The Future (9 page)

The emerging Nanotechnology Revolution, which is converging with the multiple revolutions in the life sciences, also has implications in a wide variety of other human endeavors. There are already more than 1,000 nanotechnology products available, most of them classified as incremental improvements in
already known processes, mostly in the health and fitness category. The use of nanostructures for the enhancement of computer processing, the storage of memory, the identification of toxics in the environment, the filtration and desalination of water, and other uses are still in development.

The reactivity of nanomaterials and their thermal, electrical, and optical properties are among the changes that could have significant commercial
impact. For example, the development of graphene—a form of graphite only one atom thick—has created excitement about its unusual interaction with electrons,
which opens a variety of useful applications.

Considerable research is under way on potential hazards of nanoparticles. Most experts now minimize the possibility of “self-replicating nanobots,” which gave rise to serious concerns and
much debate in the first years of the twenty-first century, but other risks—such as the accumulation of nanoparticles in human beings and the possibility of
consequent cell damage—are taken more seriously. According to David Rejeski, director of the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, “We know very little about the health and environmental impacts [of nanomaterials] and virtually
nothing about their synergistic impacts.”

In a sense, nanoscience has been around at least since the work of Louis Pasteur, and
certainly since the discovery of the double helix in 1953. The work of Richard Smalley on buckminsterfullerene molecules (“buckyballs”) in 1985 triggered a renewed surge of interest in the
application of nanotechnology to the development of new materials. Six years later, the first carbon nanotubes offered the promise of electrical conductivity exceeding that of copper and the possibility of creating
fibers with 100 times the strength and one sixth the weight of steel.

The dividing line between nanotechnology and new materials sciences is partly an arbitrary one. What both have in common is the recent development of new more powerful microscopes, new tools for guiding the manipulation of matter at nanoscales, the development of new more powerful supercomputer programs for modeling and studying new materials at the atomic level, and a continuing stream of new basic research breakthroughs on the specialized properties of nanoscale molecular creations, including quantum properties.

Humankind’s new ability to manipulate atoms and molecules is also leading toward the disruptive revolution in manufacturing known as 3D printing. Also known as additive manufacturing, this new process builds objects from a three-dimensional digital file by laying down an ultrathin layer of whatever material or materials the object is to be made of, and then adds each additional ultrathin layer—one by one—
until the object
is formed in three-dimensional space. More than one
different kind of material can be used. Although this new technology is still early in its development period, the advantages it brings to manufacturing are difficult to overstate. Already, some of the results are startling.

Since 1908, when Henry Ford first used identical interchangeable parts that were fitted together on a moving assembly line to produce the
Model T, manufacturing has been dominated by mass production. The efficiencies, speed, and cost savings in the process revolutionized industry and commerce. But many experts now predict that the rapid development of 3D printing will change
manufacturing as profoundly as mass production did more than 100 years ago.

The process has actually been used for several decades in a technique known as rapid prototyping—a specialized niche in which manufacturers could produce an initial model of what they would
later produce en masse in more traditional processes. For example, the designs for new aircraft are often
prototyped as 3D models for wind tunnel testing. This niche is itself being disrupted by the new 3D printers; one Colorado firm, LGM, that prototypes buildings for architects, has already made dramatic changes. The company’s founder, Charles Overy, told
The New York Times
, “We used to take two months to build $100,000 models.” Instead, he now
builds $2,000 models and completes them overnight.

The emerging potential for using 3D printing is illuminating some of the inefficiencies in mass production: the stockpiling of components and parts, the large amount of working capital required for such stockpiling, the profligate waste of materials, and of course
the expense of employing large numbers of people. Enthusiasts also contend that 3D printing often requires only 10 percent of the raw
material that is used in the mass production process,
not to mention a small fraction of the energy costs. It continues and accelerates a longer-term trend toward “dematerialization” of manufactured goods—a trend that has already kept the total tonnage of global goods constant over the past half century,
even as their value has increased more than threefold.

In addition, the requirement for standardizing the size and shape of products made in mass production leads to a “one size fits all” approach that is
unsatisfactory for many kinds of specialized products. Mass production also requires the centralization of manufacturing facilities and the consequent transportation costs for
delivery of parts to the factory and finished products to distant markets. By contrast, 3D printing offers
the promise of transmitting the digital information that embodies the design and blueprint for
each product to widely dispersed 3D printers located in all relevant markets.

Neil Hopkinson, senior lecturer in the Additive Manufacturing Research Group at Loughborough University, said, “It could make offshore manufacturing half way round the world far less cost effective than doing it at home, if users can get the part they need printed off just round the corner at a 3D print shop on the high street. Rather than stockpile spare parts and components in locations all over the world, the designs could be costlessly stored in virtual computer
warehouses waiting to be printed locally when required.”

At its current stage of development, 3D printing focuses on relatively small products, but as the technique is steadily improved, specialized 3D printers for larger parts and products will soon be available. One company based in Los Angeles, Contour Crafting, has already built a huge 3D printer that travels on a tractor-trailer to a construction site and
prints an entire house in only twenty hours (doors and windows not included)! In addition, while the 3D printers now available have production runs of one item up to,
in some cases, 1,000 items, experts predict that within the next few years these machines will be capable of
turning out hundreds of thousands of identical parts and products.

There are many questions yet to be answered about the treatment of intellectual property in a 3D printing era. The three-dimensional design will make up the lion’s share of the value in a 3D printing economy, but copyright and patent law were developed without the anticipation of this technology and will have to be modified to account for the new emerging reality. In general, “useful” physical objects often
do not have protection against replication under copyright laws.

Although there are skeptics who question how fast this new technology will mature, engineers and technologists in the
United States, China, and Europe are working hard to exploit its potential. Its early use in
printing prosthetics and other devices with medical applications is gaining momentum rapidly.
Inexpensive 3D printers have already found their way into the hobbyist market at prices as low as $1,000. Carl Bass, the CEO of Autodesk, which has invested in 3D printing, said in 2012, “Some people see it as a niche market. They claim that it can’t possibly scale. But this is a trend, not a fad.
Something seismic is going on.” Some
advocates of more widespread gun ownership are promoting the
3D printing of guns as a way to circumvent regulations on gun sales. Opponents have expressed concern that any such
guns used in crimes could be easily melted down to avoid any effort by law enforcement authorities to use the guns as evidence.

T
HE WAVE OF
automation that is contributing to the outsourcing and robosourcing of jobs from developed countries to emerging and developing markets will soon begin to displace many of the jobs so recently created in those same low-wage countries. 3D printing could accelerate this process, and eventually could also move manufacturing back into developed countries. Many U.S. companies have already reported that various forms of automation have enabled them to bring back at least
some of the jobs they had originally outsourced to low-wage countries.

The emergence of Earth Inc. and its disruption of all three factors of production—labor, capital, and natural resources—has contributed to what many have referred to as a crisis in capitalism. A 2012 Bloomberg Global Poll of business leaders around the world found that 70 percent believe capitalism is “in trouble.” Almost one third said it needs a “radical reworking of the rules and regulations”—though U.S. participants were
less willing than their global counterparts to endorse either conclusion.

The inherent advantages of capitalism over any other system for organizing economic activity are well understood. It is far more efficient in allocating resources and matching supply to demand; it is far more effective at creating wealth; and it is far more congruent with higher levels of freedom. Most fundamentally, capitalism unlocks a larger fraction of the human potential with ubiquitous organic incentives that reward effort and innovation. The world’s experimentation with other systems—including the disastrous experiences with communism and fascism in the twentieth century—led to a nearly unanimous consensus at the beginning of the twenty-first century that democratic capitalism was the ideology of choice throughout the world.

And yet publics around the world have been shaken by a series of significant market dislocations over the last two decades, culminating in
the Great Recession of 2008 and its lingering aftermath. In addition, the growing inequality in most large economies in the world and the growing concentration of wealth at the top of the income ladder have caused a crisis of confidence in the system of market capitalism as it is presently functioning. The persistent high levels of unemployment and underemployment in industrial countries, added to unusually high levels of public and private indebtedness, have also diminished confidence that the economic policy toolkit now being used can produce a recovery that is strong enough to restore adequate vitality.

As Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz put it in 2012:

While developing and emerging economies are seeing increases in productivity, jobs, incomes, and output, inequality within these countries is also increasing. And of course, many of them still have significant numbers of people experiencing extreme poverty and deprivation. More than one billion people in the world still live on less than $2 a day, and almost 900 million of them still live
in “extreme poverty”—defined as having an income less than $1.25 per day.

Most important of all, among the failures in the way the global market system is operating today is its almost complete refusal to include any recognition of major externalities, starting with its failure to take into account the cost and consequences of the 90 million tons of global warming pollution spewed
every twenty-four hours into the planet’s atmosphere. The problem of externalities in market theory is well known but has never been so acute as now. Positive externalities are also routinely
ignored, leading to chronic underinvestment in education, health care, and other public goods.

In many countries, including the United States, the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the top one percent has also led to distortions in the political system that now limit the ability of governments to consider policy changes that might benefit the many at the (at least short-term) expense of the few. Governments have been effectively paralyzed and incapable of taking needed action. This too has undermined public confidence in the way market capitalism is currently operating.

With the tightly coupled and increasingly massive flows of capital through the global economy, all governments now feel that they are hostage to the perceptions within the global market for capital. There are numerous examples—Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, to name a few—of countries’ confronting policy choices that appear to be mandated by the perceptions of the global marketplace, not by the democratically expressed will of the citizens in those countries. Many have come to the conclusion that the only policies that will prove to be effective in restoring human influence over the shape of our economic future will be ones that address the new global economic reality on a global basis.