Thought for food
Article Type: Editorial From: Industrial Robot: An International Journal, Volume 38, Issue 1
Our theme for this issue is “Applications towards factories of the future” – but it could equally have been be titled “Where are we going?”.
If we momentarily look back over our shoulders and consider how automation has progressed in a broad-brush overview, we do not have to look back very far to around 1,800 and the start of the industrial revolution to see when factories started to appear. Before this time “manufacturing” hardly existed,items were made of course, but each was primarily a “one-off”.
Mechanisation brought with it the ability to manufacture identical parts in great numbers. Actually it required that the parts be identical and “any colour, as long as it was black”. In the words of Nobel Prize winning Robert E. Lucas, Jr “For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth. […]Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before”. People’s income, and their ability to buy things, increased by a factor of 10 – or at least it did in the developing world (Wikipedia).
Within just eight generations we have gone from a largely subsistence standard of living to one of conspicuous consumption.
Our ability to manufacture at great speed and with good quality and low prices, seems to be advancing at an ever greater rate. Will we ever run out of raw materials? I doubt it. if you consider manufacturing to be basically the action of moving matter from below ground to above ground then if you steam-rollered all our possessions into an even thickness over the surface of the Earth then I doubt it would add more than a few millimeters of thin veneer– perhaps not even that. Given that the Earth’s crust is about 40 km thick we have hardly scratched the surface.
We may have used up specific natural resources like oil as if there was no tomorrow, but even if we keep relying on oil for energy and chemicals, there still appears to be loads of it left, even if it is becoming harder to get at. And we, finally, seem to be making progress with recycling these precious resources. If we get really good at recycling then it could be we need little or no “new” materials at all, just the application of energy to convert and old something into a new something.
I also do not expect that we will run out of energy – nuclear power and advances in solar panels should see to that. And all the time our machines are getting more and more efficient and so our per-capita energy needs may even fall.
If we have enough raw materials and enough energy then the prospects for our increasing population (about 1 per cent growth a year) may not look too bleak,and I see no reason for the current trends towards more and more advanced manufacturing not to continue in their current directions. The bad news? Food could be a big problem, especially if we continue to impact our environment and climate, but I do not consider that even this is insurmountable – although writing this as I am on the day that it is announced that 20 per cent of plant life on Earth is heading for extinction, it is hard to be overly optimistic.
Perhaps, our biggest challenge in factories for the future is that they produce food with the clinical precision and efficiency of our other manufacturing industries?
Clive Loughlin
