Who Owns the Future? (13 page)

One of the strange, tragic aspects of our technological moment is that the most celebrated information gadgets, like our phones and tablets, are made by hand in gigantic factories, mostly in southern China, and largely by people who work insanely hard in worrisome environments. Looking at the latest advances in robotics and automated manufacturing, it’s hard not to wonder when the labors of these hordes of new potential Luddites might become suddenly obsolete.

In this case, even once the technology becomes available, I suspect politics will slow it down a little. It’s hard to imagine China deciding to throw much of its own population into unemployment. It is still a centrally planned society to a significant degree. It’s hard, even, to imagine one of China’s neighbors doing it. Would an aging Japan automate its factories to undercut China? Seems like a significant risk.

But somebody somewhere would find the motivation. Maybe a low-population but capital-rich Persian Gulf nation worried about the post-oil future would fund gigantic automated factories to undercut China in the production of consumer electronics. It might even happen in the United States, which has ever-fewer manufacturing jobs to protect anyway.

What would it look like to automate manufacturing? Well, the first word that comes to mind is
temporary
. And the reason is that the act of making manufacturing into a more automated technology would inherently move it a step closer to being a “software-mediated” technology. When a technology becomes software-mediated, the structure of the software becomes more important than any other particularity of the technology in determining who will win the power and the money when the technology is used. Making fabrication software-mediated turns out to be a step toward making the very notion of a factory, as we know it, obsolete.

To see why, consider how automated manufacturing might advance. Automated milling machines and similar devices are already ubiquitous for shaping parts, such as forms for molds; robotic arms to assemble components are not as common, but still present in certain applications, such as assembling parts of large items like cars and big TVs. Detail work (like fitting touchscreens into the frame of a tablet) is still mostly done by hand, but that might change soon. At first manufacturing robots will be expensive, and there will be plenty of well-paying jobs created to operate them, but eventually they will become cheap and the data to operate them might then be crowdsourced, sending manufacturing down the same road traveled by the recorded music industry.

A current academic and hobbyist craze is known as “3D printing.” A 3D printer looks a little like a microwave oven. Through the glass door, you can watch roaming robotic nozzles deposit various materials under software control in an incremental way to form a product as if by magic. You download a design from the ’net, as if you were downloading a movie file, send it to your 3D printer, and come back after a while. There, before you, is a physical object, downloaded from afar. There are fledgling experiments with printers that realize physical products including working electronic components. A
chip is just a pattern deposited by something like a printing process to begin with. So is a flat display. In theory, it ought to be possible, in the not-so-distant future, to print out a working phone or tablet.

It is still unknown how good 3D printing will become, or how soon. The little gotchas and annoyances of technology are not predictable and can add decades of uncertainty to the timing of technological change. But it seems likely that 3D printing can close the various loops and become a fairly complete technology in this century.

But notice that once a 3D printer can be deployed in a factory, it might just as well be placed close to where the product will be used.

Being able to make things on the spot could remove a huge part of humanity’s carbon footprint: the transportation of goods. Instead of fleets of container ships bringing tchotchkes from China to our ports, we’ll print them out at home, or maybe at the neighborhood print shop.

What will be distributed instead will be the antecedent “goops.” These are the substances squirted out by the printer’s nozzles. At the time of writing, there are about one hundred goops in use by 3D printers. For instance, a particular goop might harden into the kind of tough plastic found in car interiors.

It is too early to say what goops will be in use in the future. Nor do we know how many different goops will be needed. Maybe a single supergoop would go a long way. Perhaps a suspension including graphene particles will be configurable into a variety of components like nanotube digital circuits, battery layers, and tough carbon fiber outer shells.

Will there be goops delivered by pipes to the home? Goop trucks that make rounds to refill printers once a week? Goop refill kits sold by Amazon and delivered by parcel? Little blimps that alight on your roof to refill your home printer? This we do not know. At any rate, a new infrastructure will be needed to get goops to printers. Expect goop to be as overpriced as ink for home photo printers is today.
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Or, if goops turn out to be cheap to make at home, or wherever they are used, then some other imperfection or inconvenience in the cycle will become the nexus of cartel and artificially elevated costs.

The real magic might come about because of the transformation of recycling. Right now, when we throw something away, no information is packaged with that thing that described how it could best be disassembled into its constituents in order that they might be reused. This is a great inefficiency.

We rely on human labor to very approximately assess what we toss away so that it can be recycled. This happens when we choose the right trash bin at the cafeteria, or when poor people pick over garbage dumps.

Once 3D printers commonly create objects, the nature of recycling will transform utterly. An object that had been printed will be remembered in the cloud. There will be “deprinters” that accept objects that are no longer wanted, like the previous year’s tablet. By referring to the original printing specification, always retrievable over the ’net, it will be possible to unravel the object back to its original goops with precision. Instead of melting it down, little nozzles with specialized solvents and cutting tools will separate each striation that originated from a different antecedent goop. The process will not be perfect, since the laws of thermodynamics cannot be revoked, but it will be
hugely
more efficient than what we do today.

Between the obsolescence of shipping and an extreme increase in recycling precision, 3D printing could create a massive explosion of convenience and fun, and at the same time vastly reduce humanity’s carbon footprint and reliance on nonrenewable resources. All this modulo the gotchas we don’t know about yet, of course.

But supposing that some portions of the benefits appear, it certainly would be foolish to oppose this stream of progress. How could a liberal not like the reduced carbon footprint? How could a conservative not like the efficiency? And of course techies will be in love.

And yet the transformation will throw factory workers out of work in a massive wave. Will China be destabilized? As happened with the file-sharing of other things like music, the transformation of fabrication into a file-sharing phenomenon could happen very quickly.

When I explain this scenario, I often receive this response: “But someone still has to make the printers.” Somehow it’s hard to wrap our heads around a world in which the printers themselves
are printed. You wouldn’t go buy a 3D printer at Wal-Mart. Your neighbor would print your first one for you. They’d spread “virally,” to use the usual metaphor. Wal-Mart would probably go bankrupt fairly quickly.

Huge benefits on both a global and individual scale could appear, but coupled with a wave of supposed human obsolescence. I repeat that it’s only “supposed” obsolescence, because all those files that are shared to describe objects to print have to come from somewhere.

In a world of efficient 3D printing and recycling we might experience much, much faster turnaround in our material culture than we are able to easily conceive of today. A guitarist might routinely print out a new guitar for every gig. Snobs might very well then decry that much of the design churn is stupid and pointless, just as critics might say the same about today’s social network kinetics. But if people are interested in finding the latest stupid cool guitar to fabricate for the day, there will be a stupid cool guitar designer out there who ought to be paid.

The most radical change in daily life might be associated with fashion and clothing. A home device will be able to print out clothes based on Internet designs, but also based on your body. The device would scan your body in three dimensions, just as Microsoft’s Kinect input device
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does today. You’d see an outfit slinking about on your body before it exists. Everyone will be dressed exquisitely because every piece of clothing will be custom-fit.

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Kinect is a camera that gathers the three-dimensional depth of the scene in front of it, and uses that data to estimate the body poses of people in view, allowing software to portray them as avatars. It was the fastest-selling consumer electronics product in history at its introduction.

Forget laundry. At the end of the day you’ll pop dirty clothes into the top of the device for recycling. Never wear the same dress twice. (Though there will no doubt also be a countertrend in which vintage and handmade clothing becomes ever more revered. This is what happened with vinyl records after music became networked.)

Today “cool hunters” comb impoverished neighborhoods, sniffing out fashion trends. In the future, kids in those neighborhoods should earn wealth for their fashion trendsetting.

Napsterizing the Teamsters

Humans are terrible drivers. We kill each other in car accidents so frequently that the toll has become a more deadly problem than wars or terrorism. It’s one of our biggest sources of death and pain.

A team of Google and Stanford researchers has famously demonstrated cars that are quite effective at driving themselves. (They are not alone; similar developments are occurring around the world.) The motivations for developing self-driving cars are so extraordinarily powerful that it’s hard to imagine stronger ones. Results from experiments thus far indicate that it is unlikely robots will ever drive as badly as people. My mother died in a car accident. What could be more compelling?

But there’s more. Stoplights would generally go away. Cars would simply know when there’s no other car coming, and no pedestrian, so they could just proceed through without stopping when there is no need. This would bring a huge gain in energy efficiency, since vehicles wouldn’t have to accelerate from a stop nearly as often. City driving would become almost as efficient as freeway driving.

If cars could coordinate with each other, traffic jams might nearly cease to exist. Instead of people engaging in tiny ego-wars to merge between lanes on the freeway, causing huge backups going miles back, cars would anticipate mergers and merge cleanly, taking full advantage of the hypothetical bandwidth of the freeway.

There will be gotchas, just as with 3D printing. We can’t yet know what they will be. One of the problems might be that when there is a screw-up, it could be a huge one. If a whole freeway of cars hit each other because of a snag, that would be a calamity on the order of a plane crash instead of an incident involving only a few people. That’s conceivable should there be many cars connected together virtually, moving rapidly under a connected software system. If the overall death rate was way down, but accidents when they occurred were more horrific, how would we respond emotionally?

That brings up the existential/emotional issue of losing the freedom associated with driving.

Maybe we won’t accept fully automatic vehicles, even if the safety
statistics are in their favor. An intermediate scenario would still involve people in directing the cars, but in a subordinate position. You might be able to drive the car yourself when there’s no one else around, and you can’t kill anyone. However, when there is an intersection with other cars approaching, congestion, or an imminent collision, automation would be lurking and sprung to take over.

What sort of economic impact will self-driving vehicles bring? It could be catastrophic.

A giant portion of the global middle classes works behind a wheel. Many have entered middle-class life the first time as a taxi driver or a truck driver. It’s hard to imagine a world without commercial drivers. A traditional entry ramp into economic sustenance for fresh arrivals to big cities like New York would be gone. Wave after wave of immigrants drove New York taxis. And I’m trying to imagine the meeting when someone tries to explain to the Teamsters that nothing like their services will ever be needed again.

Both cabbies and truckers have managed to build up levees with some legal heft over the years. They’ll be able to delay the change, but not for long. Whenever an innocent person is killed in an accident involving a cab or a truck, there will be public outrage that human error is still allowed to intrude in its murderous ways to destroy life and love once automated cars become familiar in some guise. For a while, there might be a compromise in which a Teamster or a cabbie sits there passively, along for the ride, perhaps to man a failsafe button. But young people won’t expect that to last and won’t seek it as a way of life. The world of work behind the wheel will drain away in a generation.

You can’t make cars quite 100 percent autonomous. If people are going to be people at all, somebody has to tell the car where to go and something about how to do it, and there has to be some failsafe. There has to be some human responsibility, if not on the part of the people who are passengers in the car, then at least somewhere over the network.

Will this remaining human role turn into a benefit for the middle classes or only for a Siren Server? If it’s to only benefit a Siren Server, you can imagine that in, say, ten years, when you want to get to the airport, a robot taxi shows up. However, the chosen route might
be peculiar. Maybe the taxi lingers in front of billboards along the way, or forces you to a particular convenience store if you need to pick up something, or whatever scam would come about in a Siren Server–driven car.