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The 3D Economy — What Happens When Everyone Prints Their Own Shoes?
cold fjord writes: "According to Reason, 'Last May, Cody Wilson produced an ingeniously brief but nuanced manifesto about individual liberty in the age of the ever-encroaching techno-state-a single shot fired by a plastic pistol fabricated on a leased 3D printer. While Wilson dubbed his gun The Liberator, his interests and concerns are broader than merely protecting the Second Amendment. ... Wilson is ultimately aiming for the 'transcendence of the state.' And yet because of the nature of his invention, many observers reacted to his message as reductively as can be: 'OMG, guns!'... But if armies of Davids really want to transcend the state, there are even stronger weapons at their disposal: toothbrush holders, wall vases, bottle openers, shower caddies, and tape dispensers. ... In many ways, it's even harder to imagine a city of, say, 50,000 without big-box retailers than it is to imagine it without a daily newspaper. So perhaps 3D printing won't alter our old habits that substantially. We'll demand locally made kitchen mops, but we'll still get them at Target. We'll acquire a taste for craft automobile tires, but we'll obtain them from some third party that specializes in their production. Commercial transactions will still occur. But if history is any guide, more and more of us will soon be engaging in all sorts of other behaviors too. Making our own goods. Sharing, swapping, and engaging in peer-to-peer commerce. Appropriating the ideas and designs of others and applying them to our own ends.'"
I have to imagine that the climb to that level of 3D printing (assuming we ever get there) will be so gradual that society will have plenty of time to adjust.
3d printer frames and lenses will break the global eyeglass monopoly
That is an interesting idea for sure. I'm not sure if we could ever really get to 3D printing that could print something that durable; arguably a tire goes through even more physical wear than the guns that have been printed so far.
It does leave me to wonder though if we could print a tire straight on to the rim. Then the whole matter of mounting is no longer an issue - although balancing likely still would be. Could a service truck with a 3D printer print a new tire for a motorist in comparable time - and with better safety - than what it takes to put a space saver spare on from the trunk?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So if I understand this correctly, thanks to the 3D printer we will soon have access to affordable items made of plastic.
Wow, it's difficult to even imagine what the world will be like!
I gave up Inkjet printers years ago because of the cost, I can't see how 3d printers will have cheaper cartridges...
Unless 3D printers can start molding metals, rubber, paint, and various other base materials then this is a non-issue. The article reads like 3D printers are going to become Star Trek replicators and somehow end the concept of branding. They're useful for fabricating small unique plastic parts, not making a stove, Benz, or Macbook Pro.
Don't worry, the government will get involved much earlier. Since the shoes that you've 3D printed can be argued to be more valuable than the raw material, they'll just tax the difference.
How do you get to be a submitter to Slashdot? This article and summary have no actual content.
"If history is any guide" we will continue to do what we have done up to now. Honestly what a wasted article about nothing.
Seriously before we go off in a discussion of how 3d printing will change everything, it'd be helpful to first understand how modern things are actually made, currently. When people talk about printing car tires, I just laugh. They don't have a clue what's inside a tired. I highly recommend watching "how it's made." then we can talk about what 3d printing is good for. I think 3d printing will revolutionize things but maybe not in the way most people think.
Creating moulds, tooling, prototypes, one offs, that's where 3d printing is hitting its stride. Or maybe structural plastic manufacturing. But complicated items like tires always will be complicated involving many materials and many construction techniques and steps.
3D printing won't replace traditional manufacturing, any more than home laser printers replaced commercial printing. It enables NEW BEHAVIORS that are different, and any replacement is indirect. What 3D printing does is enable people to make unique, personalized things that can't be mass produced. So, for example, the e-NABLE project (http://enablingthefuture.org) lets people affordably make prosthetics custom fit for each individual, at a cost of $50 (in materials) instead of $thousands for commercial prosthetic hands. And that's a perfect application of 3D printing because each patient's needs are unique, and 3D printing can provide a cheap solution that's financially accessible to millions of people who can't afford the commercial options.
But if something can be mass produced, with millions of identical injection molded widgets sold cheaply, it makes no sense to 3D print it, because mass production is astoundingly efficient, and 3D printing adds no value.
That's why 3D printing guns is strictly a PR tactic to promote a political agenda by associating it with a sexy new technology. In reality, 3D printed guns are terrible guns, and expensive to produce. High quality guns are extremely efficiently mass produced so they are cheap and widely available, and if you want guns that aren't mass produced, people have been making guns in their homes for 200 years. Heck, you can make a better "gun" than a liberator with a piece of wood and a drill, and people have been making them forever. The reason people don't use "zip guns" any more is because they're dangerous, and real guns are so cheap. The "Liberator" is more dangerous to the user, and more expensive.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
What happened to supermarkets when people started being able to grow their own food?
Thanks for all the stuff, Foxconn, but we get our gadgets from Pirate Bay and MEGA now.
I really hate these kinds of articles. Foxconn mainly makes electronics like iPhones. There is no way to 3D print an iPhone. The glass can not be printed, The circuit boards can not be printed. The chips can not be printed. Lets get down to reality. 3D printing can make plastic objects and metal objects from a very limited range of material. Most objects we buy use other materials. Where they work they work very well but there are more things than can not be 3D printed than can. Many items that can be 3D printed are still much more economical to produce using conventional methods. For example a stainless steel mixing bowl can be 3D printed but it would take quite a while on a very expensive printer to make one and then would need to be polished. Using presses one could stamp out hundreds in the same time. Just because one can does not mean it is economical.
This whole "3D printing will change the world" meme is just stupid. Will some things change? Sure. Will a significant portion of manufacturing change? Not likely.
The population of the planet is predicted to peak around 10-16 billion people. Every one of them needs a toothbrush. At some point in the distant future, resources might become so abundant that most personal property can be produced using something like Star Trek's replicator; however, not in my lifetime.
3-D printing might make more sense for some products than traditional manufacturing. If you have an old car that is long out of production, producing parts in a printer might make more sense than tooling a factory to produce a limited run of a part for an old car. Anything that people need in the millions though. . . it just does not seem economically competitive to manufacture on demand.
I do think the retail landscape will change a lot. As the negative impact of personal automobiles become more of a crisis, people will do a lot less offline shopping and will simply have products delivered. I think that manufacturing centers will spring up to produce certain goods on demand, some locally, but eventually much of that will be produced centrally too (in large factories on cheap land) and shipped out to you.
And, of course, for smaller, less complicated things, 3D printers in the home might move out of the realm of hobbyist into the mainstream, the way many people have a professional quality printer (laser or inkjet) in their home these days, but I don't see most common products being produced on demand. Large factories tooled to a specific product will still be the most efficient way to produce things on a large scale.
IN THEORY, factory-manufactured homes would be this huge step forward over built-on-the-spot. Buckminster Fuller devoted endless hours to the subject, and imagined deployment by zepplin or helicopter, dropping off the whole Dymaxion House. Robert Heinlein wrote sharply about what a car would cost if GM sent a team of automobile assemblers to build it in your driveway.
IN REALITY, the cheapness was a hidden sales-killer. Only those with the tightest budgets live in manufactured homes, with their constraints on shape, their reputation for short service life, and they are disparaged as "trailer trash".
Printed alternatives for factory-made products will have some compromises. I'm not aware of an ability to print leather, so the shoes, for instance, will probably be *visibly* printed shoes that will be known to cost less...and come with a stigma because they will "look cheap". ANY kind of clothing that can be seen to be made a cheaper way will always carry a stigma. Jeans in the early 70s went quickly from being chic because they were cheap and proletarian and showed anti-consumerist, non-bourgeois "hippie" values to...designer jeans that cost as much as the most conspicuous-consumption choices.
"Conspicuous consumption" is not regarded as a moral sin until it hits truly comical levels (see, Saddam's palaces or much of the Hamptons) within its own culture. Dr. Robert Frank of Cornell has devoted a lot of study to the subject, is one of the best even-handed reads about income inequality; showing that you have a little money, or just really take pride in appearance, is not a bourgeois evil, it's a constant in every society through history. Adam Smith wrote about there being some decent level of clothing below which even a tramp would not be seen on the streets of Edinburgh...he wrote in the 1700s when that level was better than half the population could have afforded 200 years earlier, because fabric production was already much-mechanized. Whatever is the cheapest way to make anything is in any culture is always going to "look poor" and carry stigma.
Printing cups and bowls? Could do, but notice that people actually keep two sets of china? You might print the kid's tableware, but you won't put it out for guests. Might was well put out placemats with the sign "we're poor".
People spend a lot of money on: homes, cars, appliances/electronics, furniture - as capital assets. And clothing and other items much on display for status as well as use, as consumable assets. Notice that none of these things are going to be popular as home-printed products. I'll happily buy a home printer, there's loads of things they will do: a box of just the right size to fit a storage space, a replacement part. I just walked around the house and came up with the TV trays, the TV stand, my CD cases, the picture frames, bookends, and a whole lot of containers. All acceptable if plain and utilitarian. Everything else, I'd want it to look like it wasn't produced the cheapest way possible.
Remember how photo printers put photo shops out of business?
Well, yes. I haven't seen any photo shops lately. "1 Hour Photo" is dead. Kinkos has photo printers, and so do the local CVS and Walgreens, but they're not used much. Nobody has an in-store film processor any more. Palo Alto still has Keeble and Shugat, a high end photo equipment store with pro darkroom services. Redwood City has some wedding-photographer types and some commercial printers. That's about it.
...in the same way 2D printing = "paperless office".
(+1 Oxymoron)
the problem is instant manufacturing. It won't be a 3D printer in your home, it'll be one at the store. That'll be doable in my life time. Heck, some officemaxs already have 3D printers, and there's a little commune of hobbyists doing 3D printing too.
It means the end of an entire industry of logistics, shipping, etc. That combined with automation (most factories employee less than 100 people unless they're paying subsistence wages) is going to cause huge social upheaval.
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And it will always be better to run IT as a centralized system on a mainframe than it will be to give people personal computers.
These things go in cycles. There are some things which will be much cheaper and more efficient to 3-d print; lots of small plastic bits that break and render a larger item useless, like the brackets on my $50 folding chair, or a doohickey on a plastic toy. Put the old one together, put it in the scanner, replicate one without a crack in it. There's not enough of those little parts to repair to warrant a centralized, economy-of-scale market for any specific item, but there is an economy of scale in having a cheap replicator for lots of little things that can break like plastic handles and so on.
Power generation may see a similar shift; it will be more economical for those who can to install solar grids or methane fuel cell systems at home than to rebuild the whole power grid.
We just don't know when specific markets will make gain in distributed as opposed to centralized distribution.
I plan to buy a C/CMYK 3D printer so I can manufacture a custom dashboard for my ZR-1 interior and I am looking for ways to make the printer pay for itself (the price tag on the printer approaches the original MSRP of the car). I would not do shoes though because 3D printed shoes would be much like Crocs. Ick. Friends don't let friends wear crocs.
"That's a nice pair of crocs" said no one, ever.
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No, people are producing low quality plastics with the same general dimensions as traditional products, but with much lower quality and less choice of structural characteristics, for more money. But they can do it themselves, so they're having a lot of fun with it.
There are a lot of things you could easily do right now that you don't, and not because of laziness. Like power generation. You could generate your own power, right now. No new tech is needed, everything is on the mass market. Generac will happily sell you a generator sufficient to power your entire house. You can even get them so that they feed off of the natural gas line, and thus you don't need a separate fuel contract. What's more, this isn't rare. Generac sells these all the time as backup generators to people who live in areas prone to power failure. People drop 4-5 figures to have everything set up so that when line power dies, they stay powered. On the bigger side of things, data centers buy huge ones to make sure their computers never go dark.
Ok well these places already have generators. They are installed, ready, and capable of providing power. So, they go off the grid right, generate their own energy? No, basically never. Well why not? Why spend the money for the backup and not just use it all the time? Because it is cheaper to buy line power. Those generators, impressive as they may look, cannot compete with the behemoths that produce line power. The massive plants with multi-stage turbines just do a much more efficient, and thus cheaper, job of generating electricity.
This holds true for just about everything. You find that the cost to produce something at home, using equipment of that size, is just not near as cheap as producing it in large quantities using big industrial equipment.
So perhaps we will see the day when 3D printers truly can print anything (I'm somewhat doubtful, it would really take a technology advancement so much as to be a completely different thing) but it is likely to then be a luxury, not the way everything is done. You would be able to have your 3D printer/replicator/UC/whatever print you something and have it right away, but the cost in doing so in terms of materials, energy, and so on would result in a product more expensive than if you ordered the same thing from Amazon. So those that have money might use it for convenience, or to get things more to custom spec, but mass production is still likely to be the thing.
I wouldn't print my own tires either, but I did sell a car once because the foam rubber whether strips that kept the rain from leaking into the car were wearing out. The car ran like a champ, but the rubber strips would have cost in the range of $800 dollars for a car that was only worth about $1200. A 3D printer could have easily made those parts for $10.
K Eric Drexler wrote The Engines of Creation in 1986. Whatever you think is called "nanotechnology" today isn't even close to what is described in that book.
Mostly random stuff.
I can hear the Brontitall foot soldiers approaching (painfully) now...