Information Is Driving a New Revolution in Manufacturing

Information Is Driving a New Revolution in Manufacturing

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Because nature does not present the world in the form we would like, we must reorder it. To create this new order, we need information about what that order is supposed to look like, knowledge about how to build it and energy to get it into shape. Many technological revolutions of the past have focused on the energy part of this equation—waterpower, the steam engine, the electric motor and the internal-combustion engine, to name a few.

The technological revolution under way now is not driven by energy, however. It is driven by information. A Boeing 747 or an iPhone is made mostly out of fairly common materials that are worth, at most, just a few dollars a pound. Yet the finished product sells for thousands of dollars per pound. Most of the value is in the information content. That is where the jobs and the livelihoods are going.