THE THIRD WAVE
Today members of Computer-aided Manufacturing International (CAM-I) are hard at work classifying and coding parts and processes to permit the full automation of The prospect is still no more than a glint in the eye of such experts as Professor Inyong Ham of Penn State’s Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineer ing, but ultimately a customer will be able to feed his or her specifications into a manufacturer’s computer directly.
The computer will not only design the product the cus tomer wants, Professor Ham explains, but select the manufactoring processes to be used. It will assign the machines. It will sequence the necessary steps from, say, milling or grind ing right down to painting. It will write the necessary programs for the subcomputers or numerical control devices that will run the machines. And it may even feed in an “adaptive control” that will optimize these various processes for both economic and environmental purposes.
In the end, the consumer, not merely providing the specs but punching the button that sets this entire process in action will become as much a part of the production process as the denim-clad assembly-line worker was in the world now dying.
While such a customer-activated manufacturing system is still some distance off, at least some of the hardware already exists. Thus, at least in theory, the computer-run laser gun used in the garment industry and described in Chapter Fif-teen could, if linked by telephone to a personal computer permit a customer to feed in his or her various dimensions select appropriate cloth, and then actually activate the laser cutter—without leaving his or her own home.
Robert H. Anderson, head of the Information Services Department at the RAND Corporation and a leading expert on computerized manufacture, explains it this way: “The most creative thing a person will do 20 years from now is to be a very creative consumer . . .Namely, you’ll be sitting there doing things like designing a suit of clothes for yourself or making modifications to a standard design, so the computers can cut one for you by laser and sew it together for you by numerically controlled machine.. ..
“You really could, because of the computers, take your specs and turn them into a car. They will, of course, have programmed within them all the federal safety regulations and all the physics of the situation so they won’t let you get too far out of bounds.”
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