Just Slightly Ahead of Our Time

jameshowison writes: "We're doing a presentation at the O'Reilly P2P conference next week on what happens when you merge the technologies of P2P with those of 3D printers or 'Fabbers'. If you thought the record companies were pissed off, wait till manufacturers realise that P2P will affect them too!" Yum, tasty wheat.

Comments

Been there, done that

[joss]

I wrote a lot of software for this stuff, (responsible for several patents too, eg http://home.att.net/~castleisland/up10/up10_12.htm _ and others before I realised that SW patents are evil.....)

It was dead fun working at 3dsystems though. I wrote a translator so I could grab cool looking VRML models off the net and print them out as solid objects. As far as I know, I was the first person to do this. Fun to come to work in the morning and have a vat full of models of the Enterprise waiting for you.

Manafacturers don't have to hang up their boots just yet though. The current machines generally print in a single material, plastic, wax, or some such. It will be a while before you go to the mechanic and he prints out a new transmission instead of ordering one from Ford. However already, you can create a cast and injection mold a small run of parts, accuracy is around 1/1000 of an inch on the better machines. Currently takes around 10 hours of so for a 10 inch cubed model.

However, the technology will improve. An auto-parts company *will* download the part instead of ordering it. Eventually manafacturing will be an information business too. This won't do humanity a blind bit of good until we move over to a post capitalist society though. Capitalism is a good mechansim for efficient distribution of scarce resources but when wealth is in the form of information, capitalism only works by enforcing false scarcity on the information.

Re:Been there, done that

[walnut]

Manafacturers don't have to hang up their boots just yet though. The current machines generally print in a single material, plastic, wax, or some such. It will be a while before you go to the mechanic and he prints out a new transmission instead of ordering one from Ford. However already, you can create a cast and injection mold a small run of parts, accuracy is around 1/1000 of an inch on the better machines. Currently takes around 10 hours of so for a 10 inch cubed model.

However, the technology will improve. An auto-parts company *will* download the part instead of ordering it. Eventually manafacturing will be an information business too.

Cool that you wrote the stuff. That's gotta be some pretty cool code. However, manufacturing will probably not make that kind of switch *ANY* time soon.

Manufactured parts come in a variety of materials formed in a variety of ways. Not all parts can be built in any one specific way - not because of the cost - but because of the material structure, the stresses which the material will experience, and so on. Casting is cool for engine blocks, but I would hate to see it used for body panels.

Different parts not only have different thicknesses of materials, but different structural makeups. Pressing a metal weakens and strengthens it vastly different from stamping, forging, or casting. Sheet alumininum will respond quite differently to outside forces than say, a part spun from aluminum bar stock.

I guess, that plastic parts have a better chance of being usefully replicated, but traditionally the processes used (injection blow molding, rotational molding, extrusions, and so on) are usually used to produce the original product because it is simple, easy and quick. Ten hours to build a shampoo bottle, or a half a dozen legos is unacceptable when the manufacturing process for producing them turns out hundreds or thousands in that amount of time.

While I agree, there will be an increased role of these prototype modelers in the coming decade, the replicators from star trek are - well - not. This story is FUD.

"Desktop Manufacturing"

[Jeremy Lee]

Ha. "Fabbers". Good name.

I'd come to pretty much the same conclusions over the last few months. I've been talking to engineer friends about the machines that sinter metal powders with lasers, the UV-sensitive polymers, and the starch bubble-jet printer, and the possible combination of them with the various plastic electronics components still being developed.

I applied Moores Law (probably not directly relevant, but a good bechmark nonetheless) to the current state-of-the-art, which is a washing machine sized device that can sinter plastic powder. A place here in town will take your CAD files and return a plastic part for about US$180 a pop.

I calculated we'll have microwave-sized 'fabbers' as a common household appliance in a little less than 15 years.

That means us early apopters will have expensive 'hobby' kits in just less than ten.

The main action will remain in commercial prototyping up until then. It will probably be a common commercial practise in about five years.

Right now the only users are the commercial and educational 'early-adopters' with specific needs that are filled by the fairly primitive tech we have now. Automated milling machines are currently a far superior tech if you want to do metal, for example.

Of course, the very existence of these machines is likely to push the curve forward by an unpredictable amount.

Just consider: fifteen years from now, well look back on all those jokes about ordering things over the internet, ("how do you fit it down the wires! Ha, ha!") and not get it.

The main obstacles are as follows:
* Sintering (melting powders together) has precision limits caused by heat transfer in the material.
* Light-sensitive polymers are still rather nasty chemicals. They're also quite brittle.
* Plastic electronics need to become available in dye/powder form. This will take a while. (And they will never beat silicon for high-performance tasks)
* You need infrastructure to ship the raw materials. They don't just magically materialize in the print-head, you know.
* Recycling all these things is going to become an issue.

But, yes. 'Fabbers' are another great step down the path. Open Hardware, here we come. (And the advantage is, it's easier to design a plastic toy than your average piece of software)

If you want a good historical analogy, you can't go past printing. From Gutenberg, to desktop publishing, to the web.

Can't wait.

I think you are thinking too small

[afrazer]

What we are really talking about here is changing every kind of property into intellectual property. Once this can be done at the molecular or atomic level, then you can make gold, heroin, a ferrari, or any other desirable item out of your garbage, mud, sewage, etc. It would render things like recycling completely obsolete. It would also render the ownership, buying and selling of material goods completely obsolete. Every electron, proton, and neutron would be worth the same amount because all would have the same utility.

I think you are also missing the biological implications. Today, when we want to fix a problem with your body, we have to first understand the problem, then coax your body into healing it with its immune system or with chemical help. But if we could just move your molecules around, we could just take a "snapshot" of you when you were a healthy 18 year old, and then, years later, rearrange your decrepit 85 year old body, except the brain, to the original configuration. This would be much more dramatic than cloning. You could duplicate or modify yourself with great flexibility, and would not have to wait for the product to "grow up" - while we don't understand certain mysteries of life, I bet a bunch of electrons, protons, and neutrons configured just like me would be, well, just like me. PEOPLE might ultimately be transformed into intellectual property.

There's also the military angle. Those who read Ender's Game may remember the "Molecular Detachment Device", which could undo molecular bonds. Just like you could turn a pile of garbage into a person or a tank, you could turn a tank or a person (or a country) into a pile of garbage. Perhaps the analogy is really Calvin & Hobbes's transmogrifyer. Of course, "they" could just turn their pile of garbage right back into a tank, and this time also turn YOU into extra missiles for them to use, so this would quickly spin completely out of control.

Of course, the ability to do this at the atomic level is very far from the fabbers we are talking about. I doubt it will come any time soon.

Very much ahead of our time.

[Donald Kerr]

One of my girlfriends works at a rapid prototyping workshop, so I've seen some of these "fabbers" in action. In my experience, I really can't see the manufacturing industry are going to be too worried by them. Fabricator machines are useful for prototyping of products, but they really aren't suitable for the production of the finished product.

Fabricators are slow. Very slow.

There's a limited range of materials you can use in them - the idea of a Rolex fab mentioned in the article is a fairy tale. The fabricator can't just magically produce gold and diamonds and incorporate them into a shiny new replica Rolex Oyster. Fabricators just aren't designed for making luxury goods like this, or for making anything which requires a non-trivial variety of materials.

Basic economics tells you that fabricators aren't a threat to the manufacturing industry. Real manufacturers benefit hugely from economies of scale, allowing them to buy raw materials in bulk and use faster and more efficient machinery. By trying to make things yourself, you lose these economies of scale. It wouldn't be worth your while trying to cheat Bic out of a few pence by trying to make your own ballpoint pens. The industrial revolution happened for a good reason!

Items produced by a fabricator don't have the durability of properly manufactured items.

There are countless other reasons why fabricator technology isn't a threat to manufacturing industry. This presentation is just jumping on the peer to peer bandwagon, but it really isn't realistic. Only when we have Star Trek-esque replicator technology will this sort of thing approach viability, but I am sure that replicators will also prove to be financially unviable.

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Not very convincing reasons

[OlympicSponsor]

"Fabricators are slow. Very slow."

Computers used to be slow too.

"There's a limited range of materials you can use in them..."

Most consumer goods are made of a limited range of materials as well. Nearly all children's toys, for example, are plastic and/or wood. Besides, why couldn't I fab myself a VCR minus those parts that need to be "handmade" and then install those myself later?

"Fabricators just aren't designed for..."

Here's your basic flaw. No, fabbers aren't designed for that NOW. But what about 20/50/100/150 years from now?

"By trying to make things yourself, you lose these economies of scale. It wouldn't be worth your while trying to cheat Bic out of a few pence by trying to make your own ballpoint pens."

This reads like FUD from the manufacturing industry, circa 2101. Sure, I might lose economies of scale (although dirt, air, water, wood and sunshine are all pretty cheap--not to mention the fact that I might buy my materials from a co-op or something)--but what do I GAIN? I can make a device that works EXACTLY how I design it. I can download Joe's design for a water heater, tweak some parameters and have my own custom machine that exactly meets my needs. The point of fabbers isn't saving money on pens. It's control over the devices in your life. It's also about opening the field of design (if not manufacturing) to everyone, just like the Internet opened up the fields of music, writing and programming.

"Items produced by a fabricator don't have the durability of properly manufactured items."

This almost solely a function of the materials used--which could easily change in the future.

Honestly, your whole post reads like some intelligent-but-fuddy-duddy from the early 70's explaining why this new-fangled "desktop publishing" won't work. "Sure, a computer and a printer are useful for creating a manuscript--but who wants to read dot-matrix?"
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