Transcriber: Erika Alexandre Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
So I'm going to talk about a new breed of Industrialists
and a new revolution they have set in motion.
But first, I would like to take you back to the first Industrial Revolution
and the stories behind two technologies.
(Portuguese) It's too close.
So I'm going to take you back to the first Industrial Revolution
and the stories behind two technologies that changed the world.
In 17...
In 1777, James Watt began selling a new steam engine.
His model rose the machine efficiency
to almost double what it had been till then,
so it was a major breakthrough.
However, Watt, who aggressively enforced his patent,
not only didn't allow other people to improve his own design,
but was himself prevented from using other patented inventions
that would have made it even more efficient.
In 1814 -
In 1814, Richard Trevithick, introduced again a new model,
which once again doubled the efficiency of steam engine.
Trevithick, however, did not patent his invention.
Up until the early 1800s, tin miners, in the county of Cornwall in England,
had struggled with Watt's engine.
Not only many of them couldn't afford to install the steam engine,
but they were also prevented from improving it
or adapting it to their own specific needs.
But when Trevithick's engine was introduced,
which he freely allowed miners to install, adapt and improve,
miners quickly got together
and began creating collaborative improvements for the engine.
During the 30 years of Watt's patent,
steam-engine efficiency rose at the rate of 3.8%.
With Trevithick's, miners -
due to miner's contributions, efficiency rose at the rate of 8.5%.
That's almost double that of Watt's.
So this was one of the earliest cases
of collaborative development of technologies.
Several decades later,
Ford was ready to begin production of a brand new car.
Up until then, cars had been very expensive machines
only the very wealthy could afford.
But Ford dreamed of a day
when everyone would be able to afford a car,
no matter what their income would be.
So his model, which cost half -
Are you OK?
So his model, which cost half of the average car at the time,
promised to make technology available to a greater number of people.
He called it a car for the common man.
However, in order to begin production, Ford needed the approval
of the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers,
also known as ALAM.
ALAM held the patent for the car,
and no one was allowed to make the car without their permission.
So Ford didn't fully ask for their permission,
which after several months of deliberation was denied.
Ford began producing his car anyway.
In turn, ALAM filed a patent suit against him,
requiring that he paid them royalties for each new car sold.
These royalties would make Ford's car considerably more expensive
and would shatter his dream to make a car for the masses.
Ford also believed that the automobile was a technology that belonged to everyone
and everyone should be able to make one.
Fortunately, the court agreed with him,
and by allowing Ford to go into production without paying ALAM any fees,
ended the monopoly over the automobile.
What followed was a boom in the car industry.
Ford's company was one of the very first ones
in the city of Detroit, in the United States,
but within two years, more than 100 manufacturers entered the market.
So Ford's highly affordable model
made it appealing and accessible to a whole new market segment,
and everybody wanted one.
Like, his cars were bought by traveling salesmen,
by artisans, and by farmers,
people who had never been able to afford a car before.
Cars became so popular that Ford couldn't keep up with the demand.
He also wanted to make them cheaper,
and back then, the way to make something cheaper
was to make more of it in less time.
So in order to increase production,
Ford and his team began streamlining the assembly line
by using conveyor belts while workers remained stationary,
repeating one single task over and over again.
Under the old model, it took over 21 hours to assemble a car.
With the new assembly line, it took one hour and a half.
However, the assembly line was tedious and back-breaking.
So Ford had trouble holding onto his workers.
To counter this, he introduced the 8-hour workday
and began paying his employees
twice as much as the average wage at the time.
So both of these stories are about making technologies available
to a greater number of people
and the extraordinary things that happen when monopolies are broken
and people are given the freedom and conditions
to do more, better, and faster.
However,
even though the assembly line brought the 8-hour workday
and cheaper products,
it also brought about mass production,
and with it, one size fits all and the consumer society.
Artisan and small-scale production simply weren't cost efficient,
and because of that,
manufacturing became the realm of professionals in large corporations.
Now, we are on the brink
of what Chris Anderson calls a new industrial revolution,
a transformation that both repeats and inverts these events of the past.
It hinges on some very powerful technologies
that may very well disrupt manufacturing as we know it
and transform entire economies,
but also on what is a very old and very new way to make things:
the collaborative economy.
I don't need to tell you how much the internet has changed the ways
in which we communicate, work, and play.
And now, we are taking it to the next level
and becoming entrepreneurs in our own right.
Services like Airbnb allow us to rent our houses and rooms
directly to other people.
TaskRabbit allows us to hire each other to do everyday tasks,
like doing laundry or assembling furniture.
Countless ride-sharing websites allow us to rent our cars
or share a ride with someone,
and crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo allow us to raise money
for projects or businesses directly from our peers.
So the internet lets us work directly with each other.
It skips the middleman
and allows us to build previously unimaginable businesses
on top of these peer to peer networks.
And what has become known as the sharing economy
is today a 3.5-billion-dollar market.
Now, the same technology that allows us to create this alternative economy
and to consume together
also allows us to create and produce together.
Cornish tin miners communicated in person and used a local publication
to share improvements and collaborate.
Today, the internet allows us to do that on a massive scale.
One vital component of collaborative production is open-source hardware.
So open source hardware is a research and development model
in which designers publish their plans online
and allow anyone to copy, modify, and redistribute them.
Openly available plans mean that we don't have to reinvent the wheel
each time we want to create or improve something.
We simply pick up where our peers left off and keep building on top of that.
Here's how it works:
Someone has an idea for, say, a bicycle, and publishes the plans online.
Someone else can then download these files and make their own bicycle,
or they can modify the designs to improve or personalize it.
Everyone is also free to manufacture and sell these bicycles.
In turn, the original creator can take these upgrades
and incorporate them back into her original design.
And so on, and so forth.
However, a powerful technology
that allows us to share information in open-source plans is not enough
if we wouldn't be able to actually materialize the objects.
Up until recently,
if we wanted to produce something,
we'd have to either work with the factory or make our products by hand,
one at a time.
We had a choice between two types of tools:
mass-production tools or manual tools.
There was nothing in between.
Things began to change in the 1980s
with emergence of the first digital fabrication tools -
3D printers, laser cutters, CNC mills -
machines that produce physical objects from digital designs,
very much like printing a document on our home printer.
What is interesting about these technologies is their flexibility.
While it takes a factory months
to switch from the production of one good to another,
with digital fabrication tools,
we can make toys in the morning and chairs in the afternoon.
For the same reason,
the cost of making, 3D-printing or laser-cutting one single item
is not very different from the cost of making 100 of them.
So what we're looking at here
are technologies that automate production and replace manual labor
but without the huge size and cost typically associated with manufacturing.
But if these technologies have been available for three decades,
how come we haven't seen more of them sooner?
Well, the answer lies in their complexity, size, and cost.
For the longest time, digital fabrication tools were extremely expensive,
so only big organizations could afford them.
In 2004, Adrian Bowyer, a professor in the UK,
decided that just as Ford had done for the car,
it was time to make digital fabrication tools accessible to the common man.
He began designing a compact and highly affordable 3D printer
capable of producing all sorts of plastic objects,
including many of its own parts.
He named it RepRap and released it as open-source.
With the plans available online, hobbyists around the world
began making self-replicating devices in their basements
and using them to make parts to make more machines.
In a few years after that,
Adam Mayer, Zach Hoeken, Bre Pettis simplified Adrian's open-source design
and created another highly affordable 3D printer based on it.
Their model cost 850 dollars at the time
when the cheapest commercial 3D printer cost 10,000 dollars.
So, excited with the results, they decided to quit their jobs
and launched a company to sell their 3D printers as kits.
What is interesting is that they used NIC resistor's laser cutter
to create their first production runs,
meaning that they used one digital fabrication tool
to make another.
So their company, MakerBot Industries,
is now one of the most successful manufacturers
of desktop 3D printers.
And after this,
the desktop 3D printer market exploded.
Up until then, there was no market,
and I began counting the number of desktop 3D printer models in 2009,
but by 2011,
there were so many
that I just basically lost track and had to stop counting.
But 3D printers don't do all the job that we need them to do.
They are not enough. We needed more tools.
So, soon, laser cutters and CNC mills appeared.
Lasersaur, the open-source laser cutter pictured here,
costs only 7,000 dollars
compared to 30,000 dollars for the proprietary ones.
So Makerbot, RepRap and Lasersaur launched the wave of chain
that is doing manufacturing like Ford did to the car
and putting the means of production in the hands of everyone.
So what this is causing is it's generating a new type of industry,
the open-source industry.
It may sound strange
that industrialists are giving away the plans for their products for free,
but that's exactly what they are doing,
and they are doing it
because it's a better research and development method.
With the plans available online,
everyone, including their costumers and competitors, is free to improve them,
and then, the improvements are made public and everyone benefits,
leading to foster development and more appropriate products all around.
So the same collaborative approach that worked for the Cornish tin miners
is now fueling the open-source industry.
Now, you're probably wondering,
how do they stay in business if they give away their designs?
Well, the answer is oddly simple:
they make things and they sell them,
which is probably the oldest business model known to humankind.
And then they stay ahead of the competition
not by holding a monopoly
but by producing better services and goods
and selling them at the best prices.
And they're becoming very good at it,
with companies like Sport Fund reporting revenues
of over 75 million dollars for 2012.
So who are these open-source industrialists
who believe in the power of collaboration
and are building enterprises on top of it?
They are the makers of aerial drones, like DIY drones,
the makers of sailing drones, like Protei,
the makers of subaquatic drones,
like OpenROV -
They are the makers of toys like littleBits,
the makers of cars like Local Motors and Wikispeed,
the makers of houses like Architecture for Humanity and WikiHouse,
and the makers of production and agriculture machinery
like Open Source Ecology.
Now, efficiency and automation are just as important now
as they were in the first Industrial Revolution.
They just work at a different scale.
Last December, Open Source Ecology -
Oops, sorry about that.
Alright.
OK, thank you.
So last December,
Open Source Ecology built a brick press in a single day.
I happened to be there.
Ten people,
some of which were meeting for the first time
and have never built anything of this size,
got together and built a machine in 12 hours.
This was made possible by open collaboration methods
and access to a laser cutter
that allowed one person to cut all the parts for the machine
very quickly and very efficiently.
So open-source plans allow us to create better and faster,
and digital fabrication tools allow us to manufacture these results
efficiently, quickly, and at small to medium scale.
So this, I believe, is the future of industry:
a model that allows us to create faster,
a model that allows us to combine the significance,
the satisfaction of artisanship
with the efficiency of automation and a part of collaboration.
Thank you.