by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright June 2014
The Third Wave of the Industrial Revolution will be coming to flower as the Snap occurs. The basic concepts of the Third Wave are:
o Custom production can take the place of mass production -- assembly lines can easily accommodate short runs of similar but not the same products. The "commodity benefit" is that there will be more variety in what can be offered at the retail level. A second commodity benefit is that there is less waste -- a hundred are not made to sell ten. And there will be "surprise" benefits as well. (see my essay Tattoos and T-Shirts for fuller definitions of commodity and surprise benefits) This accomodating-short-runs will not affect service industries as much as manufacturing ones because service industries have always been so human (not machine) oriented.
o Streamlined supply chains. This will show up in two ways: being able to change what is made more quickly and being much more efficient in resource utilization. This latter is real and serious "green", and this is why resource depletion will become a manageable issue as the 3rd wave takes hold.
o 3D printing and nanotech. I'm not sure what the effects of this will be because it depends so much on what can be made. But the basic effect will be similar to streamlined supply chains: fast, flexible and green.
Adding cyber supervision to these concepts will amplify their effects.