Rusted Sky

And then, for the woodworking folks, there is the Craftsman 21754 CompuCarve for all the 3D beauty you can't afford to make. Design up the design, put into the memory card, take it to the device, load up the flat piece of wood and out it chugs your finished piece to your specifications. In concept this will do the same in a few years, with metal engraving.

Mind you, HP has been experimenting with a 3D cell placement system for organ creation. Just determine the structure, load up the cells and start printing! As each cell layer gets placed, the table descends for the next layer to be deposited. Add in rDNA and differentiation of one's own tissues from stem cells or from culture grown sources from biopsy, and you will get your very own organ without fear of any tissue rejection.

Yes, that is what you get when you get 'drop on demand' technology where the drop size is that of individual human cells. Once nanotech starts getting into the act in 20 years or so, then making your own drugs at home will be cheaper than trundling out to a pharmacy. And I expect addiction to rise like no one's business until we get used to the concept of letting people take care of themselves. Again.

Why the Nannystate won't work: high tech will obsolete it. Mind you, the same technology will make things like home-made explosives a *snap*, so we had best sort out this terrorist insanity *now* before the tools become really cheap.

I have used, as an example of what technological change can do to one's future job prospects for my students, a 3D printer, available now for $25K, that prints in ABS plastic to .01 inch resolution, with 70% of the strength of injection-molded plastic. Give it no more than 5 years, and one of those, with higher resolution and greater final strength, will cost roughly as much as a printer costs now. This is going to affect manufacturing jobs, Wal-Mart (if you can print out a soup ladle, you don't need to buy one; multiply this by 100,000), transportation (the ladle manufacturer won't be shipping nearly as many ladles to Wal-Mart), etc.
Drafting is already an obsolete profession; given the power and ease of use of CAD programs, the people who used to employ draftsmen now can do the drawings themselves. Tool and die making is almost obsolete also; machining already is. No one wants to pay master machinists' wages for someone to stand at a milling machine and turn out precise parts, one at a time, for 8 hours a day; they want someone who can program a bank of CNC milling machines that can simultaneously turn out precise parts 24 hours a day. eMachineshop is the first step in making the entire world a CNC machining resource; if you want to start manufacturing cars of your own design, everything is available online, with custom parts courtesy of eMachineshop. Anyone want to be the next Ford?

Any sufficiently advanced technology will seem like magic - and we're about at a point where the magic is REALLY going to be flowing all around us.

The question is what the side effects will be...

J.

John -

I see that out at the plant. The hordes of tool&die folks, the expert machinists, the model makers are pretty much gone now except for some very senior folk and guys who could adapt to the CNC machinery.

Technology marches on - I kind of expect my job won't exist in another 20 years, myself.

J.

My sister was trained for tool & die making in the late '70s and promptly got a so-so job at Moog. That company has had its shares of ups and downs, and she was pushing a broom part time at one point. But when things picked up she was back on full and overtime continuously... on deburr. Now that is due to the fact the company outsources so much work to the Philippines, and the work done there is not up to snuff and needs final finishing in the US. Which is a fancy way of saying that the overall cost of production has not flattened, due to re-work time and poor quality, and that schedules are now at the mercy of shipping.

What the roboticization of this portends is the end to the expensive manual labor part, especially if quality control in finishing is kept up via automation. Like all things, the Craftsman machine will be hit by Moore's Law and advanced machining capability. For the true hobbyist, why send out for parts if you can get the raw materials and have the design and a $2000 machine to make them? For larger parts, say a car doors and such, a larger facility is necessary, but for the hobbyist/specialist side with things smaller than a breadbasket, DIY will be seen as a distinct possibility.

Basically, take a look where the laser printer started out in the early 1980's and look 20 years on. From big, messy, clunky, hard to maintain and expensive to, well, 'would you like a printer with that computer?'. I can see where going to the Sears online store will get an automated assistant asking if you would like the new 'home forge and casting attachment' for your existing setup. The large scale will need space and scaling up, which will be relegated out of the pockets of individuals, but not small business. Today a 36" fully automated, four color press with automatic plate loading and disposal is actually something you can run environmentally safe in an office environment. Load in the plates, top off the ink, make sure the water and disposal lines are good and cart out the used plates every day or so.

And as printing gets finer and finer, actually *printing* circuitry and batteries starts to make all sorts of new things possible... the day of the home-made, home printed computer, including display is coming. It may not be 'top of the line' but it will be extremely cheap. Disposable, in fact.