Advances in personal manufacturing, continued exploration
Desktop Manufacturing
Impacts of decentralized manufacturing on desktop stations creating a new production gestalt.
personal factories
As we look to the future of these desktop manufacturing devices it is interesting to contemplate what the merger of decentralized solar power, personal manufacturing and the ability to customize your personal experience to a high level will do culturally.
The need for factory workers is diminishing and at the same time the need for information workers is increasing. Like all paradigm shifts this brings awkward questions. The rapid re-alignment from a centralized power structure to a dispersed architecture of individuals working towards their own goals or the goals of their networked communities is fascinating. There will be those that adapt and those that are overwhelmed by the changes. One thing is certain, as the level of automation in society increases and the reliance on others for such basics as personal goods decreases, they dynamic of power is shifting in a turbulent and perhaps unstoppable wave.
Personal manufacturing will increase self reliance for everyone, or at least provide the option. Whether that is ultimately beneficial or too upsetting to our pack animal instincts remains to be seen. We are closing the gap between the ability of the collective to provide and each person to be able to provide for themselves. Larger institutions are becoming increasingly unnecessary, except to organize broad concepts like basic research and instruction in how to use the tools we are creating on the fly.
It is time culturally to step back and look at the bigger picture. The housing issue has been solved functionally, if not economically. The very fact that there is a surplus of housing shows that this is the case. With shelter covered this leaves us with only a few other primal needs. Food and water distribution is not yet solved and good resource distribution schemes remain tenuous. Progress is being made on the frontier of energy production. It is becoming increasingly obvious that machines have created a surplus of labor, as far as necessary tasks. Adapting to this new world is challenging and may force us to rethink such fundamentals as basic wealth distribution. Whether we can move beyond the simplistic feudal hierarchies that seem to guide our species into a more enlightened state remains to be seen.
It is clear though that personal fabrication is part of the future, that a decentralized solar grid provides strength and that we need to strike a better balance between the haves and have nots for the purposes of social and political stability.
The advances in and individuals ability to manufacture their own goods are just the forerunner of wider sweeping changes which we are facing as individuals and collectively as a species. Like many of the questions posed by the arrival of future technology, the answers will probably be a mixed bag as people struggle with the old patterns of trying to control the distribution of resources and ideas. The only real question is the same one we’ve been asking for a while now. Does information really want to be free?
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