The third industrial revolution | Hacker News Reader

The third industrial revolution

economist.com

58 pointsicki21 comments

I've investigated starting a modern manufacturing company. Regulation and bureaucratic impediments are immense in most countries. When a manufacturing process is new it usually gets some old, broad regulation applied to it. If you doubt me, pick any already industrialised economy and read their health and safety requirements (usually found in multiple, conflicting documents). Governments are doing their best to remain as rigid and inflexible as possible in most cases (not deliberately, usually due to incompetence, lobbyists and special interests). From my point of view, one of the hardest tasks in starting an agile, flexible manufacturing company is finding a government that won't prevent you from starting in the first place. However, I'm still hopeful of finding that magical sweet spot of talented people congregating, relaxed regulation and at least basic infrastructure.

I visited someone yesterday who has a very small manufacturing business. His product is security screening for windows.

In the middle of the floor was a very large delivery of aluminium. It has just arrived from China. He said it wasn't just the price that made him get it in. It was the fact that he could send them a design on the computer, and receive the finished product some time later. No fuss, no questions, no nosy government types.

As the article points out - everyone assumes the products are coming from China because of low wages. That's partly true, but it's much more than that. China has a flexible manufacturing sector made up of lots of tiny factories all producing something small. With a mass of government regulations you effectively mandate a minimum factory size, which mandates a minimum batch size to justify using the factory.

It's not until the ever-increasing regulations get wound back will home-grown manufacturing be able to return.

The main problem I have with articles like this, is that I see all major turning events are only shown to be significant in their historical context after the fact. You need the 20/20 vision of hindsight to see what impact any particular development. World War 1 wasn't named until long after the event. This is not to say that people didn't know they were at war, or in a Depression. Only that the scope and impact of the event can only be known after it has finished.

While every development or change results in a set of writers and thinkers keen to coin the phrase that defines it (hello 'web 2.0'), in reality you only get to write the story long after the event has happened.

Personally I do see 3d printing having a large impact if they become as widespread as the laser printer became.

It also makes me wonder if a home foundry kit will become a popular item. Combines on-the-spot recycling with creation from 3d printers (making the moulds). The applications are enormous. But we won't know what the breakthrough is until hindsight can put it into context for us.

So yes, interesting article. Industrial Revolution 3? We'll see.

On-the-spot recycling for your 3D printer is here: http://filabot.com/reclaimer.php

Now if we can get low-cost printers for metal and electronics, and on-the-spot recycling for at least the metals, we'd be there.

Interesting link, thanks.

I was talking more about using a 3d printer to make a mold, then melting down metals to create your own castings. A small foundry kit where the printer makes the mould, you pack the sand, then you melt down alumnium cans or scrap steel, pour and get yourself a metal object.

I recently saw a segment on the show 'manlab' where they cast their own lemon squeezer - vid is poor quality but here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtFkn4gRt-M

It’s completely reasonable to say that we only know the upshot of events after we see them. Many things are not understood at the time.

But many contemporary understandings are basically correct.

If you do a Google Books search for the phrase “first world war” in the range 1914–1935[0], you’ll find that many people were using it basically as we do. They grasped that Versailles set up another war, and that globalization meant it too would involve all of Europe (i.e., “the world”). We see more now, but they had the basics. We could have that good an understanding of manufacturing.

I’m not trying to refute your point, only to temper it.

0. http://www.google.com/search?q=%22first+world+war%22&btn...

Interesting. You get about 7,830 results for First World War there.

By contrast, you get About 532,000 result for "great war" which is what I thought it was referred to before there was a need to number the great wars.

> The lines between manufacturing and services are blurring.

If there was on thing I learned with this crises is that services are the first to go down. Why? Because they're expensive and not a must have.

On the other hand real products like food, houses, vehicles, medicine... are the ones that will never go down (must have). But they have low margins and are not so attractive during growth periods.

So while the trends exposed here are probably true, the fundamentals will surely change with such large disruptions as the ones predicted here. And then the service providers will not have who to sell to anymore. Auto-balance

Note: I'm not an economist. I read however "Economy in one lesson"

Really? Car and housing prices have dropped significantly since 2008.

Food prices have dropped steadily for several hundred years (exceptions for misguided policy like the ethanol mandate, which spiked corn prices globally).

I think he may have meant "go down" as in, "go down in flames"

I look forward to being convinced that housing and car manufacturing are more stable and resilient than services.

exactly!

I assure you that healthcare, education, and sanitation do much better in a crisis than durable goods. Nobody is going to stop their college education because the rest of the economy collapses (they might even be persuaded to go to grad school), but people put off buying new cars, new computers, or anything else where their current item can last a bit longer.

These 3 are fundamental needs (so exceptional services - more like utilities).

But even here, unless life threatening situations, people will postpone action. (eg. drugs instead of surgery, disinfectant, ...)

With education I beg to differ: although it may look like a safe heaven, pursuing education for the sole purpose of temporary financial stability is probably not that smart. Reasons:

     - practical experience is more valuable and if not truly committed to the PhD, don't really see the value
     - state funding for schools & research will drop (later, true, but it will).
     - if everybody (or the majority) will go to school, who's going to do the work to come out of the crises.

Yes, those services are fundamental needs. There are lots of services that are fundamental needs, and lots of goods that aren't. In fact, a greater percentage of services are fundamental than goods, because your contention that " services are the first to go down" is exactly the opposite of what we observe in practice.

"If there was on thing I learned with this crises is that services are the first to go down."

What are services? Does "manufacturing process engineer" qualify as a service job, or manufacturing job?

I always found the distinction to be silly and irrelevant. Services are demanded and supplied to support the economy, as are manufactured goods. (I'm not even talking public service here)

Offshore production is increasingly moving back to rich countries not because Chinese wages are rising, but because companies now want to be closer to their customers so that they can respond more quickly to changes in demand. And some products are so sophisticated that it helps to have the people who design them and the people who make them in the same place. The Boston Consulting Group reckons that in areas such as transport, computers, fabricated metals and machinery, 10-30% of the goods that America now imports from China could be made at home by 2020, boosting American output by $20 billion-55 billion a year.

This is absurd, manufacturing will move to the places with cheap energy, or in case of non-energy-intensive production to places where resources and supply chain is. In most cases it's much cheaper to move produced item, and, for example, it already takes just two days for Apple to move a custom-made item from factory in China to doorstep in US.

Much as I like the Economist, this isn't a very good article. It doesn't clearly distinguish proto and small-scale from large scale manufacturing and glosses over the fact that resource, energy, labor and transportion cost all affect the final cost of products in different ways.

There's no disruption or revolution, mechanical and manufacturing engineers have taken all these factors into account as a matter of course. The availability of better 3D printing is great and we use it to our advantage all the time but it's just one tiny aspect of the overall manufacturing landscape.

Flexible small batch manufacturing is not new. It already came with CNC machines.

TDM machines can be setup for a tiny fraction of a CNC, and the running costs printng ABS are still way below the cheapest metal stocks for CNC.

The only advantage CNC has right now is accuracy (thousandths vs tenths of an inch).

What has changed is that TDM machines are cheap enough for almost every home with a large screen TV could also have a printer.

The only advantage CNC has right now is accuracy (thousandths vs tenths of an inch).

It is more than that. You can make things out of metals that you can heat treat later to become much stronger/harder.

The products made by of those processes are not very strong. You can't heat treat ABS to HRC 65. Sure, you could print a pattern for casting with ABS, but castings are not that strong either.

Sintered metal? I don't know enough to comment. Perhaps it can use poweder metallurgy grade alloy steel?

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