The future of manufacturing

OK, probably not the best image to represent manufacturing in outer space, but I couldn't think of anything else

You may have seen my earlier post on the future of shopping. One interesting element about the retail debate is how retailers have forgotten about the globalisation of manufacturing and the loss of local jobs around a decade ago, which they were largely quite happy about because it meant cheaper products (and higher margins).

The bulk of what we buy today is now “Made in China” or some other low-labour cost country. Global logistics is at a level of maturity where this doesn’t have any negative impact on customers’ ability to get things fast. For example last year I ordered an iMac from the Apple Store, and it was assembled in China, despatched within 24 hours, and on my doorstep in a matter of days. It wasn’t so long ago that you had to rely on local retailers to bring over stock in bulk, or wait for a shipping container to be filled.

So what’s next for manufacturing? I reckon the answer lies in space.

It’s clean up there
Many kinds of product require an uber-clean environment to manufacture. Computer chips for instance, require a completely clean, dust-free atmosphere – any impurities in the silicon wafer and the resulting chip is useless. Terrestrial facilities have to deal with atmospheric impurities, but I reckon – although I could be wrong about this – dust would be less of a problem in outer space.

Heavy lifting? No problem!
Weightlessness is a boon if the manufacturing task involves large, heavy materials. You’d no longer have to deal with gravity, although this only improves manoeveurability – it’d still require a sufficiently strong force to move the object.

Space does weird (but cool) things
There’s probably a lot about the physics of space that we have yet to discover. One thing that we do know of however is cold welding, where metals in a vacuum fuse together simply by touching. The convenience of doing this in space is that you don’t have to create the vacuum. Who knows what other weird and useful effects might be possible!

How do we get it up there, and then back down?
So the question remains of how we get stuff up and down from space. At the beginning of this post I mentioned how global logistics allows items to be sent around the world at great speed, but we don’t yet have the same infrastructure for space, and rely on rockets and the like, which are expensive because they’re moving a large quantity of fuel required by the launching process as well as the payload.

We (human beings) have already had an answer to this since the late 19th Century – in the form of a space elevator designed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895! Basically, space elevators work by having an satellite in space held aloft in geo-stationery orbit, anchored to the ground via a large cable of sorts. The whole shebang is held up by centripetal force, like the hammer toss at the Olympics, where the circular motion of an object, combined with its weight, results in a net outwards force. The payload is then carried up and down this structure.

Imagine looking at the tag of a future product and seeing “Made in Space” :-) Wouldn’t that be cool?

Idea: policies, not parties

Hehe… I shouldn’t tease, after putting up that last post about sharing my ideas and increasing my post count, then letting things go back to normal. Here’s the first idea [insert disclaimers defending against disappointment due to heightened expectations].

As I progress through life, I’m taking an increasingly large interest in politics. Maybe as I find myself more and more deeply entrenched in middle class, tax-paying serfdom, it’s become important to have a government that is working in my best interests.

What bothers me, and the pain point from which this idea is derived, is that politics is predominantly organised into the major parties: the ALP (Labor), the Liberal/National coalition, The Greens, The Democrats, etc. I recognise the efficiencies to be gained by having these parties, and hence the economic benefits, however it sits uneasily with me that in order to get what I want, I have to vote for a party that may also have policies I disagree with.

Let’s be clear: I’m not advocating doing away with parties. That’s too idealistic even for me, so the idea is this: create a resource (most likely a Web site) around a core topics in the public interest, onto which you attach the policies proposed by each political party. They can be both broad and detailed, ideally organised into some kind of taxonomy, e.g.:

• Climate change
  – Carbon tax 
• National infrastructure
  – Transport
  – Communications
  – Health
  – Education 
• Human rights
  – Assisted suicide
  – Gay marriage 

People could then “vote” on individual policies instead of a raft of often incompatible policies. The benefit of doing this is that we would get a better gauge of public opinion on an issue (particularly controversial ones like gay marriage) divorced from political passions and persuasions. It might even be useful to have the policies “blinded” so that it is not revealed which policy belongs to which party. You could separate views by region (city vs. country, state/electorate/town/etc.)

Opportunities also exist, come election time, for this information to be used to compile a “20 questions” survey that then spits out a “how to vote” card you can print out and take with you to the poll booths, like the media sites tend to do around every election (e.g. Vote-a-Matic by SMH and its Fairfax brethren), but with more objectivity given how the various media organisations don’t even bother to hide their political biases any more (I’m looking at you, The Australian).

It’s not that such a thing doesn’t already exist – a very close match can be found at AustralianPolicyOnline published by Swinburn University of Technology, but as best as I can tell it simply aggregates policy-related news; I couldn’t find links to the policies for the listed headings.

Do you think this would this be a useful public tool slash instrument for political analysis?

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This post is part of the series Ideas.

Ideas

I’m starting a new series of posts simply called Ideas. The posts will be exactly that – no more, no less.

I have ideas all the time, business ideas, political ideas, inventions, harebrained schemes, and random thoughts. Often they’re inspired by what I perceive to be a deficiency or inefficiency, and other times it’s purely entrepreneurial. The only problem is that they remain in my head or on the computer (in many respects one and the same), and rarely progress beyond (a) a rant about how the world is a mess, and I just need to… rule it, or (b) a deep despair at my own lack of resources and ability (which largely boils down to laziness).

No more.

Instead complaining how I don’t have the time, money, skills, clout, courage and commitment to nurture an idea past its point of inception, I am going to do the one thing that I can do, and do well, which is to articulate it in the form of a blog post.

Answers to a couple of inevitable questions:

Why share your ideas?
I am almost certain that any idea I post here will have been thought of at some time by another human being either past or present. I’d very much like to believe I’m original or unique, but recently figured out that it’s not about uniqueness but action: an idea not acted upon is worthless. Also, what good is an idea not shared? How does one know whether an idea has merit unless it’s held up to scrutiny by peers and experts – like in the scientific review process? This may prove to be a very humbling exercise, because my posts will be necessarily brief – as the blog format and peoples’ attention spans demand – providing opportunities for criticism. But all I stand to lose is my pride, which isn’t worth much in the grand scheme of things.

Can I use your ideas?
Yes. If by some stroke of craziness one of my posts is the spark you needed to turn dreams into reality, you may – in no uncertain terms – take it as your own to use. I humbly ask for a small token of acknowledgement, whether it’s my name in the credits or a link back to this blog, but it’s not mandatory and I waive the right to sue you if you make a motza. Realistically, the idea will be in need of development, and I’d love the opportunity to talk about it further with you over coffee or a meal.

If nothing else, it will boost my post count (or add to my horrifically large pile of draft posts). Hope you enjoy future posts in this series, or better still, they inspire you to create or progress your own ideas!

Junk feed

I’m a total Facebook slut. Jenny doesn’t like it, but begrudgingly accepts that I happily share things about myself in all over the Web, not just on Facebook, but also discussion forums, Twitter and this blog (although I’m not quite as bad as this). I also have several hundred friends on Facebook and don’t block any of them from my newsfeed (games, apps and pages on the other hand, are a different story).

Why not, you might ask? A lot of people think that subjecting yourself to random posts is a waste of time, but there’s a hidden benefit lurking amongst the updates on Aunt Phylis’s latest medical drama, pictures of your friend at so-and-so’s wedding, and what Jack had for breakfast.

First, let me explain: our main instinct, when faced with the firehose of information that the Internet delivers, is to filter it down as much as possible, by “hiding” people from your Facebook feed for example. The problem with that approach though – even though it helps greatly with time management and feeling a sense of staying on top of it all – is that end up with a wicked case of confirmation bias.

Seeing only things that you like, and which align very closely with a tightly defined set of interests and values, will have a narrowing effect on your mind. One symptom I’ve observed in myself, is becoming bored with the Internet. Think about that for a moment – it’s the Internet. If you can’t find something interesting or entertaining, either you’ve become omniscient, or it’s a sign that you’ve become a victim of too much awesome. It’s not unique to the Internet either. Ever found yourself saying “there’s nothing on TV”, or scanned through the newspaper headlines and thought that journalism today ain’t what it used to be?

The remedy is simple: be open minded. Follow a blogger or Tweeter with a strongly different opinion to yours, take up a project like The Great Library Challenge like one of my friends did, or simply allow friends who post crap (e.g. me) to appear on your Facebook friend feed.

What’s wrong with wireless?

You may remember me writing about the National Broadband Network just prior to last year’s Federal Election, where I laid down a few thoughts on why I believe it is such an important piece of infrastructure for Australia. Sadly, support for the concept of a (mostly) homogeneous, nation-wide fibre-optic network has gained little traction since then, because of a concerted media campaign against it led by the Liberal mouthpiece The Australian. Its unrelenting stream of angry rhetoric has given the Coalition and Luddites a number of specious arguments to use against then NBN, particularly the one where wireless is supposedly a better alternative than rolling out optical fibre.

As a tech-savvy person, I find it very difficult to understand why we’re even having this debate. After all, there are certain ineffable truths on our side – as the famous geeky quote goes: “ye cannae change tha’ laws o’ physics!” – and yet every day we endure tirade after hateful tirade about why the project is oh-so-wrong.

To that end, I found a post by user jwbam on the Whirlpool forums very insightful. He writes:

The benefits and limitations of modern networking technologies are not intuitively obvious. What technically-informed people know about telecommunications infrastructure is the result of over a century of research by countless scientists and engineers funded by governments, military and corporations. The limitations of wireless may seem simple and obvious to you and I, but the average person in the street:

• doesn’t know or care what radio spectrum is, nor that it is a limited resource;
• thinks that because wireless has no wires, it must be cheaper and better;
• considers wired and wireless technologies to be equal in all respects;
• sees wireless gadgets in the shops that feature faster-than-NBN speeds, and doesn’t realise the difference between local area networks (LAN) and the internet (wide-area networks, or WAN);
• sees a wireless modem that just works, all by itself, without any thought for the infrastructure that enables it – towers, spectrum and backhaul;
• believes that their wireless link has a global range.

But most importantly, they don’t know how much there is that they don’t know, so they make no effort to learn how it all works and what the limitations are.

(Used with permission; edited for length and clarity)

He goes on to explain that because consumer networking technology has become simple, cheap and user-friendly, people expect that the same qualities must apply to large-scale networking infrastructure. So when they hear about the cost and complexity of the NBN fibre rollout, it suddenly seems expensive, exorbitant and excessive, and they position themselves to oppose it as yet another inefficient and ineffectual government program.

I’m not suggesting that everybody should have a working knowledge of the technology in order to refute the claims; it’s that politicians and journalists (who should know better) are presenting scathing arguments riddled with these ridiculous factual errors, and people – oblivious to the truth – get taken in by it. Normally we’d laugh derisively at the hacks who presume to tell experts how a thing could be better, but are we now faced with a group whose hatred of Labor is so complete that they’ll accept lies as credible? Incredible.