Slashdot Mirror
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."
.. what would you make ?
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Something similar (utilizing some kind of 3-d inkjet printer with hot, liquid plastics für ink) was presented in the mid-1990s at some trade fair I went to. Matter of fact, I think I have also seen these on TV, building evolving robots (not joking, cannot remember the context, thought)
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
Yeah, you use a hack to capture the instructions for atomically building the latest gadget or toy and then everyone shares it over bittorrent.
How is this idea different from replicators on Star Trek anyway?
Not to troll, but vaporware it too concrete a term for this technology. Emperors may be impressed, as well as Marketing people.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
...once created, throw the entire world economy into chaos? Of course I am referring to not a simple fab as the article is talking about, but what it is insinuating at, a device capable of assemling things at the atomic level.
Think about it.. once you buy such a device, no matter *what* the initial cost, you could use it to make almost anything... including, other devices!
Such a device would make physical goods value-less. The only things of value any longer would be services and artistic creations.
Then again, this all sounds way too good to be true. We're not evolved enough as a sepcies to have that kind of tech - think also - everyone instantly has access to unlimited weapons. Great.
We would kill ourselves off as a species within days.
Then again maybe that's not a bad thing.
Engines of Creation: http://www.foresight.org/EOC/
Not everyone thinks this is only a dream. Of course, many people think these people are crazy.
But one must reach a bit beyond the accepted if one is to achieve something greater than the norm.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
http://www.bathsheba.com To start building a model from my 3D file, the design is built up, one layer at a time, from steel powder held in place by a laser-activated binder. ... This produces a porous steel part that is about 60% dense. ... The model is heated, the stems are dipped in a crucible of molten bronze, and capillary action causes the bronze to wick throughout the piece. Counterintuitive to say the least, but apparently it works very well.
at a speed of 1 billion atoms per second takes about 20 million years.
Slow, slow.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Doesn;t that signify a flaw in the concept of economics rather than material science?
Imagine the day when robots do most of the work.. Building, manufacturing, construction, planting.. Who can beat a machine specialized at a task?
Remember the GM workers in Detriot replaced by machines on the assembly lines?
At some point when the world is all SERVICE oriented.. because none actually produces anything.. Then all the people who HAVE money will be KINGS and QUEENS. Make sense?
I think so.
Smile.
http://www.bathsheba.com/ it is way cool.
How about circumvention of the whole bank robbery. Just make some money.
It strikes me that although we may have mass consumer 3-d plotter type stuff that can create objects out of certain substances, or maybe a combination of a few materials, atom-by-atom assembly is going to be a long way off, if ever. At the very least it will require very advanced nanobots.
But what is more likely is biological printers that grow stuff out of cells. It will be much easier to let the cells do the work of reproducing and just induce specialization into a lattice of pre-grown tissue through chemical infusion.
This wouldn't be home genetic engineering, just creation of specialized tissue from a batch of pre-cooked cells of a fixed genome. It could be some other organism's genome, plant or animal or something specially designed for object replication, or even, your own...
So in 50 years or so, you or a doctor may be "printing" out a new patch of skin for your tatoo removal or a new seed for a lost tooth, or high follical count skin for your balding head. Or a tentacle to help you type faster. Or, well, I don't really want to even get into where elective plastic surgery is likely to go in the next decade with reguard to certain less seemly "self-enhancements" people might be inclined to make, nevermind the concept of "home bio-generation kits."
It's truly scary stuff -- let's just say tomorrow's anime conventions may not require costumes for the truly devoted fans.
Someone had to do it.
A class I am working with at Brown University is working with 3d scanners in conjunction with 3d fabricators, such as were discussed here (ABS plastic, wax, plaster, etc). The 3d copier idea seems funny, but as we've found out it's not nearly so simple. We have a blog about our work, if you are interested, and a general webpage too.
It was liver. Kidneys are very, very complicated. Whereas livers are merely very complicated. To produce functional kidney, you'd have to reproduce a complex three dimensional plumbing arrangement that's basically natures reverse-osmosis desalination plant. Liver, on the other hand, is more like a coffee filter that happens to also manufacture digestive fluids, and is relatively simple in comparison.
Lawsuits? How about asking yourself: how complicated are the atoms of the usual variety of brisant explosives? Answer: not much. Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen. You can get these elements from electrolysis of water (H2, O2), from the air (O2, N2), from common household chemicals like ammonia (NH4), and finally from the messy molecules of bulk items like common sugar.
... except that it will go on every goddamn day.
....
So, with a deskfabber in hundreds of thousands of bedrooms owned by mischievious teenagers, you'll have the world's largest arms race in a jiffy. After the C4 specs are posted to the Internet, at least tens of thousands of these little fuckers will have tons of C4 made within 30 days. It'll be a July Fourth to remember
(If I had had a deskfabber, I would have made explosives. I'm sure at least 50% of the hands-on techies here on Slashdot would have done the same.)
The endless July Fourth would go on until someone notices that clever little teenager, taking his fabber down to the river, just below the runoff from the tailings from that old uranium mine
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
People with nothing to do are the worst kind of people. Remember what it was like in high school? All the stupid little games about who was popular? Now imagine the entire Earth being like that.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
My fear is that many, many companies will rightfully feel threatened by this concept. It would allow us to make pretty much anything for the cost of the raw materials (very cheap). We'd quickly see things lize open source food, clothing, computers, everything. This would (understandably) destroy most industries as they currently stand. I hate to sound paranoid, but they will not let this happen.
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin