Big Thinker Chris Anderson Delivers Talk about a New Industrial Revolution

NEWS
Mar 4, 2011

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, recently gave a talk at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale campus entitled, “The New Industrial Revolution.” Anderson looked back at the first Industrial Revolution as a time when humans became much more productive, but also required that they concentrate in cities, working together at large scale, for example, in factories. Innovating and creating new products at small scale by individuals was extremely difficult. Anderson sees the coming decade as a time when this trend will reverse, bringing a new industrial revolution. According to Anderson, the models of human interaction that have grown on the Web over the last decade are spreading to the physical world. Inventors and innovators are gaining the ability to prototype their ideas at small scale and at low risk, collaborating with others around the world on manufacturing and even open-sourcing physical objects, such as cars and autonomous drone planes. Anderson provided compelling examples of the challenges to being both an inventor and an entrepreneur in the 20th century. His grandfather invented and holds the patent on the automatic lawn sprinkler, but never tried to manufacture any (he also inspired Anderson’s love of building things). The inventor of rain-sensing windshield wipers, on the other hand, went bankrupt trying to manufacture them at large scale. The new industrial revolution makes this dual existence possible. The 3D printer (Anderson has one in his basement) lets inventors generate one instance of a new physical item. Flexible manufacturers in China let inventors specify and order their design online, in quantities numbering in the hundreds or thousands, numbers too small to be cost-effective for conventional manufacturers. The open-sourcing of products lets inventors easily handle the commodity aspects of their designs and focus their energy on true innovation. Anderson pointed to some 21st century successes: BrickArms is one of several companies that manufactures Lego parts in small quantities that are too niche for Lego itself to produce (his kids are fans). Returning to his roots, Anderson has open-sourced an extensible automatic sprinkler with features such as operation by phone and gathering weather reports. Anderson concluded with the message that building new products in the real world should be just as easy as on the Web: “atoms are the new bits!”