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" Baxter, however, moves with less determination because it compensates for changes in its environment. This means it can work safely alongside people."

Yet 3D printing is just one of many production technologies and trends which are transforming the way companies will be able to make things in the future. The old rules of manufacturing, such as "you must seek economies of scale" and "you must reduce unit-labour costs", are being cast aside. New machines can print every item differently. More flexible robots are getting cheaper and better at doing all the boring and dirty stuff.

Dixit on 'the 21st Century's Economic Hurricane', by New Economist: Princeton emeritus professor Avinash Dixit is always worth reading, even when he is speculating about the economy over the next hundred years. Likening economic forecasting to weather forecasting (plenty of caveats and uncertainty), his approach is suitably skeptical. Here's how he kicks off:

The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made-and change the politics of jobs too

"WHAT could well be the next great technological disruption is fermenting away, out of sight, in small workshops, college labs, garages and basements. Tinkerers with machines that turn binary digits into molecules are pioneering a whole new way of making things-one that could well rewrite the rules of manufacturing in much the same way as the PC trashed the traditional world of computing."

Will the evolution of the internet reduce or increase cognitive inequality? The answer may not be so straightforward. 

It seems more top-tier economists are coming around to the idea that robots and technology could be having a greater influence on the economy (and this crisis in particular) than previously appreciated. Paul Krugman being the latest.

"Bloomfield is working on a platform, called the Synthetic Economy Research Environment, that could enable economists to produce games that simulate large-scale economic phenomenon like a central bank." I often wondered whether professor Robert Bloomfield (Johnson School of Management at Cornell University) was still involved in virtual worlds research. He was the charismatic host of the rather high-brow Metanomics talk-show in Second Life. Now I got my answer, via Brad Plumer who published a post about the economics of video games on Wonkblog at The Washington Post. 

Yesterday the Washington Post had a great piece in the business section entitled  "Economists offer more pessimistic view on manufacturing in upcoming report."

"We've noted on more than one occasion that economists may be missing a trick when it comes to how technology is changing the global economy. More so, that developments like 3D printing, could even pose a black-swan risk for Asia in their own right."

What Apple teaches us about the American economy, and no, it is not all what you would expect; 

Economists are failing to account for mass technological innovations when making forecasts and constructing models.

Increased levels of connectivity are rendering economic rules obsolete.

Two economists offer opposite explanations about why job growth in the United States and other developed economies remains extremely weak.

how US military needs during World War II and the Cold War steered engineers and applied mathematicians to an economic way of thinking about scarce resources, including limited computational resources, and how economists subsequently incorporated that mathematics.

Overcoming spinal cord injuries (I learned a lot about the spinal cord from the first segment, e.g. the systems that control walking are at the base of the spinal column, the brain has little to do with it), remote brain controlled mechanical hands, self-directed robots, and so on: