It’s all about the people.
As 3D printing takes off, we’ll see a huge shift in the leverage for manufactured goods. Some types of manufacture will always require huge concentrations of resources, not to mention the distribution of those goods. However, we will see a drift toward highly customized production based on small variations within each category of device as thousands of people get involved in the cottage industry of computer aided design. I suppose when we first start seeing 3D printers themselves being produced in homes on 3D printers, we will have hit a major turning point. But I want you to think about how the technology will begin scooping up every kind of manufacture, and how it will enable totally new types of products never before imagined. Think about creating your own custom mobile computing device at home in the price range of $100 US. Think how that will affect the business landscape.
The old corporate cookie cutter is already dead. We may well see a continuation of big companies buying up all sorts of independent operations that become successful. That’s not the point. The market will swing toward a high degree of individualization in serving the customer simply because it will become possible. The standardization will arise most clearly in how the components connect together and what those individual components will do, but how they are assembled and used is where we will see the greatest variations. It’s Burger King’s old promise, “have it your way,” but applied to every physical object people use.
You’ll see software doing the same thing. Picture a highly modularized operating system. It already exists and the greater the flexibility, the better its market standing. The vast spying will have to shift techniques because the current technology ecosystem will move away from the corporate backdoor provisions, simply because the corporate software company will not be able to keep up with the changes demanded. Open Source will become dominant until someone figures out how to capture it’s flexibility. Perhaps you recall the warnings that Microsoft and friends were trying to commoditize the PC so that their OS would be the only one that worked, while the PC manufacturers were trying to commoditize the OS. The whole arena of contest has closed, and the spectators and consumers have moved on. Modular operating systems assembled to order for a highly customized device is the future.
What will we do when the ten-year-old next door can sell you just about anything you now buy at Wal-Mart and offers it to you for about the same price range?
Holding stock in a company may well disappear. Already the future is in crowd-sourcing. That’s because the future commerce will center on the person. What sort of economy will we have when virtually everything we’ve traded can no longer be kept behind a gate? Commerce depends on controlling access to a limited supply of something in demand. In the future, about the only thing you’ll really be able to control is access to yourself. Rising above the status of a human commodity will be the path to prosperity.
I won’t draw that picture for you. Instead, I’m warning you as a prophet of Almighty God that this is where His hand is taking our world. We can be led or we can be driven, dragged and crushed by the passage. If you want God’s prosperity promises, you’ll keep it focused on people, where it should have been all along. If you strive to set the individual free, grant them full access to all the folly or wisdom available so that they can choose their own personal means of engaging this world for good or ill, then you will participate in His justice. Some generations hence, things will somehow swing back again to injustice and God will send His wrath one more time. We can’t see that image, nor should we want to. Our mission is today, leading the world across to the Network Age.
In His eyes, it will always be about the people, about His justice among the humans on this plane.
