The bastards are never satisfied, they never have enough. Like the Edward G Robinson character in “Key Largo”, they always want more.

It’s turned out that productive increases work AGAINST the work force.

Reminds me of what happens when a larger passenger plane is rolled out. It’s explained that passengers will have more room, the seats will be cheaper, there will be a lounge and exercise area, it will be great because economies of size and better technology will allow this great machine to benefit everyone.

As we know they just cram more people into them.

Note the stereo eyepieces to view the 3d image of the ground,(Just above the blue coordinate repeater box), two hand cranks for motion of the image in x and y, and the foot pedal under the operator’s seat used to raise and lower the pen on and off the plotting table viewable to the right of the machine. The two photographic positive transparencies (9″x9″ glass plates) are at the top of the machine, under those rectangular lights.

It brings back memories. It was hard, precision work, very exacting and meticulous, but it got me through graduate school.

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7-2-2013 | Heather Ewing

In the nineteenth century, cast collections—plaster copies of famous statues and architectural monuments primarily from antiquity and the Renaissance—enabled working people to study and enjoy works of art that previously had only been available to the wealthy elite who could travel to see the originals. Museums like the Victoria & Albert in London and the Cooper Union in New York were established precisely with this aim of providing the working public access to excellent design and education. Many other colleges and museums around the world acquired their own cast collections, but by the mid-twentieth century the value of plaster casts were questioned—causing most institutions to dispose of their collections. Some still exist, but very few are on permanent display. Today some of these early plaster copies, particularly of the Elgin marbles, for example, can hold special value as they capture elements of the originals that have been lost or damaged over time.

This Kickstarter campaign got me thinking that we are about to experience a new and improved 21st-century version of cast collections and open access to art. Artist Cosmo Wenman has been given permission by the Skulpturhalle in Basel, Switzerland, to 3D scan any of their vast cast collection and make the files freely available to the public. In the not-too-distant future people will have the ability to download free 3D printable files from the web for their own use. Then anyone could generate their own cast collection, or their own curated collection of objects drawn from museums around the world. Whereas in the nineteenth century, it was institutions that commissioned casts for study collections, or wealthy individuals who could afford to acquire them for their mansions, when 3D printers become more affordable and accessible, it will be elementary school classrooms and art students and the rest of us. And unlike in the 19th century, where one was reliant on the offerings of a formatore, like Domenico Brucciani, who supplied the Victoria & Albert and the British Museum, in the future it could be up to the individual to pick their own originals to make models from (barring copyright restrictions). And it doesn’t have to rely on extremely high-end technology. As Wenman explains in this interview, he is using his eight-year-old standard digital camera to take the photos used to create the 3D models.

Cool beans!

Its awfully hard to be critical of this trend without sounding like a Luddite, someone who wants to preserve the Old Ways of doing things at all costs, no matter how inefficient and expensive, just so industrial workers can make good salaries after they learn complex skills. There are very good reasons why technology should be applied in this way to manufacturing, and now, to many management and administrative tasks as well. (It ain’t just machinists and draftsmen who will be thrown out of work, a lot of suits in the front office are going to suddenly find themselves redundant. There goes the middle class.)

But let’s face it, we can’t ALL be programmers or software developers and operators, or the PHD specialists they support, the ones who spec out their programs. The whole economic point of all these technologies is the need to reduce labor costs, which are now the most expensive part of all industrial processes.

The final step of this evolution is a society where a very few highly specialized people will be able to provide all the labor required to produce and manage everything everyone needs. It will be a society made up mostly of non-contributing people or manual worker drones. If nothing else, it will be a colossal waste of talent and creativity.

What is everyone else going to do, and how will the average man earn the resources he needs to buy the goods and services that are produced by the society? Its the lesson the Romans learned the hard way–the more slaves you integrate into your economy, the greater a problem you have with unemployment.

And I don’t mean to imply that this is all merely a Capitalist plot designed to impoverish us all so the rich can live like Pharaoh. (Although that certainly plays a role!) Its a lot more complex, subtle, and insidious than that. What I’m saying is that economic forces are driving technological development in a direction that will inevitably cause social problems. Its not a conspiracy, its a process, much like digestion.

We’ve been through similar crises in our history as a species before, and these problems have eventually been solved, but too often the cost has been staggering, and it has always fallen disproportionately on the shoulders of those least able to pay.

It doesn’t seem to me that this would be a cheaper way to make many products which are not machined. That process is automated, too, and can start out with most of the job done.

Anyway, I feel better and understand the process better.

Thanks again.

Of course, if the thing you are making has moving parts, then each part must made separately and the collection of parts must be assembled by hand later. So you don’t really make a 3D gun; you make a 3D barrel, a 3D receiver, a 3D trigger, and so on.

Read Vonnegut’s book “Player Piano” to understand the motivation, if not the actual process. Instead of mechanical parts like a connecting rod or a piston being forged, cast, stamped or machined by highly paid craftsmen, one lonely pencil-necked geek programs a computer once to fabricate as many of the damned things as you want.

Its progress, if it is used to make more and better things cheaper and faster. But I suspect things will be designed so they can be fabricated by mindless minimum wage automatons, and quality (and the dignity of labor) will be compromised as a result. Of course, the pencil-necked geek, and his boss, make out like a bandit.

Its sort of how MacDonalds automates and systematizes the culinary process to allow skilled chefs to make cheaper, tastier, and more nutritious burgers. It is certainly possible for technical advances to put out a better product at a cheaper price, while simultaneously making the workplace more humane and civilized. Sometimes it even turns out that way. But it ain’t necessarily so, and it is only rarely planned like that from the start.