The third industrial revolution

I've investigated starting a modern manufacturing company. Regulation and bureaucratic impediments are immense in most countries. When a manufacturing process is new it usually gets some old, broad regulation applied to it. If you doubt me, pick any already industrialised economy and read their health and safety requirements (usually found in multiple, conflicting documents). Governments are doing their best to remain as rigid and inflexible as possible in most cases (not deliberately, usually due to incompetence, lobbyists and special interests). From my point of view, one of the hardest tasks in starting an agile, flexible manufacturing company is finding a government that won't prevent you from starting in the first place. However, I'm still hopeful of finding that magical sweet spot of talented people congregating, relaxed regulation and at least basic infrastructure.

The main problem I have with articles like this, is that I see all major turning events are only shown to be significant in their historical context after the fact. You need the 20/20 vision of hindsight to see what impact any particular development. World War 1 wasn't named until long after the event. This is not to say that people didn't know they were at war, or in a Depression. Only that the scope and impact of the event can only be known after it has finished.<p>While every development or change results in a set of writers and thinkers keen to coin the phrase that defines it (hello 'web 2.0'), in reality you only get to write the story long after the event has happened.<p>Personally I do see 3d printing having a large impact if they become as widespread as the laser printer became.<p>It also makes me wonder if a home foundry kit will become a popular item. Combines on-the-spot recycling with creation from 3d printers (making the moulds). The applications are enormous. But we won't know what the breakthrough is until hindsight can put it into context for us.<p>So yes, interesting article. Industrial Revolution 3? We'll see.

&#62; The lines between manufacturing and services are blurring.<p>If there was on thing I learned with this crises is that <i>services are the first to go down</i>. Why? Because they're expensive and not a must have.<p>On the other hand real products like food, houses, vehicles, medicine... are the ones that will never go down (must have). But they have low margins and are not so attractive during growth periods.<p>So while the trends exposed here are probably true, the fundamentals will surely change with such large disruptions as the ones predicted here. And then the service providers will not have who to sell to anymore. Auto-balance<p>Note: I'm not an economist. I read however "Economy in one lesson"

<i>Offshore production is increasingly moving back to rich countries not because Chinese wages are rising, but because companies now want to be closer to their customers so that they can respond more quickly to changes in demand. And some products are so sophisticated that it helps to have the people who design them and the people who make them in the same place. The Boston Consulting Group reckons that in areas such as transport, computers, fabricated metals and machinery, 10-30% of the goods that America now imports from China could be made at home by 2020, boosting American output by $20 billion-55 billion a year.</i><p>This is absurd, manufacturing will move to the places with cheap energy, or in case of non-energy-intensive production to places where resources and supply chain is. In most cases it's much cheaper to move produced item, and, for example, it already takes just two days for Apple to move a custom-made item from factory in China to doorstep in US.

Much as I like the Economist, this isn't a very good article. It doesn't clearly distinguish proto and small-scale from large scale manufacturing and glosses over the fact that resource, energy, labor and transportion cost all affect the final cost of products in different ways.<p>There's no disruption or revolution, mechanical and manufacturing engineers have taken all these factors into account as a matter of course. The availability of better 3D printing is great and we use it to our advantage all the time but it's just one tiny aspect of the overall manufacturing landscape.

Flexible small batch manufacturing is not new. It already came with CNC machines.