3D printing has been maturing rapidly since the beginning of the decade, although the process can be traced back to a 1984 patent filing by a group of French inventors – Alain Le Mehaute, Oliver de Witte, and Jean Claude Andre.
Recently, the specter of automation has cast a shadow over the manufacturing industry. Alongside gains in productivity, automation also produces widespread fear of job losses and mass unemployment. Statistical evidence, based on historical trends in automation, reveals a much less alarmist picture, while advances in the area broadly defined as Artificial Intelligence (AI) are seized upon as evidence that in the near future, human labour will be made obsolete, or worse, AI will be the catalyst of humanity’s destruction.
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