We’re in the Third Industrial Revolution :: Implications for education

Notwithstanding the current market problems, there is a strong future for manufacturing, plus a strong need for people able to effectively CNC machine tools, says Peter Hall, managing director of Haas Automation Europe.

Peter Hall

We are, according to Jeremy Rifkin, a leading US economist and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, entering the third industrial revolution. What he means by this is the end of the oil/carbon-based energy era and the transition to a new, sustainable energy future. Indeed, he suggests peak oil production will occur somewhere between 2010 and 2030 – after that the amount of oil coming out of the ground starts to diminish.

In brief, what he sees is locally-generated green energy distributed via an ‘intergrid’. It will drive a revolution in technology that will require a huge variety of new and different things to be made and which will require machine tools as part of that process. That apart, up to 2030, a trillion euros – a million, million euros – must be invested annually into the energy sector to meet the world’s forecast demand. All that investment for products that must be manufactured.

But many things are going to have to change. Cars driven by internal combustion engines will give way to electric cars, for example. But these new sustainable solutions will need to be manufactured, and manufacturing technology – machine tools and more – will be required to turn these solutions into products!

Smart programs and investments into technical educations are needed to  attract many more youngsters into manufacturing training.

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Full article: Revolutionary Times, Machinery.co.uk

Video: CNN – The Third Industrial Revolution

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