This Is One Of The Greatest Secular Growth Trends

Summary

• One of the greatest secular growth trends of our time is the rise of what I call Intelligent Manufacturing, which is a quintessential manifestation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
• In this note, I introduce Intelligent Manufacturing by walking us through the evolution of earth's industrial economies.
• In so doing, I shed light on the present state of our global economy and where it's headed over the coming decades.
• While I only share a handful of ideas in this note, I hope that the broader description I share with you will allow you to make more informed investing decisions.
• Looking for more investing ideas like this one? Get them exclusively at Beating the Market. Get started today »

Source: Institute Of Entrepreneurship Development

Welcome Back!

Welcome back to another installment of The Greatest Secular Growth Trends of Our Time!

I'm very excited to share the contents of this installment because I believe that it will serve to illuminate not just how many of our investments are changing the world around us but also how society itself is evolving.

Today's note is special because it takes us back to the dawn of capitalist societies and demonstrates how technology and production have evolved to a point where artificial intelligence, robotics, and data will produce abundance for all of mankind sometime during the 21st Century. Through this lens, alongside our financial assessments, I believe it becomes exceedingly clear why we own the stocks we own. It gives us confidence that we are indeed placing our money into the right companies at the right time.

Before we start, I invite you to review the following table of contents to get an idea of how I structured this note.

Table Of Contents

1. Overview of Intelligent Manufacturing
2. The evolution of the means of production in society
3. The technologies that have coalesced to give rise to Intelligent Manufacturing
4. A real-world example of Intelligent Manufacturing in action
5. Companies to buy to play this secular growth trend
6. The looming global crisis created by Intelligent Manufacturing
7. Concluding thoughts

Introduction To Intelligent Manufacturing

Source: Max Pixel

This greatest secular growth trend of our time installment is embodied by the phrase Intelligent Manufacturing. Much like the previous greatest secular growth trends I've shared, a series of technologies have coalesced such that the rise of Intelligent Manufacturing may now take place in earnest over the coming decades.

As was for previously shared installments, Intelligent Manufacturing will be an extremely data and AI intensive industry. That is, the area in which I believe the greatest ROI could be generated is related to high-margin data and AI businesses, such as data warehousing, observability, and log analysis. We will cover this pretty exhaustively later in this note. Intelligent Manufacturing will inherently be global in scale, though its manufacturing hubs will be regional in scale, as I also will further highlight later in this note.

Companies will employ manufacturing AI apparatuses that will essentially act as one, somewhat omniscient mind, overseeing the entirety of a company's manufacturing operations globally.

You can think of it like this:

Imagine that you closed your eyes and you envisioned manufacturing plants all over the world: One in Vietnam, one in France, one in Abu Dhabi, one in Argentina, and one in South Korea. In your mind, you imagine yourself determining how much to produce, at what times, and for whom.

You consider all of the factors that might alter your global manufacturing operation's production patterns, such as weather, seasonality, macroeconomic factors, etc.

With these bits of information, you act like a god of manufacturing and deploy resources and manufacture goods based on supply and demand and the aforementioned factors with just your thoughts. All of this occurs through a single synchronized point of decision making - in this example, your mind.

The future of manufacturing will almost identically resemble this vision. A nearly omniscient central manufacturing intelligence will operate at global scale, but instead of guessing about the weather, data from individual manufacturing hubs, macroeconomic factors, and the various cycles of demand, a ubiquitous, central superintelligence, digesting all of these points of data, quintillions and beyond, simultaneously and in real time, will make decisions with little human intervention.

While there will be a central intelligence, there also will be a hierarchy of less advanced artificial intelligences operating something like an army, e.g., "foot soldier" artificial intelligence ensuring operational uptime in individual manufacturing plants.

The central, global manufacturing intelligence (housed on a platform such as Snowflake (SNOW) or AWS (AMZN)) will be able to perform highly intricate multi-variable regression analyses and other statistical functions unreachable by the human mind. This central manufacturing intelligence will consider a nearly infinite array of data sets such that it will create predictive analysis, on which it will automatically act without any human intervention. Furthermore, as it digests data and makes decisions, and sees the results of those decisions, it will become more intelligent, and thereby more efficient in operating the manufacturing plants under its supervision.

Sound far fetched?

Today, I will illustrate how a handful of technologies have coalesced to make this vision a very near term reality. And not only will I illustrate the technologies, but I also will demonstrate to you how companies we own are giving rise to this incredible future today.

After sharing this vision with you, I will delve into the more sober aspects of such a future, especially such a future that comes too rapidly for the developing world to adjust.

Enjoy!

An Evolution Of The Means Of Production

In order to truly highlight the significance of the rise of Intelligent Manufacturing, we must understand this technology's significance within the context of the entire evolution of mankind's manufacturing technology (aka the means of production), dating back all the way to 20,000 to 10,000 BC. That is, though it might be sufficient for me to illustrate the Fourth Industrial Revolution or the rise of Intelligent Manufacturing alone, I believe it's even more convincing and impactful when we look at it from the perspective of the evolution of the means of production since the dawn of man. When seen through this lens, we fully appreciate the immense importance of this secular growth trend and how it's dramatically altering the state of life on earth as we know it.

So let's get into it!

The means of production have been the focal point of the economic world since the 19th Century. Controversial economic literature, such as the Communist Manifesto and the corresponding Marxist belief system, were derivatives of the first and second industrial revolutions. They were responses to the radical shifts in the economic landscape of the developed worlds, where the industrial revolution was strongly underway. To that end, the first and second industrial revolutions rapidly shaped and evolved our world and the way in which we perceive it.

• As a quick aside, I must share that this is indeed a controversial idea, in that many scholars question whether belief systems or technology lead the evolution of society for mankind. A book could be written on this subject so for today we will lean more towards the idea that technology shapes society instead of the other way around.

For the first time in mankind's history, even the peasantry could live like kings, as mass production via factories, division of labor, and electrical power generation technologies coalesced to create riches never experienced before by humans. Society evolved from an agrarian civilization in which there were a ruling class and a slave class to a society in which there was a feudal system, to a society in which there were a capitalist aristocracy and a proletariat, to today's society in which we are yet another step closer to a more equitable playing field for all. I will further illustrate this evolution in a chart a little bit later in this note.

In short, the first and second industrial revolutions were created by the following factors:

1. Introduction of mass production based on breakthrough technologies in manufacturing.
2. The formation of the division of labor as opposed to feudal guilds or slavery-based systems.
3. The introduction of electrical power generation as well as other forms of energy generation via the use of coal, steam, and eventually oil and natural gas. Today, alternative energy sources are being introduced.

The first two industrial revolutions were, arguably, the most important events to have occurred since the dawn of the agricultural revolution, which occurred somewhere around 12,000 to 20,000 years earlier. Prior to the first two industrial revolutions, mankind's wealth progressed slowly and life for humans was rather challenging, as evidenced by, for example, extremely short lifespans (relative to our nearly 100-year lifespans today).

In the same way that many businesses struggle for sometimes decades before experiencing massive, exponential hockey stick growth (Nvidia (NVDA) experienced this for example), so too did mankind as a whole prior to the first and second industrial revolutions.

Here's a graphical depiction of how important the first and second industrial revolutions were:

Source: Bank Of England

As can be seen above, we are experiencing exponential, compounding, hockey stick growth in society due to the technologies that are burgeoning all around us. Such growth did not occur for 99% of the first 10,000 to 20,000 years or so of agrarian living for mankind.

Could the Fourth Industrial Revolution further evolve us to the stage at which all of mankind is offered the opportunity to live a rich, prosperous, and comfortable life in which we can craft our existences in precisely the way we wish, as the most basic needs of the society have become extraordinarily inexpensive due to automated manufacturing superintelligences?

While I don't think we can necessarily answer that rather lengthy question today, the above sequence of logic and the contents of this note lead me to believe that we are indeed heading toward a natural stage of human evolution where all of mankind operates on this more level plane of existence, and its foundation will be built by automated manufacturing superintelligences.

Here's the above ideas summarized in a chart:

Time Period	Stage Of Human Evolution	Notable Changes To Society
20,000 - 0 BC	Agricultural Revolution	Agrarian Lifestyle; Capitalism Is Born; City-States are created; Ruling And Slave Classes are dominant societal structures.
0 to 1700s AD	Feudal Civilizations	Intermediary Stage Between Slave Classes And Manufacturing Proletariat. De facto slave and ruling classes still exist with modest improvements to living standards and lifespans.
1700-1800s AD	1st and 2nd Industrial Revolution	Death Of Predominately Agrarian Lifestyle; Capitalist Aristocracy and Proletariat are dominant societal structures.
1900-2000s AD	3rd and 4th Industrial Revolution	Death of Proletariat Manufacturing Class; Balance Between Capitalism Aristocracy and social safety nets, ensuring fair opportunities for prosperity; Automated Superintelligences
2100 AD	5th Industrial Revolution	Death Of Scarcity; All humans with tools to create the existences they wish; Space Faring Civilization

Click to enlarge

Source: A Decade Plus Of Personally Studying Political Evolutionary Theory

As can be seen above, humanity is in the midst of the end of the Third Industrial Revolution and at the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

• As an aside, I recognize that "humanity" should be taken with a grain of salt. A large of portion mankind is still living in abject poverty, and as we will come to find out, this 4th Industrial Revolution may lead to even more exacerbated gaps between developed and developing nations.

Graphically, the third and fourth tiers of the above chart look something like this:

Source: Salesforce

Dissecting the fourth stage a bit more...

Source: Pinterest

As can be seen above, many of the technologies in which many of us are invested are embodied in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. From big data analytics, to brain-machine interfaces, to cloud computing and virtual reality, many of us are heavily invested in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Next, let's check out a chart highlighting, specifically, the evolution of Intelligent Manufacturing:

Evolution Of Intelligent Manufacturing

Source: Powerelectronicsnews

So as you can see, we are presently transitioning into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I would say that we aren't fully in the third nor fourth. We are in an intermediary stage.

That is, evolution occurs in averages; in that, at any time, an evolving entity may not be in one evolutionary stage or another. It's an average of every facet that makes up that entity at any given time. So we are likely in an average of the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions... somewhere in between.

Next, let's check out some of the most important commodities that have facilitated the evolutionary stages of manufacturing and production.

Most Prominent Commodities Of Each Industrial Revolution

I have said a few times recently that the mobilization and monetization of data in the 2010s are similar to the rise of oil usage in the early 1900s. I remain very convicted in this idea, and the following charts further highlight this conviction, while providing context around what commodities were most prominent during each of the previous three industrial revolutions, during which tens or hundreds of companies mining and selling the following commodities made investors rich.

Commodity	Initiation of Boom
Coal	Mid-1800s
Oil	Early 1900s
Semiconductors	Late 1900s to early 2000s
Data	Early to mid-2000s

Click to enlarge

Fossil Fuels (Coal, Oil, etc.)

Source: eia.gov

Semiconductors

Source: FRED

Data

Source: Haac.hawaii.gov

As can be seen above, we are in the initial stages of the growth in data, which is an essential fuel to the growth of Intelligent Manufacturing. Without the extraction of data from the many components of manufacturing and production, Intelligent Manufacturing and, as or more importantly, the Fourth Industrial Revolution could materialize in the way they are and will.

That is, such data growth is one of the central technological factors that will ultimately give rise to Intelligent Manufacturing, and by extension, Fourth Industrial Revolution

Technologies That Underpin The Fourth Industrial Revolution

There are a handful (maybe two handfuls) of technologies that have been necessary in order for the rise of Intelligent Manufacturing to come to fruition.

These include:

1. Global Cloud Data Platforms
2. Hybrid Cloud Data Operating Systems: Edge computing analytics, on-premise data analytics, cloud data warehousing, and data synchronization across environments (cloud, on-prem, and hybrid)
3. Rapid advancements in AI and ML
4. Rapid advancements in application performance monitoring/management
5. Software products to support Intelligent Manufacturing and Design
6. Intelligent Robotics
7. Mass Manufacturing 3D Printing; Additive Manufacturing; Transportation of goods via the 4th modality: land, sea, air, and internet

To further summarize and succinctly communicate the above ideas, let's turn to a very short, though potent, video I happened upon throughout my research:

Source: YouTube

Now that we have a very strong foundation for understanding the rise of Intelligent Manufacturing and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, let's turn our attention to a specific example and how certain companies factor into this specific example.

Example: The Rise Of The Global Manufacturing Superintelligences

To further elucidate the rise of Intelligent Manufacturing and the investment opportunities therein, let's review an example. While I conceived of this example myself, I ended up finding a video following its writing that really complements the following example very well. It's short and also touches on the pitfalls of this rapidly approaching new paradigm of manufacturing.

With the seven technologies mentioned above at the fingertips of the mega enterprises' of earth, these companies will create fully automated global manufacturing superintelligences that will require little if any human intervention.

For example, let's say Lululemon (LULU) wants to fully develop a global intelligent manufacturing apparatus. It would look something like this:

Lululemon would enlist the aid of two handfuls of companies primarily:

1. Amazon/AWS and/or Snowflake
2. Splunk (SPLK) or Elastic (ESTC)
3. Autodesk (ADSK)
4. Unity Software (U)
5. Dynatrace (DT) or Datadog (DDOG), and
6. Fastly (FSLY) and Cloudflare (NET)

It might not enlist the aid of all of the above companies, but it would certainly choose a combination of at least five.

AWS, Snowflake, Elastic, And Splunk

To start, Lululemon would focus on building out the mind of its global intelligent manufacturing network. This mind would start out somewhat dumb, but as it oversaw more manufacturing operations, it would become more and more intelligent. Lululemon would leverage Snowflake's global platform (built atop the public clouds such as AWS and Azure) to warehouse and access vital data in determining how its manufacturing operation would be run and optimized. With that being said, manufacturing is notorious for producing massive quantities of data on-premise, which is prohibitively expensive to transport to central warehousing clouds.

Enter Splunk and edge cloud computing companies.

Splunk would serve as the manufacturing intelligence's data analytics operating system. Data scientists, especially at first, would work to create machine learning algorithms and AI that would identify where data would need to be synchronized from the manufacturing plants to edge cloud computing data centers and to more centralized public clouds, accessed through, for example, Snowflake's global platform.

Furthermore, Splunk would extract the massive quantities of data generated by the individual manufacturing plants and feed this into the AI that runs the individual manufacturing plant. It would synchronize data from the individual manufacturing plants with the central manufacturing intelligence when such synchronization was deemed necessary.

Data would be processed and analyzed in an on-premise and edge data center environment, conclusions would be generated, then, those conclusions, if necessary as, again, the cost of sending data can be prohibitively expensive, would be sent to the central manufacturing intelligence that would make higher-level optimization decisions and coordinate assets globally.

The artificial intelligence at each level would determine whether the information/data it's processing would be necessary to send to the central intelligence and vice versa. That is, each AI echelon would reach a level of intelligence such that it would determine when it'd be necessary to synch data horizontally (with other manufacturing plants) or vertically (with central big data-based artificial intelligences, such as AWS or Snowflake).

Here's a quote from our introductory paragraph that further illustrates how this would operate:

While there would be a central intelligence, there would also be a hierarchy of smaller artificial intelligences operating something like an army, e.g., "foot soldier" artificial intelligence ensuring operational effeciency, optimization, and uptime in factories.

One of the major issues in the fashion industry is determining how much of any single garment to produce. Oftentimes, the fashion industry must sell goods at a specific (higher) margin so as to make up for the inevitable loss they will incur from not selling all of their inventory during one season or another.

In this world of data analytics, AI, and intelligent manufacturing, such loss will be massively reduced, if not eliminated.

In this new paradigm, Snowflake's data marketplace would allow Lululemon to synch its own data collections with pertinent data, such as weather patterns that may affect retail spending by consumers, macroeconomic environments, political impacts, seasonality, etc., in order to optimize the amount of product Lululemon should produce during a certain period of the year.

As time goes on, the central manufacturing intelligence would become so smart and robust that Lululemon would be able to operate its business with virtually zero intervention from humans.

Fastly and Cloudflare

This section of TGSGT VI serves as supplement to the above information regarding Lululemon's hypothetical data operations. As I mentioned above, every bit of data generated from manufacturing plants cannot be sent to the central manufacturing intelligence, i.e., a platform like Snowflake hosted atop the public cloud infrastructures, because data transmission costs money... lots of money when we're dealing with Intelligent Manufacturing plants generating exa and zettabytes of data.

Hence, companies must leverage on-prem solutions such as those offered by Splunk and Alteryx (AYX), but they also will supplement this on-prem analysis with edge data center/edge cloud computing analysis.

According to Microsoft (MSFT), by 2025, 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed at the edge (where Fastly and Cloudflare operate their data centers), up from less than 20% today.

Source: YouTube

Such data will stem from a wide variety of industries, most notably for the purposes of TGSGT VI, manufacturing.

Source: YouTube

By 2025, IoT is projected to produce 180 zettabytes of data, four times what the internet represents today (currently estimated at 40 zettabytes).

While I have not considered these edge computing plays through the lens of data analytics before, it has become exceedingly clear to me that they may be seen as data analytics plays predominately in 10-20 years, or at least, they will generate a solid amount of their revenue from the hosting of data from energy and manufacturing companies for example.

Examples of these companies entering the data analytics arena include Fastly's partnership with Microsoft and Fastly's integrations with Splunk.

Autodesk and Unity Software: The Merging of Software and Material Science

Next, Lululemon would set out to build the physical body of its global manufacturing intelligence apparatus.

In the Fourth Industrial Revolution and in a world of Intelligent Manufacturing, the physical world is secondary. The messiness of physical life is first resolved through the software portal from which the physical world is ultimately born.

The demand for AI/virtual reality/3D based software that assists in the process of mass production is set to grow over the coming decades. Manufacturing will be primarily conducted through a software portal, such as those that Autodesk and Unity offer to their subscribers. Manufacturing will not, nor could it be, done via manual design, intuition, or even manual digital design.

Artificial intelligence-infused software will be responsible for most if not all of the design that takes place within manufacturing in the future. From the design of the smallest component in a manufacturing plant to the design of the plant itself, it will be done first and foremost through an AI-based software portal such as those offered by Autodesk and Unity.

We're in a whole new world now, where we are merging software and material science.

To further highlight this idea, I invite you to watch the following video that discusses how AI-based software portals have become the starting point for manufacturing. From 3:00 to 5:00, the host discusses how AI will shape manufacturing in the future.

Source: YouTube

Lululemon would begin designing intelligent manufacturing plants through a platform such as one offered by Autodesk or through Unity (as we will come to see in a couple videos below). Lululemon would design its entire product line alongside the entirety of its manufacturing operations all through a collection of software environments.

From 5:00 to 6:15 (recommend the whole video as well), we see that design software, such as that which Autodesk produces and supplies to its customers, will be employed significantly in the redesign of countless manufacturing components.

Source: YouTube

3D printing, or additive manufacturing as it's also called, which thus far we have not discussed, will be essential to the physical (as opposed to the software/data-based intelligence component) component of the global manufacturing intelligence apparatus. In that, if intelligent manufacturing is to bring us into a world of ultra-low cost goods and abundance, certain costs associated with the current manufacturing paradigm, i.e., material and energy waste from subtractive manufacturing and transportation costs, must be virtually eliminated from the global supply chain equation.

Furthermore, between 3D printing and software portals for manufacturing, manufacturing will occur locally, such that the primary mode of the transportation of goods will be the Internet.

Such is the nature of global supply chains in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and it further highlights the idea that software and the physical world will continue to blend in a way that's never been the case before.

With these technologies in hand, Lululemon will be able to collect consumer feedback to its new product lines and rapidly alter the course of its product offering due to the company's ability to generate new products via software-based 3D printing (additive manufacturing). It will not be stuck with massive batches of unwanted product.

Before we move on to a discussion exclusively about additive manufacturing and why I'm reluctant to invest in it presently (though some interesting opportunities are out there), let's review how Unity Software is diversifying its revenue base (away from exclusively gaming) and acting as a complement to design and manufacturing software, such as Autodesk.

As you will watch in the following videos, Unity is being used to manage the entire lifecycle of automotive design, manufacturing, and construction.

Source: YouTube

We were originally introduced to this idea in another TGSGT installment, in which we learned that software is allowing us to perform literally infinite scenarios related to biopharma. That is, no science need be done physically any longer. All testing can be done virtually, and this idea will only further accelerate in the future.

Such an idea is absolutely essential for the design of manufacturing plants. Furthermore, it's essential to ensuring manufacturing operations are optimized to the greatest degree.

Next, let's continue to investigate how Unity's platform is being used to act as the software portal into industries such as architecture, engineering, and construction.

Source: YouTube

In the Fourth Industrial Revolution and in a world of Intelligent Manufacturing, the physical world is secondary. The messiness of physical life is resolved through the software portal from which the physical world is ultimately born.

Such is the utility of complementary software solutions such as Unity Software and Autodesk.

Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing is synonymous with 3D printing. The term additive manufacturing refers to the idea that in order to build an item, materials are added, or layered. This differs from subtractive manufacturing (think a sculptor chipping away at a block of marble) in that it does not require massive material waste, which ultimately elevates costs and energy expenditures in the manufacturing plant.

Additive manufacturing has been around since the 1980s. However, it has only been used predominately in prototyping and small batch productions. Even today, we are still in the world wide wait for 3D printing to be adopted on a mass production/global scale. In fact, each 3D printing stock I have analyzed has had either very tepid growth or fluctuating growth, neither of which entice me to invest, much less share them as investments to consider.

Notwithstanding, the estimates for this industry are staggering, and rightfully so. 3D printing will truly be essential for the creation of global intelligent manufacturing operations to really drive down the cost of goods and thereby create abundance on a global scale. With that being said, outside of 3D printing, the technologies and recommended companies discussed in this note are being applied to manufacturing today.

Source: The 3D printing revolution | DW Documentary

Source: The 3D printing revolution | DW Documentary

Though it has been challenging to find rapidly-growing 3D printing companies, there are a handful of them out there, and high profile companies, such as Tesla (TSLA) have begun employing the technology in their own manufacturing operations.

In a recent Seeking Alpha post, Tesla was cited as having been searching for a partner to perform robust 3D printing operations for its company. However, each of the companies listed in that note have absolutely abysmal financials and are not projecting themselves to grow in line with the above charts.

For now, I'm being very patient with this industry and allowing obvious winners to IPO, in which we will invest.

Datadog And Dynatrace

Once Lululemon has designed the brains and physical attributes of its global manufacturing network (the global and local data operating systems and Artificial Intelligence and the additive manufacturing, AI robotics plants), it will need to enlist the aid of an application performance monitoring company to ensure that each application (there's at least one application per intelligent machine) functions properly within this global manufacturing network.

AI-based APM platforms, such as Datadog and Dynatrace, will allow Lululemon's intelligent manufacturing apparatus to instantly identify issues that may arise among the millions or billions of applications running within the intelligent robotic machinery within Lululemon's network of intelligent manufacturing plants.

The Rise Of Developed Nations' Manufacturing Hubs

With the rise of Intelligent Manufacturing hubs that are stationed locally (relative to where the goods produced will be sold), there's a looming crisis that's set to occur in developing nations.

That is, if goods do in fact become primarily transported via the Internet (the fourth modality of transportation and the primary one in the 4th industrial revolution), then the cost-benefit analysis will be such that it wouldn't make sense to produce goods in places like China or India, because the transportation costs of those goods alone would exceed the cost-benefit derived from producing in an entirely robotic factory in a country such as Germany.

Intelligent Manufacturing plants will be stationed by regions, and the cost of labor will not be a factor. As mentioned above, the primary factors at this stage will be cost of materials and cost of transportation of goods. With that in mind, it would benefit, for example, Lululemon to station its manufacturing plants close to the outlets through which Lululemon would sell its goods.

For example, if Lululemon has a concentration of physical retail outlets or a concentration of online shoppers in Western Europe, it would place one of its intelligent manufacturing plants in that region, instead of, as is likely the case now, China or India. Transportation costs would come to exceed the cost of production in a developed world, and therefore, it would make economic sense to simply place the factory nearest to the point of distribution.

This could create a fallout in jobs for developing nations who rely heavily on manufacturing jobs that might be onshored by developed nations who adopt the technologies contained in this note.

The following video highlights this potential devastating reality very well:

Source: YouTube

And coincidentally, it's related to the fashion industry.

Furthermore, companies such as Reebok and Adidas (OTCQX:ADDYY) already are experimenting with 3D printing their shoes.

The implications of onshore manufacturing for developed and developing nations cannot be overstated. The pandemic has hastened the desire from developed nations to onshore their manufacturing, which will further accelerate the creation of global intelligent manufacturing hubs that leverage AI and 3D printing (aka additive manufacturing) to produce their goods.

This very well could serve to exacerbate the wealth gap among nations if countries like China and India do not actively diversify their primary industries of employment.

So not only would onshoring manufacturing using AI and additive manufacturing on a mass production scale be cost effective, reduce environmental burdens, and be less time consuming, it also would serve to ensure national security. This set of compounding factors will almost certainly serve to further usher in the Fourth Industrial Revolution as manifested through Intelligent Manufacturing.

Concluding Thoughts

Intelligent Manufacturing, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and this installment of TGSGT are synonymous terms highlighting not only the revolution in manufacturing, but also the revolution in many other industries, including design, data analytics, AI and ML, and many others. While this installment is exciting and presently underway for developed nations, there also are implications for developing nations that must be considered by the political leaders of those countries.

At present, 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, seems to still be in its infancy, relative to what they may become in terms of technology and impact on our global society. With that being said, there's immense promise in this industry, and if the projections shared in this note regarding additive manufacturing are correct, then there will unequivocally be methods by which to invest in the industry in the very near future.

In closing, I hope this installment was an educational and valuable to you as it was enjoyable for me to create.

To that end, I want to say thank you for reading!

Follow me for future installments, and happy investing!

Analyst’s Disclosure: I am/we are long U, SNOW, LULU, SPLK, ADSK, AMZN, MSFT, FSLY, ESTC, DT. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.