MT Magazine January/February 2025

Additive, Digital, Generative: Emerged and Emerging Tech New technologies don’t appear with the speed and certainty of throwing a switch. They grow, evolve, and then seem to emerge.

BY GARY S. VASILASH CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

When you think of an “emerging” technology, it may evoke the idea of something developing and on the edge of breaking through, but the reality is a little more complicated than that. In the case of additive manufacturing (AM) – the equipment, the material, the processes – its emergence was more along the lines of something evolving. And while emerging technology may be thought of as breaking out of beta testing to the workaday world, AM has been around for decades.