Tag: 3D Printing

Overestimating The Speed Of Technology Adoption

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

I’ve been going over some of my older articles that I wrote on new and emerging technologies. Some of these are now almost ten years old. Back in August 2017, I published an article entitled How 3D Printing Could Be The Biggest Thing To Affect Our Lives Since The Internet. In this article, I talk about the great potential that 3D Printing has in transforming different industries. I specifically talk about how it has the power to change the manufacturing, construction and medical industries. Back in 2013/14, there was a lot of excitement around 3D Printing, dare I say almost verging on hype, with all kinds of grand predictions being made regarding its future potential. It was easy to see why there was this fever around this new and innovative technology and all the solutions it could offer. It felt like one was witnessing the very early days of the internet. And I myself was very excited and could see the possibilities. Some people were even saying that by 2020, every household would have a 3D printer. That prediction has sadly not turned out to be true and to this day 3D Printing remains far from mainstream adoption. However, that is not to say this won’t ever happen. It is simply that far from being able to predict the future, there is a tendency to overestimate the speed of technology adoption. 

There are people who underestimate new and emerging technologies. Just like there were many people who underestimated the future potential of the internet in its early days. However, it is also easy to fall into the trap of overestimating the speed and development of new and emerging technologies. I think that is what a lot of people got wrong (including myself) with 3D Printing. This is not to say that 3D Printing does not have a future. I think it absolutely does, but getting the timing right regarding when this technology will be adopted en masse is the tricky part. It may be that it happens at some point soon in the future and when it happens it happens very fast. Perhaps the rise and exponential evolution of AI (a topic I also focused on quite a lot during this time) may help speed up the development of 3D Printing and free it from many of the bottlenecks it’s currently facing. Who knows? 

Back in 2016 I wrote an article where I focused on Virtual Reality (VR) technology entitled Virtual Reality: Further From The Source where I envisaged the possibilities and growth of this new technology. Similarly, a year later I wrote another article entitled How Virtual Reality And Augmented Reality Technologies Will Transform Education. In that article I foresaw a future of students wearing Augmented Reality (AR) glasses in the classroom to enhance their learning experience. As I write this article almost nine years later we are still not at that stage yet. And VR technology is still far from mainstream adoption even if it has been around for more than a decade now. Facebook (now Meta) acquired the VR company Oculus in 2014. And yet for the vast majority of users of its subsidiary platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, the user experience still remains a 2D experience. That’s not to say that one day this could all change, but I guess in this case the speed of technology adoption for VR was overestimated. 

Sometimes one can simply be too early. When Google launched their pioneering Google Glass, a set of smart eyeglasses, back in 2013, it was a flop. This was not because it wasn’t a good product. It was simply that people were not ready for it even if the developers of the product at Google X were perhaps expecting such a game changing product to be widely adopted. Yet it was far too early for mainstream adoption. People had legitimate concerns regarding privacy and safety and thus it was not a success despite its innovation. More recently, there has been controversy over Meta’s Ray Ban smartglasses. The backlash has been pretty strong with some labelling them as “pervert glasses”. What’s interesting is that those specific glasses don’t contain AR technology (although the Meta Orion ones do as well as the Ray Ban Meta Display glasses in a more limited capacity), but they do contain a built in camera with speakers and AI technology. Although these glasses do have many benefits, the privacy concerns continue to be a problem. And this is more than a decade after the launch of Google Glass. 

However, just to be clear, this is not an article that does not believe in technological innovation. On the contrary, and as per my previous tech articles, I have often seen the potential with many new and emerging technologies. But what has proved tricky is trying to predict when some of these technologies would reach a tipping point where they become adopted en mass. It could be that with smart glasses, and perhaps more advanced ones with AR and VR technology, that tipping point could happen pretty soon despite all the challenges and setbacks so far.

By Nicholas Peart 

13th August 2026

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Image: wikipedia

LINKS:

https://latitudepost.com/2017/08/14/how-3d-printing-could-be-the-biggest-thing-to-affect-our-lives-since-the-internet/

https://latitudepost.com/2016/05/15/virtual-reality-further-from-the-source/

https://latitudepost.com/2017/11/06/how-virtual-reality-and-augmented-reality-technologies-will-transform-education/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/08/ai-smartglasses-camera-film-privacy-consent

How 3D Printing Could Be The Biggest Thing To Affect Our Lives Since The Internet

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

IMG_0685

 

I’ve been very interested in 3D Printing for a few years now. What fascinates me the most about this technology is the awesome and unlimited potential it has. Currently it is still at a very embryonic stage in terms of its development but, like the internet before it, its potential is enormous. 3D Printing has the power to transform and effect many different industries. I am listing a few of these industries below.

 

The Manufacturing Industry

This is the industry which I think will be most affected by 3D Printing. Already large segments of the global mass manufacturing industry are automated via Robotics and AI. As 3D Printing develops and evolves more and more, it will be able to greatly increase the productivity of this industry and even contribute towards automating it to even greater levels than robotics. In fact, 3D Printing may even have the power to completely disrupt the entire mass manufacturing industry. This is especially true after this technology has become truly mainstream and every home not just has a basic 3D printer, but one that is capable of printing almost any kind of 3D object imaginable using just the basic raw materials. Once 3D Printing has got to this stage of development and has matured as an important consumer technology, then one could say that every household is a factory. People would be able to create and customise any physical good they want through simply taking the designs of the products and applying them to the 3D printer. This could severely disrupt businesses whose business model is based mostly on manufacturing goods, especially at the mass level.

 

The Construction Industry

The construction industry is the next obvious industry to be affected by 3D Printing after the manufacturing industry. As with the manufacturing industry, it has the potential to increase efficiency and productivity as well as save costs and time. The construction industry is also a potentially dangerous industry for human labour and any building physically constructed by humans will always be vulnerable to flaws and errors. Yet 3D Printing with a double dose of robotics and strong AI has the potential to create buildings more robust and in less time than humans can and without the labour costs involved. And as these technologies develop further, it will be possible to 3D print entire cities. And why stop at building on dry land? Perhaps one day in the distant future when these technologies are at a level far greater than our comprehension, it may even be possible to 3D print domed cities under water. A crazy notion but with out of this world technology anything is possible.

 

The Medical Industry

The medical industry and our lives and health have the power to be greatly augmented by 3D printing. Already the technology has the ability to print prosthetic arms and legs. Yet 3D printed bones and organs are a real possibility. 3D printed organs will already reduce the enormous waiting list of patients waiting for organ transplants, especially for kidneys and livers. And what if the 3D printed organs were more developed and healthy than the healthiest of donated organs? 3D Printing combined with other groundbreaking emerging technologies in the biotech sector like stem cell technology, genetic engineering and nanotechnology have the power to achieve this.

 

I am looking forward to experiencing how 3D Printing will further develop and more importantly how it will greatly assist and make our lives easier as well as being an amazing resource to make our lives more efficient and aid us in reaching greater heights. Already there are a number of growing 3D Printing start ups and businesses all trying to further develop this amazing technology.

What is becoming increasingly clear with the way emerging technologies are developing, and will develop, is that our ideas and creativity will be our greatest assets. These technologies will help us expand our ideas and creativity and realise them to the greatest levels possible.

 

By Nicholas Peart

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Want Your Children To Survive The Future? Send Them To Art School

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

I am presenting you all with one of the most illuminating and forward thinking articles I’ve ever read entitled ‘Want Your Children To Survive The Future? Send Them To Art School’. The author of this article, Dustin Timbrook, talks about a ‘Post-Work’ world (which many economists and futurists are predicting) where most jobs become obsolete due to automation from growing technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, 3D Printing and Robotics. But what is even more interesting, and very much the heart of this article, is that when this does occur, then our creativity will be all that is left. Yet it is interesting how in today’s world the ‘Arts’ are becoming an increasingly maligned sector. Art schools are currently in danger of becoming exclusively the preserve of people who can afford to pursue an ‘arts career’ and more and more focus is put on STEM subjects. In the context of today’s world this is understandable and there will be an ever increasing demand for computer programmers and website developers (‘coding’ is the current buzzword) and workers in growing technology sectors. But what happens when there comes a time when we are just not needed any more for any jobs? I often think of the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity prediction for 2045 when Artificial Intelligence will become on par (and subsequently more and more advanced) with human intelligence (our logical intelligence)? Suddenly we will all have lots of time on our hands (yippee!!!) and be able to put all our energies into things that interest us and that we are passionate about. It will be our creativity which will be king in this new world.

Being an artist has always been viewed as an ‘unstable career choice’. In a way, to quote Picasso, every child is born an artist. Every child is born with an innate sense of curiosity and wonder. To quote Timbrook (from a TED Talk he did in 2015), every child is ‘born weird’. But the problem is that traditionally (and today) this ‘weirdness’ and curiosity would be stifled and suppressed by the child’s parents who were (understandably) fearful of their children becoming outsiders or ‘drop outs’. By moulding them more in sync with the mores of current society, they would lose all their unique qualities and go on to do jobs they had little to no interest in doing. A recipe for a repressed and unhappy life. Yet by allowing a child’s ‘weirdness’ and sense of wonder, curiosity and creativity to flourish you are enabling a child to develop not only unique skills and traits, but gifts it will one day be able to present and share with the world and even contribute to making the world a better and happier place to live in.

Just underneath Timbrook’s article, I am also enclosing a You Tube video of his excellent TED Talk, which continues on the themes covered in his article.

by Nicholas Peart

8th May 2016

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Want Your Children To Survive The Future? Send Them To Art School   by Dustin Timbrook

http://www.rocketcitymom.com/want-children-survive-future-send-art-school/

 

Creativity Is Not A Gift – TED Talk by Dustin Timbrook

 

The Death Of David Bowie, The Future and 3D Printing

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

This is a piece I wrote on January 12th 2016, a couple of days after David Bowie died

I’ve been thinking about nothing but David Bowie these last couple of days. So many of his songs are playing in my head; Sound and Vision and Heroes being the most popular. Heroes always makes me pause and be deeply pensive. There’s something majestic and timeless about that song. Like millions of others around the world I am saddened and shocked by his early death. I had no idea he was so unwell even though I was a little suspicious that something was not right regarding his sporadic movements over the last decade. Another clue that perhaps all was not well was from watching the video to the 2013 song Where Are We Now? from his penultimate album The Next Day. It’s a beautiful, haunting and deeply reflective song. More importantly, it seems to me like he’s seriously questioning his own mortality. When I initially saw the video to that song I could see real pain in his face and I began to feel very sad for him.

In my selfish state of mind I was hoping that he would tour again but I can now kiss that option goodbye. I remember one day back in 2003 pondering on whether to see him live at Wembley Arena. The Dandy Warhols were confirmed as his support band. That day I was at the Stargreen ticket office on Argyll Street in Oxford Circus and the lady at the desk told me they still had tickets left for the show but I foolishly declined on the grounds that I thought the £65 ticket price was too high. As the years went by and I got more deeply into Bowie’s music the desire to see him live increased exponentially but that was never to be as, after a heart attack in 2004, he retreated into splendid isolation with his beautiful wife Iman and the rest of his family. I have seen his compadre Iggy Pop live many times (and I even saw his other soul brother Lou Reed live once but he was dreadful and in a foul mood that day, which was a huge disappointment for me) and as special as Iggy will always be to me, I still regret not taking that unique opportunity to see David live. But life goes on man.

Taking a slight tangent, I often wonder what kind of people the people born today and in the last few years will grow up to be? I don’t know what the world is going to be like in 2020 let alone in 2030 or 2050. I humbly predict that by 2100 there will be no purely organic/biological human life still standing. I think by then all humans will be at least trans-human (half human/half machine). If the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s 2045 prediction for ‘The Singularity’ comes true then by 2050 artificial intelligence will be on par if not far more advanced than human intelligence. The question now is will this advanced level of AI further benefit our lives? Perhaps we can augment our bodies with AI technology in order to be compatible with AI itself as far as logical/mechanical intelligence is concerned? Or will it have dystopian consequences and wipe us all out? Some prominent figures such as the scientist Stephan Hawking and Tesla founder Elon Musk have already publicly expressed much concern that a situation like the latter may very well happen and Musk has even gone as far as to spend a large chunk of his vast fortune on AI research.

By the beginning of the 2020s I predict that 3D printing will slowly start to become mainstream. Currently 3D printing machines are the preserve of scientists and a smattering of ‘geeks’, innovators and early adapters. It is also still rather expensive to acquire a 3D printer but with time costs will decrease and the technology will only get more advanced. I think 3D printing will be the biggest thing to shape our lives since the Internet. 3D printing now is what the Internet was back in 1994/5. Give it time.

Now back to the subject of David Bowie, there is an interview he did with Jeremy Paxman in 2000. At one point in the interview they were talking about the Internet and what it meant back then. Paxman seemed to have little belief in the power of the Internet and stated that he thought it was just a ‘tool’ whereas David disagreed and saw it as potentially a much bigger and larger force (both good and bad) to what it currently was. In fact, Bowie was one of the first major artists to utilise the Internet as a platform for his music when it had just become mainstream back in 1997. Now let’s fast forward to 2016. The Internet plays an enormous role in our lives. It has also disrupted many industries in the process. The one that really springs to mind is the music industry. Many will remember the Napster saga involving members of Metallica back in 1999 but how many back then could have foreseen the colossal impact that illegal downloading would have on an entire industry worth billions of dollars? For many creative people; especially writers, musicians and digital photographers, this is now the age of Free Content. Yet what the Internet has enabled is an instant connectivity and strong social networking facility with an enormous and growing number of people around the globe, which was not possible before.

 

David Bowie talks about the Internet with Jeremy Paxman (2000)

 

Back to 3D printing. The main casualty of this emerging technology is going to be the mass manufacturing industry. “Made In China” will become a thing of the past as every household becomes a factory. Big mass manufacturing businesses like IKEA will either have to adapt in the face of this growing technology or potentially face serious challenges to their current business modal. I believe that the next 5-15 years are going to be very interesting.

For more information on this I highly recommend that you purchase a copy of The Curve by Nicholas Lovell. It is a riveting and incredibly insightful and enlightening book which is very ahead of its time. Furthermore, it is an indispensable book to have with many helpful and practical solutions if you are a creative person struggling to make a living in a world of free content.

 

by Nicholas Peart

12th January 2016
London

 

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