Traditionally, manufacturers have relied on clay models to create three-dimensional images of what products on the drawing board might look like once they were constructed. Increasingly, however, manufacturers are making use of holograms or three-dimensional photographs. A typical holographic model of a car design contains 2 trillion characters of data on a three-dimensional image containing 500,000 photos recorded from different perspectives. Each photo is encoded on a laser, focused through a spherical lens, and burned onto a section of plastic a millimeter across. Once a company has integrated a holographic camera system into its existing computer network, creating holographic images of product designs takes only a fraction of the time that sculptors require to make clay models. Consequently, product developers using holographic techniques can now create more designs while utilizing fewer resources.

Why do technological improvements often reduce labor requirements for specific tasks, thereby allowing more labor to be used for other purposes?