- Posts tagged Future
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Laurence Rozier: 3D Printing Next Trillion-Dollar Business
My long-time good buddy Laurence Rozier, one of the smartest and most insightful thinkers with whom I've ever had the chance to work, predicts that 3D printing will be the next trillion-dollar industry. It's hard to disagree. With 3D printing (or what he calls "rapid manufacturing", a term I think fits better with the future he envisions), one can begin with a scan or 3D rendering being transmitted to a device into which one pours the appropriate manufacturing substance(s) -- plastic powder, zinc, ceramic, chemical compounds -- and out pops a physical object.
The process is apparently already seeing some use in the manufacture of dental prosthetics, according to a Forbes article Laurence cites in his Meshverse Journal.
The only place I might disagree with my colleague is on the question of where this revolution will focus. He sees it as a major hope for reviving America's manufacturing capacity, which has dwindled so badly that we are in serious danger of becoming a colony to one or more major manufacturing powers. I'm inclined to believe it will be China or perhaps India that will lead this charge. American companies, sitting on a reported $2 trillion in cash and doing nothing with it except investing in financial instruments, seem moribund and more concerned about protecting themselves against the next Wall Street fiasco than against rising world powers.
Laurence thinks we'll see this in full bloom by 2015. He's usually optimistic, but I do hope I live to see the day!
The Next Bubble to Burst? Higher Education, Says Serial Contrarian Thiel
Peter Thiel says the next economic bubble that will burst and have widespread impact will be the higher education bubble. Getting a higher education is a highly overvalued commodity which many Americans believe passionately will guarantee their future safety. Which it won't, of course.
Thiel is not only the guy who co-founded PayPal and became an early investor in a little property called FaceBook, he also correctly forecast both the dotcom bubble and the housing bubble. That probably makes him worth listening to.
In this TechCrunch piece, he tells Sarah Lacy that, “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”
Couple that with the fact that
I had lunch with a good friend, a smart guy whose Renaissance background I admire. He pointed out that his daughter is about to graduate from medical school. The day she does, she takes on the obligation of repaying more than $200,000 in student loans. When she started her education, she intended to be a pediatrician or obstetrician. She's about to take her residency in a surgical specialty because she needs to make $500,000/yr just to be able to pay off her student loans and have some kind of life.
That's insane. But it's what we're doing to a generation of college grads who will be forced to choose a career path based not on their values or on their desire to be of service but on how to repay their student loans (which are now accumulating interest at 7-8%). This year, for the first time, student loan debt in this country will outstrip credit card debt as it rises past the $1 trillion mark.
With mountains of college-level educational content available for free on YouTube, iTunes and other Web sites, there is an intriguing convergence here. The cost of a formal college education leading to a piece of paper keeps skyrocketing while more and more valuable courses are available for free online. All that's missing (and it may not be for all I know) is an agency that can credibly determine whether you've actually learned the material requisite to a degree and then grant you one based on your online learning experiences. Frankly, it's not even clear that's needed; employers want and need to know whether you can do the job, not how you learned to do it.
Maybe the new answer is, "Yes, get an education, just not a formal college education."
