right now that's the cheapest place to do it. But what happens when you can produce custom goods which are assembled by robots? A primitive example is the ability to order a mousepad over the net with your photo on it -- what happens when you can do that with clothing or cars? To me that's a post-industrial revolution -- and that's where the action will be. The old days of everyone having the same stuff will be over.

There will be a lot of smaller revolutions bound together by the speed and access to information we have today. It's easier to find, customize, and order your micromanufactured products now, and even easier to resell.

There's a huge leap between the chirping modems of the '80s and '90s and having the world at your fingertips anywhere in that world. We're living in the information revolution people have been talking about, and all the cool stuff we couldn't do 30 years ago is about to happen.

Next up will be the transport revolution where you can walk down the street, identify a need, create the solution, and take a suborbital shuttle to the factory where the new product is being built a few hours after identifying the need.

Like Star Trek with capitalism.

I think the factory may be down the street or even in your house -- my gut tells me that will happen first before a badly needed transportation revolution.

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