Above photo: AutoDesk.com.
Economic Theorist Jeremy Rifkin Explains How AI Software Driven 3D Printing/Additive Manufacturing is “Tariff-Free”.
And Upending Ocean, Air, and Land Transport.
Unlike physical goods produced by global companies and subject to tariffs in world trade, global companies and high tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) utilizing AI directed 3D printing/additive manufacturing can share digital software files for their product lines with local distributors at near zero marginal cost around the world. Distributors can then print out the items and deliver them to consumers without paying tariffs.
And that changes everything.
On April 2nd, the White House announced that the administration will issue a reciprocal tariff “number” to various nations that the US argues “represents their tariffs” obligation, in what’s shaping up as the great geopolitical tariff war of the 21st century. This initiative will ultimately fail in light of a bold new technological revolution entering onto the world stage that’s tariff-free and changing the very nature of commerce and trade.
While nations around the world are fighting with one another in a vicious geopolitical tariff war which threatens to pull the global economy apart in real time, a game-changing AI-directed Third Industrial Revolution is quickly moving onto the global stage, making tariffs obsolete on a vast number of physical goods — with notable exceptions including fossil fuels, agricultural products, rare earth elements, and wood and stone products. It’s called 3D printing/additive manufacturing. This Third Industrial Revolution platform is upending two centuries of “subtractive manufacturing” which went hand-in-hand with the First and Second Industrial Revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries and replacing it with “additive manufacturing” in the 21st century and, by doing so, neutering the geopolitical era. The global tariff war will only speed the transition in the years ahead.
Bringing together AI and additive manufacturing has upped the speed of transitioning into a mature Third Industrial Revolution. Artificial intelligence is being used to establish more sophisticated additive manufacturing models by identifying defects, optimizing designs, including the more efficient use of feedstock and reducing the cost of manufacturing, all aspects of improving product quality. Although under the radar screen, the use of AI in 3D printing/additive manufacturing is the core of a Third Industrial Revolution paradigm transformation.
Companies are bypassing tariffs by sending digital software files of 3D printed products at near zero marginal cost to vendors who then print out and distribute the smart products to clients and customers. Unlike physical goods, the transfer of digital software files used in additive manufacturing are not subject to tariffs. This shifts the zeitgeist from the “seller-buyer markets” of the first and second industrial revolutions to the “provider-user networks” of the emerging Third Industrial Revolution, and adds an additional dimension alongside conventional port operations. Establishing smart AI-directed additive manufacturing operations at ports to pour out 3D printed goods for transfer to truck and rail delivery would provide an additional time saving element to move products quickly to end users.
The economic implications are enormous and far reaching. In 2024, the global logistics cost of cargo transport via ocean, air, and land was estimated to be $12.8 trillion dollars, or 11.6% of the $110 trillion dollar GDP that year. On the upside, partially avoiding ocean, air, and land logistics that go along with the movement of physical products all around the planet means dramatically reducing the cost of doing business as well as the price attached to the sale of goods and services for much of the human family across every continent. There is also the time element to consider. As early as 2015, Deloitte was reporting that companies using 3D printing can reduce lead times by 40-90%. In dire situations like the one that faced the global community during the COVID-19 pandemic when vital supplies were stalled in ocean, air, and land shipping, 3D printing could have saved time and lives. Of equal importance, “streamlining the ports” and reducing the cost of ocean, air, and land freight logistics infrastructure and accompanying warehouses and port facilities eliminates as much as 11% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Then too, a warming global climate emerging from the emission of fossil fuels has triggered a rewilding of the hydrosphere with devastating spring floods, unprecedented summer droughts, heatwaves and wildfires, and catastrophic fall hurricanes and typhoons, crippling ocean, air, and land traffic all over the world and undermining logistics and supply chains at an ever increasing pace, stranding world trade and endangering our human family. That said, the transition to a 3D printing/additive manufacturing paradigm is all but inevitable if we are to maintain a buoyant global trade.
The First and Second Industrial Revolutions of the 19th and 20th century were based on subtractive manufacturing models. Subtractive manufacturing shaves material to create the final products resulting in considerable waste and a high entropy bill in the production process. The additive manufacturing technology of the Third Industrial Revolution pours out products layer by layer, creating objects with near zero-waste.
For example, the 3D printing of a house begins with a computer program that develops a digital model of the building. The 3D printer is a robot that uses a feedstock such as clay, sand, limestone, metakaolin, cellulose, and recycled construction waste. The 3D printer then prints out layers arranged in rows designated by the software, pouring out the entire structure in as little as 24 hours.
Consider the Italian architect Mario Cucinella who poured out the first clay house sourced entirely from locally available clay soils using 3D printing. The eco-sustainable structure was poured by the printer in 200 hours, with little waste or scraps generated in the construction. Cucinella said that what motivated the firm was “the need for sustainable homes. . . and the great global issue of the housing emergency that will have to be faced – particularly in the context of the urgent crises generated, for example, by large migrations or natural disasters.”
No less important is the new commercial exchange model that goes hand-in-hand with the manufacturing and distribution of 3D printed goods. Cucinella can shift his business plan from a “seller-buyer market” to a “provider-user network” by uploading and instantaneously sending the software instructions by computer at “near” zero marginal cost to any part of the world, allowing developers onsite to print out buildings on a just-in-time and just-in-need basis and pay a license fee to the provider for each building downloaded.
The race out of subtractive manufacturing in the Second Industrial Revolution and into additive manufacturing in the Third Industrial Revolution is coming online at warp speed. Case in point: workers in Japan recently built a new train station with additive manufacturing in just 6 hours, which would’ve taken two months and twice the cost using Second Industrial Revolution subtractive manufacturing technology.
Additive manufacturing in global provider-user networks comes with a plethora of additional advantages, including eliminating bloated inventories while continuously updating product lines. This is an example of the vast changes afloat as a fledgling Third Industrial Revolution makes possible a new economic exchange paradigm that takes the economy from globalization to glocalization.
3D printing/additive manufacturing is on an exponential growth curve, similar to solar and wind technology. A growing number of Fortune 500 companies are pioneering the use of 3D printed technologies including Airbus, Siemens, Volkswagen, Boeing, Medtronic, General Electric, Caterpillar, BASF, and SAP. In 2025, SAP became the highest valued company in Europe and a global leader in 3D printing/additive manufacturing. While global companies are fast switching over to the new AI-driven additive manufacturing model, the technology favors high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) engaged in a rich latticework of economic exchanges across industries and continents, avoiding the steep cost of ocean, air, and land transportation and logistics and tariffs.
There are currently over 1,750 fab-labs–equipped with AI directed 3D printing/additive manufacturing facilities operating in 90 countries–that offer 3D printing services mostly centered in universities. This is the highly distributed Third Industrial Revolution afoot that the Gen Z, Alpha, and Beta generations–embedded in high-tech SMEs and cooperatives–will likely be taking to every corner of the planet in the next two decades and that favors a deep democratization of economic life along with a dramatic reduction in global warming gases and the deterioration of our planetary hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere.
It was just 8 years ago that ING, one of Europe’s leading banks, ran the numbers and forecasted that 3D printing could diminish global trade by 40% by 2040. Speaking to the disruptive nature of 3D printing in the economy, ING suggests a scenario in which “the rate of investment in 3D printers will double after five years and the rate of investment in traditional machines will fall by a third after 10 years.” By this reckoning, AI directed 3D printing/additive manufacturing reaches parity with the subtractive manufacturing model of the Second Industrial Revolution by 2040.
The World Bank weighed in on the prospects of 3D printing, suggesting that its growth and impact on the global marketplace will likely be tied to product weight, suggesting that “the positive effect of 3D printing on trade decreases with product weight and could even reverse for bulky products. These results suggest that while the technology appears to boost trade on average, it may be used to produce goods closer to consumers for products with high transport costs.” What’s lost here is that 3D printed products are going to be cheaper regardless of whether the product is low weight or high weight. The important thing to remember is that AI directed software can send additive manufacturing digital files for any product–anywhere in the world–at a moment’s notice and at near zero marginal cost via the world wide web without paying tariffs.
Ironically, what’s bringing manufacturing home to America–and for that matter, every other country is not tariffs, but rather the distributed nature of AI directed 3D printing/additive manufacturing that eases out of the subtractive manufacturing models of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions and into the AI driven additive manufacturing modality of the Third Industrial Revolution.
3D printed additive construction is scaling all over the world. For example, Dubai seeks to make 25% of its buildings 3D printed by 2030. Saudi Arabia has announced that it will inject $500 billion for planning and construction of 3D printed buildings from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia and international investors.
Wind turbines, solar panels, car parts, headphones, surgical instruments, architectural models, footwear, practical visual effects and costuming in films, instruments, art restoration, prosthetics, aerospace parts, emergency supplies, aligners and dentures in dentistry, and eyeglasses, are just a few of the many new product lines that are being fabricated with 3D printing technology.
High-tech SMEs pursuing 3D printed/additive technologies fundamentally reduce their upfront research, procurement, and marketing costs of introducing incubator projects and start-up companies allowing them to quickly scale globally at near zero marginal cost and rewire at a moment’s notice while avoiding tariffs. This gives SMEs a distinct advantage over the centralized, vertically integrated global companies that framed the First and Second Industrial Revolution. The long and the short of it is that high-tech SMEs in a glocal economy are far more agile than giant global corporations and can adapt more quickly to changes brought on particularly by climate-related disruptions, especially as they affect supply and logistics chains.
Now, at the tail end of the Second Industrial Revolution, it’s important to note that 500 highly centralized global companies make up one-third of the GDP of the world with revenues exceeding over $41 trillion and an employment pool of less than 65 million workers out of a 3.5 billion-person planetary workforce. And while 44% of the human race today live below the poverty level with an average daily compensation of $6.85, the ten wealthiest individuals on Earth own $1.9 trillion in combined wealth.
With the fixed cost plummeting and the marginal cost falling in 3D printed product lines across many sectors of the economy, accompanied by the delivery of tariff-free software in provider-user networks around the world, it’s no surprise that high-tech SMEs are scaling. In the European Union, SMEs already constitute 99.8% of all non-financial businesses, providing 65.2% of all employment in the non-financial business sector, and account for 52% of the total GDP. SMEs make up 99.9% of businesses in the United States, employ nearly half of the workforce and contribute 45% of the GDP. Small and medium-sized enterprises make up roughly 90% of all businesses globally, and they contribute significantly to employment and economic growth, accounting for more than 50% of employment worldwide.
A skeptic might argue that as countries become aware of the dramatic shift from seller-buyer markets to provider-user networks and the near zero marginal cost in sharing digital files in a glocalized world, there will likely be attempts to “put the finger in the dike” and place tariffs on 3D printed digital software coming into their countries, but to little avail, for the simple reason that small and medium-sized enterprises are ubiquitous, the market is there and there’s no going back.
While there’s growing concern that geopolitics is rearing its head once again in the 21st century with nations fighting one another in an increasingly dangerous geopolitical environment, in reality what we’re experiencing is the death knell of the geopolitics that accompanied the First and Second Industrial Revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. A more glocalized “bioregional governance” is coming of age with the onslaught of 3D printing and high-tech SMEs in provider-user networks that criss-cross the world.
Bioregional governance is not an option, but rather a lifeline. Our human family is beginning to realize–although late in the game–that we live on a water planet rather than a land planet and that the hydrosphere is the prime mover that makes possible the lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere, and a life affirming existence for every creature. The turning point came on December 7th 1972 as the Apollo 17 spacecraft was journeying to the moon. One of the astronauts took out a small hand camera and turned around to take a quick snapshot of our planet from 29,400 kilometers out in space. The photo, which was shared across the planet in what can only be called the most important wake-up call in history, changed our very thinking about our little orb in the universe. Our human family has long believed that we live on a land planet with all its verdant shades of green. What the photo showed is that in reality we live on a blue water planet with only a green veneer atop. On August 24, 2021, the European Space Agency introduced the term “Planet Aqua”. America’s National Aeronautic and Space Agency (NASA), on their website concurred saying “looking at our Earth from space, it’s obvious that we live on a water planet”.
Now, in the wake of a massive emission of global warming gases into the atmosphere brought on by the extraction and deployment of fossil-fuel energies that propelled the subtractive First and Second Industrial Revolution infrastructures and the accompanying entropy bill of a global warming climate, our planetary hydrosphere is rewilding. We are experiencing blockbuster winter snows, massive spring floods, prolonged summer droughts, deadly heatwaves and wildfires, and catastrophic autumn hurricanes and typhoons, wreaking havoc on ecosystems and destroying human infrastructure all around the world. Our scientists now tell us that we are at the tipping point of a mass extinction event that could see the demise of half the species inhabiting the planet in the lifetime of today’s babies. The last great extinction occurred 65 million years ago. The lesson is learning how to adapt to the planetary hydrosphere rather than adapting the hydrosphere to our whims and understanding that the waters are not a resource but rather a life source and a shared commons that allows all forms of life to flourish.
The new realization that we live on a water planet rather than a land planet is eye-opining and suggests a rebranding of our abode in the universe with a second formal name of Planet Aqua in all of our governing jurisdictions–nations, regions, and cities–embedded in constitutions, codes, regulations, and standards as a constant reminder that our species and our fellow creatures are of the waters and to which we are indebted for our very existence
Both the First and Second Industrial Revolution infrastructures, powered largely by fossil fuels, regarded nature as raw materials to be extracted and efficiently exploited to advance utilitarian ends exclusively for our human family. To this end, the First and Second Industrial Revolutions of the 19th and 20th century were engineered to be centralized and vertically integrated to create economies of scale and required massive financial capital and expansive geopolitical and military commitments to secure their uninterrupted operations. The Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure, by contrast, is designed to be “distributed” rather than centralized, scales laterally rather than vertically, and is bioregional in impact. The reason is, climate disasters do not respect political boundaries, but rather impact ecosystems. This reality is already forcing governing regions and nation states to cross political boundaries and establish formal extensions of governance to include bioregional governance to oversee commonly shared ecosystems. Distributed governance across shared ecosystems goes part in parcel with distributed AI-directed 3D printing/additive manufacturing.
Bioregional economies are becoming increasingly viable and when coupled with 3D printing/additive manufacturing usher in bioregional governance, making the new Third Industrial Revolution era both distributed and glocal. Not surprising, bioregional governance is already taking off and scaling in countries around the world. America is home to two bioregional governances–the US Pacific Northwest states and five Canadian provinces and territories have established the Pacific Northwest Economic Region to share and steward their ecosystems as a governing commons. As well, the eight US states and two Canadian provinces that abut the five Great Lakes of North America have established the conference of The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers to steward their ecosystems as a commons.
The term “distributed” took flight when Tim Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web to allow anyone to share information with everyone else from the edges without asking for permission or paying a fee to agents at the center, opening the door to a vast new economic opportunity. High tech small and medium-sized enterprises sharing 3D printed software in provider-user networks and cooperatives take Berners-Lee’s vision to its completion.
The distributed Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure transformation is already at hand. 4 billion human beings equipped with cell phones operating at near zero marginal cost are already engaged across a glocal distributed communication internet. The communication internet is quickly merging with a digitized electricity internet powered by solar and wind electricity. Local and national businesses, homeowners, neighborhood associations, farmers and ranchers, civil society organizations, and government agencies are generating solar and wind electricity to power their operations. Surplus green electricity, in turn, is being distributed across an increasingly integrated, digitized, and soon transcontinental electricity internet using data, analytics, and algorithms to share renewable electricity as we currently share news, knowledge, and entertainment on the communications internet.
Now these two digitized internets are converging with a mobility and logistics internet made up of millions of distributed electric vehicles and soon hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles powered by solar and wind-generated electricity from the electricity internet. In the coming decades, these modes of transport will be increasingly semi-autonomous and even autonomous on road, rail, water, and in air corridors, and managed by big data, analytics, and algorithms as we do with the electricity and communications internets.
These three internets are just now converging with a fourth digitized water internet, comprised of tens of thousands and soon hundreds of millions of distributed as well as decentralized smart cisterns and other water catchment systems, harvesting rainwater where it falls in the neighborhoods and communities where people live and work, and storing it in aquifers and water microgrids. Then, using big data, analytics, and algorithms, water is delivered across smart pipe systems, providing fresh water for drinking, bathing, cleaning, industrial uses, and irrigation of agricultural fields, while also recycling wastewater back to aquifers for repurification and reuse.
These four internets will increasingly share a continuous flow of data and analytics, creating algorithms that synchronize communication, the generation, storage, and distribution of green electricity, the movement of zero-emission autonomous transport across regions, continents, and global time zones, and the harvesting and purification of rainwater for human consumption, by industry and for the irrigation of farmland.
This ensemble of internets will also be continuously fed data from distributed Internet of Things (IoT) sensors which monitor activity in real time, from ecosystems, lakes, rivers, and streams, agricultural fields, warehouses, road systems, factory production lines, and especially from the residential and commercial building stock, allowing humans to more effectively navigate day-to-day economic activity and social life.
The shift from a centralized infrastructure to a distributed infrastructure that belongs to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of human beings marks a vast democratization of economic, social, and political life.
The additive manufacturing revolution is booming around the world and boasts trade associations on every continent made up of high-tech AI-driven small and medium sized companies. Trade shows are overflowing with attendees year round. Universities everywhere are sprouting new interdisciplinary innovation hubs promoting additive manufacturing incubators and start up companies, preparing a younger generation of AI savvy students to take the reins of an emerging Third Industrial Revolution.
In short, the laterally integrated additive manufacturing revolution of the 21st century is unstoppable and will likely surpass and replace the vertically integrated Second Industrial Revolution platform well before mid-century. The reason is unlike the Second Industrial Revolution, the lead time and fixed cost of Third Industrial Revolution AI directed research, development, and prototyping, and the marginal cost of production and distribution of product lines is so much faster, cheaper, and adaptive and comes with a far smaller entropic footprint.
Here’s the bottom line. While the First and Second Industrial Revolution infrastructures were designed more to reward a few over the many in a zero-sum game, the Third Industrial revolution infrastructure is engineered in a way that, if allowed to operate as it is intended, will distribute economic power far more broadly, fostering a democratization of economic life.
Strangling high-tech SMEs with tariffs will fail in the end in a more distributed and increasingly glocalized world. The breakthrough is already here and will not be deterred.
Jeremy Rifkin is an economic theorist and the best-selling author of twenty-three books translated into thirty-five languages, including The Zero Marginal Cost Society. His new book Planet Aqua: Rethinking Our Home in the Universe has just been published in all the major word languages. Mr. Rifkin is a principal architect of the European Union’s and China’s economic plans for transitioning into a Third Industrial Revolution to address climate change and he served as an advisor to Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer on the U.S. infrastructure plan. He is listed among the top ten most influential economic thinkers in The Huffington Post’s global survey of “The World’s Most Influential Voices.”