Are We Ready for 3D Printing?

An unusual post by Rod Roddenberry in Huffington Post ponders whether society is sufficiently "evolved" to handle 3D printers. The proposition is that if 3D printing tech becomes widespread, then your shopping will be done online - the selected 3D models will be printed at home. The implication, according to Roddenberry, is that the changes to our "supply and supply marketplace" may be challenging. Roddenberry says:  

  

While the main purpose of the Star Trek replicator was to provide food, the concept of it meant that anyone could have anything at any time. If there is no material scarcity, then what possessions does one value? In fact, material possessions would lose their value. It would not matter what kind of clothes you wear, car you drive or how much you get paid. No one lacks the latest fashions or ever goes hungry. As long as they can afford a replicator and the supplies to operate it.

 

In short, needs are met without money exchanging hands.

 

How would society react if material possessions lost their value? In a world with replicators, real value would have to be found in who you are as a person and not in the status you derive from your wealth or possessions.

 

Perhaps this may be the case many years from now with incredibly advanced 3D printing gear, but for the future we foresee this will definitely not be the case. As much as we'd like to see such amazing technology, you'll still buy the 3D printer, the materials for building and probably the 3D models that you need to print. 

 

When the technology is so widespread that printers/replicators are everywhere and you need only cheap electricity to run them, then we should worry about societal changes. And they'll be huge, certainly. 

 

Via HuffingtonPost

3D Printing in a Post-Scarcity World

We're reading a short post on Singularity Hub that asks whether post-scarcity should be discussed more on their blog, due to a lack of awareness of the concept. We were certainly unaware of it - until we read their explanation: 

 

For people who don’t know what Post-Scarcity is, in a nutshell it entails everything being free (the abolition of money). Everything being free occurs due to superabundance of goods and services. Superabundance will be created via AI, nanotechnology (nano-assembly nanobots), and 3D printing. Things only possess monetary value due to scarcity. Monetary prices are required to restrict limited supplies in situations of scarcity. High-powered-AI will ensure our available resources are effectively limitless.

 

Interestingly, while 3D Printing has been likened to Star Trek replicators, this vision proposes that *society itself* will be rather Star Trek-like too, perhaps due to the presence of 3D printing tech. 

 

Obviously this is "a ways off in the future" to say the least! But as a thought experiment it's interesting to contemplate ultimate 3D printing in such a world. Maybe 3D printers of the future will be able to produce ultra hi-fidelity parts and entire functional objects, and maybe even truly reproduce themselves automatically. But you'd think there are two things they cannot make: raw material for printing and the energy to drive the system. But maybe that's not the case in this world. 

 

One could argue that unused objects could potentially be recycled back into raw material by "3D Breakers", the opposite of 3D printers: they could take objects apart and decompose them back into printable raw material. 3D Breakers could be produced as easily as 3D printers - just another object to make. Hence easy access to raw print material. 

 

What about energy? Energy will be produced by machines that harvest energy from our surrounding environments, either from minerals, wind, solar, geothermal or other sources. But in this post-scarcity world, the machines that do this will (presumably) also be easily produced on 3D printers. Thus energy should be easy to come by.

 

But could they print a good cheeseburger? 

 

Via Singularity Hub

3D Printers Will Destroy Wages?

An interesting discussion on the Open Manufacturing group asks the question: in the future when personal manufacturing equipment is widespread, what happens to the traditional consumer-manufacturer-wage earner cycle? In other words, if everyone can easily build things, what happens? Will good salaries disappear because there will be fewer buyers for traditionally manufactured items? Patrick Anderson asks: 

 

As the overhead to participate is reduced, the number of potential workers is increased.

  

As capital-outlay approaches zero, all peers will have the chance to reverse-bid for any job for which they have skills.

 

This will cause wages to fall to the minimum since there will then be nothing to stop consumers from hiring the lowest bidder.

 

P.M. Lawrence proposes the following scenario: 

 

Essentially, if people owned (enough of) their own resources, distinct wages would be a smaller component of what they would need and would get for a living, so that would become a non-issue. The first stage would act to provide them with the equivalent through wages, by assisting wages.

 

However, Kevin Carson says: 

 

Cheaper means of production means lower capital outlays to be amortized, a smaller revenue stream required to retire the outlay, and the ability to ride out longer periods of unemployment with little revenue without going in the hole from the cost of servicing debt. The increased number of needs that can be met cheaply through self-provisioning, as household-scale tools become affordable, will also reduce short-term cash flow needs and increase workers' ability to ride out short periods of unemployment -- and hence their ability to walk away from the bargaining table.

 

We're definitely not sure how this will play out. However, we are certain *something* will play out over the next decade. 

Hive45 On 3D Printing

Beer drinking Australian futurists Tristan Grace and Nathan Waters speculate about the future of 3D printing on their podcast, episode 24. They feel that the ultimate goal of 3D printing is in fact very small: nanotechnology. In other words, that's printing individual atoms and molecules in the right arrangements to achieve virtually any conceivable object. 

 

They say that right now we're "watching 3D printers grow like we watched computers grow when were kids". Today they print plastic, stainless steel, but how long until we print circuits? Once that happens, consumer goods become possible. They propose "printing an iPad", but realize that by the time they could do that, the iPad will be considered "quaint". 

 

They foresee 3D printers with ever increasing resolution, theoretically all the way to atoms: "molecules will be the biggest thing". Of course, they realize there will be very significant societal implications that are difficult to predict. 

 

Best idea: Eventually "physical objects become software, and that's when the Internet really joins everything." Then the atomic economy meets the software economy.

 

Via Vimeo (start around 13 mins in)

Fabbing as a Futuristic Technology?

Melanie Swan, the principal of MS Futures Group, presents an inspiring list of eleven technologies that she believes will dramatically affect the future. Included in her list are such technologies as: biotechnology, nanotech, inexpensive access to outer space, virtual reality and a whole lot on artificial intelligence. Hidden in her list is fabbing, on which she postulates:

Ultimately, we would like to do a lot of things, including have a home appliance, a molecular synthesizer as shown here on a counter-top, supplied by electricity, water and element canisters that would make items on-demand: food, clothing from personally designed items or from designs found on the web.

This is precisely the vision we at Fabbaloo believe in. It's not here quite yet, but all the pieces are beginning to come together.

Via AcceleratingFuture