How many 10x productivity revolutions do we need? At the end of it, will there be only one person left producing everything for humanity in 5 minutes each Tuesday afternoon?
How many 10x productivity revolutions do we need? At the end of it, will there be only one person left producing everything for humanity in 5 minutes each Tuesday afternoon?
We’re kind of at a point where the cost of making stuff isn’t very important. It is far outweighed by the cost of moving stuff - not only financially, but environmentally and temporally.
There probably isn’t a lot more refinement to be done in most manufacturing processes, other than very niche things like microchip fabrication. Production machinery can pump out T-shirts or drinking glasses or automobiles faster than people will buy them, so the factories run for shorter periods of time. The only profit margins to be had in manufacturing come from bulk production runs, which is why you can’t order 10 injection molded parts or 50 custom silicon packages - you have to buy like 5000 units just to pay the cost of spinning up the production line.
But logistics… we’re basically killing the planet to solve logistics problems. A massive amount of greenhouse gas production is due to transportation. We need better ways to move things around.
Well, I think in that scenario I thought about transportation as included in the 5min/week workload. Basically you click 3 buttons and everything goes wroom on its own from there.
If the environmental damage was accurately priced in, it would be much more attractive to produce locally with local materials and with local knowledge.
It would be less “efficient” in the sense of what a production facility could do in terms of output/input at the gates of the facility, but it would be much more efficient in terms of the overall economy.
Until we can make everything through the tireless efforts of a single Australian man