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How Open Source Hardware Is Driving the 3D-Printing Industry
TheNextCorner sends this quote from ReadWriteWeb:
"Open source software has been a key player in all kinds of disruptive technologies — from the Web to big data. Now the nascent and growing open source hardware movement is helping to power its own disruptive revolution. ... As 3D printing, powered by Arduino and other open source technologies, becomes more prevalent, economies of scale become much less of a problem. A 3D printer can print a few devices — or thousands — without significant retooling, pushing upfront costs to near-zero. This is what The Economist calls the 'Third Industrial Revolution,' where devices and things can be made in smaller, cleaner factories with far less overhead and — significantly — less labor."
Currently, the cost of materials for most 3D printers is quite high. That makes 3D printing uneconomical for most purposes.
The other problem is that most useful things are made of more than one material. Consider even something as simple as a toaster. It requires a good conductor, a resisting conductor, an insulator and structural material. So, even something as low tech as a toaster is well beyond the ability of 3D printers to make at all and especially to do so economically.
The loss of jobs need not be a bad thing in what is quickly approaching a post scarcity society. Ultimately, perhaps even within the next few centuries, we're going to see a situation where the abundant resources in our solar system are harvested and processed by mostly automated engines, providing an excellent (upper middle class) quality of life for everyone on earth. There is no physical reason why this should not be the case.
Pollution and environmental concerns would be very minimal with adequate management, energy is abundant, and if anything providing a good standard of living reverses population growth.
The main difference between that and today, other than a general longer, healthier, better life, would be the types of toys you get to play with if you excel. Obviously not everyone can have their own private ocean liner, there's only so much ocean, so artificial scarcity will need to be introduced by either fiat or economic acrobatics. Overall though we are I believe on the cusp of a golden age.
Check out RepRap and MakerBot
It's still not mass producing - it's custom desktop fabrication. It's like laser printing in the 80s... very slow but nice quality. So in the near future it's still mostly for prototyping or small scale runs.
Good point. If and when enough people have access to these printers, and if they are sufficiently standardized, you will not need mass production anymore. Or rather, the product is still produced in mass, but in many small fabs or even on the desktop, as opposed to requiring a single massive factory in China. It's distributed production. The point is that it's not necessary for these printers to become so fast that they can produce thousands of products per hour. If you're printing at home, you will probably print only a few items every day at most, and you'll be able to afford wait times of an hour or so.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...