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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (695320)	1/26/2013 11:31:53 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577031

It doesn't have to happen, though. And 3d printers don't necessarily cost jobs, although they will shift them around. For one, the made in China label is going to go away. For another, economy of scale for a lot of things goes away, too. However, not all 3d printing will be done in the home. Much of it will be done at a Kinkos, Shapeways or some other local specialty shop. So instead of having a few large factories, that will be distributed across the country. And that means, paradoxically, more people employed to provide similar output. So we become a nation of shop keepers. Fusion, particularly p-B fusion, is another that could potentially do a similar thing. For Polywell, a 100 megawatt facility could fit in a city block or two. Granted, Polywell in particular does scale and get more efficient the larger it is. But few things are cheaper than hydrogen and boron. De-centralizing power production has a lot more benefits than squeezing every last joule out of the hydrogen and boron. Now, mining the asteroids is the most speculative. But it has the potential for the greatest impact. There are already pressures on commodities from the development of China and India. And they are nowhere nearly as developed as the developed world. Asteroid mining would change that. If DST can return samples in 2016 like they are planning, then it moves out of the speculative category. So there are 3 technologies that will be disruptive if they pan out in the near term. The problem is, this is not an exhaustive list. There are a lot of technologies that promise to be disruptive in the near term. This is something that is literally unprecedented in human history. Disruptive technologies tend to be singular events for a lot of reasons. But we, as a country, made a conscious decision to invest in basic science in the post WWII era. While people like you and Shorty disparage much of it, what has happened is we have mined out the developments in science that were made roughly a century or more ago. By the beginning of the previous century we had pretty much explored Newtonian physics and pre-quantum mechanics chemistry. The mining of those sciences led to at least 3 industrial revolutions, starting in the mid-1800s. And that drove the bulk of what has happened during the 20th century. I think you will agree that the technological profile is very different now than it was in the early 1900s. Well, here we are again. We have added quite a few sciences to the list from last time. For example, we are very close to understanding exactly how the brain and vision operates. And there is the little thing of gene and tissue engineering. And many other things. Once you understand what it going on, then science can be translated into technology. And, one other thing. Once you understand the science of the previous wave, you are in a position to ask the right questions that sparks the next. With the advent of computers and the internet, not to mention the technologies mentioned in this post, those new discoveries can be be converted to technologies very quickly. So we can be looking at many, overlapping industrial revolutions. While I hesitate to say we are facing a technological singularity, I can't discount it. Sure, it might be possible that people like you can constrain access to the fishing rocks and artificially bifurcate the rewards. Heck, I lived a number of years in Galveston where exactly the same thing happened. The result was Galveston wound up with a smaller pie than they could have, because they allowed Houston to overtake them. A basic kindergarten lesson is you have to learn to share. Because this ensures the pie grows instead of stagnates. Do it for the children.