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The Beckoning Promise of Personal Fabrication
posys noted an interesting talk from Neil Gershenfeld's called "The beckoning promise of personal fabrication". It's a TED talk which I've found greatly enjoyable in the past, and is worth your time, assuming you have 20 minutes to see something really neat.
If you are interested, you can also return to the original TED page.
RE: how long till whackjob's start making weapons in them?
don't worry. This stuff will be illegal as soon as it is available because it will kill the revenue stream of too many rich people. And thanks to "the Shrub", only the terrorists will have access to this technology.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Stereolithography machines aren't magic. They're a useful way of making plastic shapes in small quantities, expensively. But that's about it. Much of the same work can be done with a CNC milling machine. Roland makes some nice little desktop CNC mills. They also make 3D "scanners" which work by touch, carefully servoing a tiny stylus with a phonograph pickup like device over the surface of a 3D object. So you can copy existing objects.
All this stuff works fine, but it's a niche market. It's mostly used by people designing small, handheld devices.
Making plastic parts by injection molding, vacuum forming, or hot stamping is incredibly cheap and fast compared to building them up with a stereolithography machine. Making, say, a keyboard key in an injection molding press costs maybe a penny. Making one in a stereolithography machine will cost about $40. Yes, you can make one-offs, but not cheaply.
Realize that most manufactured goods (with the notable exception of wood products) are made by some kind of moulding process involving a master - stamping, casting, injection moulding, blowing and vacuum forming, etc. That's also true of photolithography, used for ICs and circuit boards. Building up something in layers or carving it out of a solid block costs orders of magnitude more.
If you want to use a stereolithography machines, and you're in Silicon Valley, sign up with TechShop. They have one of the better ones, plus workstations with the necessary design software. It's not used much. Their laser cutter, which cuts flat sheets, gets much more use.
I think you've missed one of his points - these fab labs are for bespoke solutions for the individual (or small community). The reason factories are cheaper and more efficient is due to economies of scale - the unit price for a unique item is a hell of a lot higher than the unit price for 10000. To create a product requires significant (compared to the cost of producing that unit) overhead in setup, design etc; that is where these labs come into their own.
I'm sure that if someone came up with a brilliant item in one of these labs, a saleable item, they could take it to a factory to be mass-produced more cheaply. But until that happens, these labs represent one of the best opportunities for home-grown solutions from non-technical people.
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Keep in mind that any time you have a factory make something for you, there will be delays and costs associated with getting the product into your hands. Over the last few decades, they've done an amazing job streamlining this process. Still, it costs five bucks and three days between the time I place my order for my widget and the time it shows up at my doorstep.
I think that for many goods, that's fine. For things that cost a few dollars to make, spending five dollars on shipping will seem like madness. Plus there's always the "gimme now" factor, which seems to permiate our society.
There's a reason most people have printers in their houses. We may send our photos off periodically to get printed in bulk for cheap, but still print the one or two off when we feel like it.
There are two reasons that factories produce better products more efficiently. One is economies of scale (addressed in another comment), which clearly doesn't apply in some cases (see the so-called "Long Tail"). Two is that the best machines have always also been the most expensive. But there is no a priori reason that better machines must be more expensive; it is entirely plausible that some technological advance will produce machines that are better than anything we've got now, and can be made and operated by one person in a small space for very very cheap. It is even plausible that there would be no (or more likely no immediately obvious) improvements that can be made to them simply by throwing money at them. So, from that time until the next tech advance turns things around again, it would definitely be better and more efficient to run these small fab ops in everyone's home, at least for the small time jobs where economies of scale don't apply.
Your argument boils down to "It's always been this way, and so it will always be this way." which is not logical. I'm not claiming that the current generation, or even any generation, of these personal fabricators will meet the criteria I described above, but merely that logic does not dictate that they won't.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
You're not wrong.
But consider one very narrow aspect of this make-it-yourself-with-a-fancy-machine trend that we've actually got some real-world experience with: photo-printing.
A photo-printing service can crank out reams of ultra-high-quality laser-printed photos with a gigantic, capital-intensive piece of equipment. Due to the economies of scale, the cost per print is actually very low.
A personal inkjet photo-printer is slow, balky, finicky and has a voracious appetite for expensive supplies. Yet people buy and use them anyway, because they print -- or reprint, if they don't like the first result -- right here, right now.
There seems to be plenty of room in the marketplace for both of these options.
I met Neil Gershenfeld at the Supercomputing Conference in 2007. He has set up these mini-fabs at MIT, Africa, Scandinavia and elsewhere. I remember reading about someone else setting up something similiar in Silicon Valley. Each time, they were a huge success. It gives people a chance to make a one-off prototype of a idea they have. Before this was a terribly expensive proposition. Once the initial capital costs are paid, these shops run fairly inexpensively. This is such a great way to unleash the creativity of so many inventors that normally would not be able to afford it.
byteherder
I recommend a single article recommending that people keep an eye on TED instead of individual users, who apparently have just discovered TED, submitting "articles" suggesting everybody watch the latest one they stumbled upon. Actually I'd like to recommend people do that for a number of web sites, like LifeHacker and Wired. I'm glad you just discovered TED, but the fact that you are now aware of it doesn't qualify as news.
I discover new information on the internet every day and I realize that just because it's the first time it's come into my periphery doesn't make it newsworthy. Just last night I watched a video about OOP by Dan Ingalls, as great as it was and however new to me, it was 20 years old to the rest of the world.
1) Mass-produced products are not better quality. They are often worse.
2) What you want may not currently be made in a factory. It may be an "obsolete" style or model of something. I have a perfect example right in my kitchen: tupperware. I have three different sets of mis-matched tupperware. I don't like the "new" style. I like the old style. If personal fabrication devices ever become reality, Tupperware is toast. Their entire business, like fashion and other 'design' industries with extremely low raw materials costs, seems to revolve around changing the style of their products every few years and forcing you to purchase a completely new set.
3) Not everything is made on an assembly line. Many products are simply not being produced in the most efficient way possible. Which is cheaper, paying someone to build something for you in a one-off fashion, or building it yourself in a one-off fashion? "Just-in-time" manufacturing was supposed to reduce costs by building things at the last minute as the parts arrive from your suppliers, but what it has really reduced is efficiency and quality, as parts are not inspected before they are installed and more often arrive "at the wrong time" rather than "just in time", completely screwing scheduling and any semblance of an assembly line at the manufacturers that implement it poorly.
4) As the Open Source movement has proven, many times end-users have better ideas about how products should work than the people who make them. Personal fabrication can do for manufacturing what personal computing did for information technology.
5) For certain 'disposable' products, personal fabrication has the potential to reduce waste and environmental impact. Recycle products instead of replacing them.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Doing computing at home will never become practical. The machines are too expensive, and if they are able to bring the prices down some, it will still be less expensive to do it on a big centralized computer with trained professionals.
Saying that one-off fabrication can never become practical is about as short-sighted as saying the world market for computers is 4 or 5. It isn't that fabricators need to be able to crank out a million identical parts for less than a factory could, it's that a fabricator will be able to crank out 100 special-order parts for much less than just the setup cost at one of those factories and with no loss of quality. When fabricators can reproduce themselves (as several projects appear to be close to doing, other than a few very inexpensive components), the price of a fabricator will come down to raw material. Expect to see the remainder of the processing (including creating electronic components and actuators) within 10-25 years (depending on how complete you want it to be - in 25 years I believe you'll be able to dump in some iron nails, a few pennies, dirt, water, air, some aluminum cans, an old mercury thermometer and some old NiMH and Li-Ion batteries, add a bunch of energy, and have it pop out just about anything you want - maybe in 50 years you can connect it all to Mr Fusion which runs off of water, old beer and banana peels).
I often see products that I really like go out of production and the replacement has added features I don't want and taken away features I want. If I had a personal fabricator, I'd be able to replace broken parts or recreate the whole damned thing if I needed to, and not have to rely on that part or product still being available (at any price) from the manufacturer.
I often see products that are perfect except for ONE thing; I'd love to be able to re-make one little part to bring it to perfection, but often that part is just too difficult to fabricate using what I have available. A home fabricator would be perfect for that, even if it takes a couple hours to crank out a part, and costs 10 times what a factory would cost (though the cost to me would probably not be any more than what I pay for the factory part, given distribution costs and markup).
With the advent of molecular manufacturing, even the very chemical compositions will be able to be replicated. The shampoo you really like changes their formula and now it sucks? Just make your own, screw them. I see it as the equivalent of FOSS, there will be vast libraries of stuff you can download and manufacture yourself - when the chemical composition, the physical form, and the controlling software is all available as freely modifiable source code, things will really be different. I see a future in which the very concept of a shopping mall or grocery store is ridiculous. Lowes or Home Depot? Radio Shack? Furniture and hardware stores? Going someplace to buy things that were manufactured somewhere else? Why?
Wealth in the future will be: energy, raw materials, real estate, human creativity (e.g. entertainment), human services (e.g. concierge services), attention (e.g. youtube), and for a while control of force (as in government). If you really want to be rich in the future, start buying used-up landfills and worthless real estate out in the middle of nowhere and start building a political base. Even after we get off this planet, land will still be valuable, people will want to be here for a long time to come.
"Nanotech robots are actually less practical that Star Trek teleportation"
You've just made the argument that life is impossible. Im sorry, but all human beings are in fact, living nanotechnology. What exactly do you think every baby on earth is? An incredible feat of engineering.
http://aimediaserver.com/studiodaily/videoplayer/?src=harvard/harvard.swf&width=640&height=520