Knowledge is Power

Huge 3D printers will build houses.

In the 1961 film “The Errand Boy”, Jerry Lewis plays the part of a mailroom clerk serving a sprawling Hollywood studio. The movie depicts Lewis and his band of fellows as they deliver mail and scripts and revisions and memos between hundreds of offices. In typical Lewis fashion, there are lots of laughs as items are misdelivered and paper flies everywhere.

The mailroom was a classic entry opportunity into the business world. Mail clerks, if assiduous, could learn the business, gain knowledge, and begin to rise within the organization. The mailroom was a common feature of many businesses as disparate as banks, grocery chains, manufacturers, and hospitals. They all had in common the need to distribute information between knowledge workers in a variety of departments, a function the mailroom was designed to fulfill.

But the number of mailroom jobs is quickly dwindling and the culprit is obviously the rise of digital technologies. Email and text messages and a variety of other technologies have sharply reduced the need for human clerks to move physical representations of information from place to place. We now increasingly move information as bits over the internet, not physical pages made of atoms. Bits don’t require clerks as atoms do.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the fastest growing and most rapidly declining occupations over the next ten years.  Not really surprising, health care, computer, and construction jobs are ascendant. Equally not a shock is that apparel manufacturing, federal postal work, and sugar and confectionary production are on the decline.  A combination of dietary evangelism, technological shifts, and globalization has created winners and losers in the job market.

There is yet another technological revolution on the horizon which may wreak havoc with skilled machinists and a number of other occupations – 3D printing.

Everyone is familiar with the concept of metal working, where milling machine or lathes are used to manufacture precision parts. These parts are then combined with others, screwed, bolted or glued together to create a final product or component such as an airplane wing or an artificial limb.

3D printing turns this time honored approach on its head. The thing to be produced is first represented, in its entirely, as a  highly detailed computer file. This information is then processed by a machine which miraculously turns the description of the thing into the thing itself.

The machine, a three dimensional “printer,” is called such because the basic mechanism is reminiscent of the old dot matrix printer.  A dot matrix computer printer utilizes a print head which moves left and right across a page and deposits tiny dots of ink to create letters and numbers and graphics; patterns of dots which finally become your recipe for tomato soup or a letter to mom.

Now imagine a “print head” that can move in three dimensions – vertically as well as two horizontal directions – and instead of ink, exudes bits of material which harden on contact. Processing the detailed design file, the 3D printer patiently “paints” the thing itself, building up layers as it sweeps back and forth. It can take many hours, but an actual object, such as a coffee cup or piece of jewelry, finally emerges.

Long a curiosity of hobbyists, 3D printers were little more than expensive toys. But continued refinement has vastly improved their capabilities. For instance, Boeing now uses 3D printers to create certain airplane parts. Medical researchers are printing human body parts, such as kidneys and livers, and while this is still in the experimental stage, the prognosis is good.

A University of Southern California team is building a huge 3D printer designed to create buildings. Exuding concrete, this machine will be capable of creating houses or other structures, complete, from the ground up.

This technology is truly amazing and will revolutionize how we humans create objects in our world. But what does all this mean on the job front?

Like other disruptive technologies, it will destroy some occupations but create many others. It is difficult to precisely predict the job skills demanded in this new world. But for our children, a solid education including language and computers and mathematics seems a good bet. The successful worker of tomorrow will need to be literate in many ways.

As we were all taught, knowledge is, indeed, power.