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Envisioning the Desktop Fabricator
mkl writes "Yesterday I fantasized about a generator of matter. Not a laser plotter for carving 3d objects, but a device that will assemble any given object from its base, out of atoms. I was thinking about a device that can find its place under the roofs of all the people working on PCs all over the world. So I fantasize about it at work and what do I see in the Wired News newsletter? 'Any product, any shape, any size -- manufactured on your desktop! The future is the fabricator.' Heh."
1750 somewhere in northern england:
Peasent 1: "These new fangled factories , they can be made to produce anything! They'll make our hand made goods valueless! They could even use it to build parts for other factories!"
Peasent 2: "You're right Mr Ludd. Lets burn em all down!"
Ah - but, how would such an economy work? Think about it.
What service would you possibly sell? And what are the people paying you with, and why do you want it? You don't have to buy anything anymore, you can make it with your fab. Food, water, shelter, entertainment. all are costless. So why would you bother providing services to anyone in exchange for something?
Such a revolution could only lead to one of two inevitable systems:
1) The world becomes a Star-Trek like Utopia. poverty, hunger, and want are all eliminated almost overnight. People spend their daily lives pursuing things that challenge them intellectually , or work to further the species as a whole.
2) The world descends into utter chaos. Since everything is free, no one has any power over anyone any longer. Governments are thrown into disarray. Wars erupt. The whole species is nearly anniahlated in thermonuclear holocost.
In a world of *magic fabricators* and the free flow of ideas, our traditional economy would be thrown in to chaos. A good chaos I suspect. Releasing the means of production to the people will be an incredibly amazing thing.
The only problem is if these means are NOT released to the people, but controlled by companies. If we decend in to a world of DRM trousers, closed-source bicycles, patented turkey sandwiches, we are going to be an even more unhappy bunch of people.
The development of these technologies makes the pursuit of open and free exchange of ideas ever more pressing.
Desktop fabrication in a specific area, say software, is still pretty uncommon. Nevermind that program generators for cobal have been around for ages. A buddy who has been in IT since the only computers around were made of vacuum tubes has coupled his cobol generators with some program conversion utilities he wrote and now generates java programs based by specifying what they are supposed to do, rather than coding in java. One would think this sort of thing would be much more common in software.
An earlier
There have also been articles on hydroforming, foam in place construction, etc.
As for rapid prototype '3-D' printers, the articles author seems to miss two major uses of this technology. Form and fit prototypes, and most common, rapid pattern making for casting.
Yes, it's happening within specific industries, big time, but the general purpose desktop fab is far in the future.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
This would throw the world economy into chaos since any industry based on the manufacture of goods would suddenly be SOL.
Of course, corporations would try to "fix" this situation with DRM-encoded recipes. Anyone can make a shoe (with the help of open source), but if you want the new spectacular Nike shoe recipe you have to spend money...the recipe components are downloaded to your nanofactory and boom, you have the "cool" shoe.
What this would do would be to make branding more important that it already is. Emphasis will be placed on quality and style of the product instead of usability (which will be possible to gain for practically nothing). Stephenson thought that this would give rise to a whole new artisan class of the economy which I agree is possible.
There will be economic restabilization, and that's going to mean a lot of death and suffering for a lot of people. Since people kill each other over resources anything that creates a massive alteration in how resources (and thus people) are controlled will result in war, whether they can produce the weapons from nanofacotries or not . But you just wait, this is only a precursor to the real suffering.
The real danger of this, at least for me, isn't economic restabilization, but population control. With such a device food will be possible to create even more easily. No need for crops, cattle or any other "source" of food. All food can be manufactured for the simple cost of energy needed to combine the appropriate atoms.
Any ecologist will tell you that the one thing that limits a population is food. (lots of people debate this and say humans are different. That we control our population at will, however since the "invention" of agriculture the world's human population has done nothing but go up. When the world's population starts decreasing because of self-imposed limits, then I'll listening to how we determine our own carrying capacity). World hunger is a constant issue now, but if everyone in the world can eat, I assure you that the world's next generation will be even bigger. And if all of them can eat...well you see where I'm going.
The only thing limiting (and I use that word loosely) global population is the manufacture and distribution of food. If those limitations are taking away the world is soon going to be a very cramped and unlivable place.
And someone inserts a few strings in the instructions that generate a bubble of Cyanide gas around the object...
"The Borba"
And what happens when the local dictator seizes control of all the replicators to make weapons and food for his soldiers, and his friends?
Or the local religion declares them to be the tools of the devil?
Or the complexity of recreating a replicator causes the pattern to be corrupted?
Oh wait I forgot this is magic technology.
It never malfunctions and is always availible to anyone anywhere even if they are in such a back-assward place that hasn't even invented toothbrushes yet.
at least they should give credit. The idea of individual automated object fabrication has been around for several decades at least and was part of a series of influential science fiction stories. The stories even describe the different levels of technology: macroscopic automated manufacturing in the earlier versions, microscopic and atomic in later.
People at MIT didn't come up with the idea. In fact, they didn't come up with the hardware either: they took a bunch of off-the-shelf components (laser cutters, 3D scanner), put them together in the obvious and known way, and apparently are saying "look how smart we are". That is more a testament to the size of their bank account than to their smarts. Most people don't build those kinds of systems yet because they don't make economic sense yet. Once laser cutters and 3D scanners come down in price to the point of printers and digital cameras, then those combinations will be widely deployed.
When that happens, just be sure to give credit where credit is due: the original visionaries, and the people who created the technology that made it work: the engineers developing the laser cutters and the inventors coming up with organic semiconductors used in the ink jet printers used for custom electronics manufacturing.
Well, I'm sure there would be SERIOUS economic changes, but in order for this thing to function, it would need resources, which countries control.
This would either lead to war over resources, and a desire for people to control those resources. Think about that and what it leads to.
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....be a breach of someone's IP rights - on investions wuch as a "wheel manufatured using fabricating process".
You will be able to use a fabricator only after taking legal advice, that is until they are banned as "devices designed to faciliate IP theft".