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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
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!
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.
Show me a 3D printer that can print the following and maybe that can print a tire;
1. Different vulcanized rubbers for tread abd side wall. Currently there are no 3D printers that can print vulcanized rubber.
2. High tensile strength steel wire for the tire bead. Metal printing can be done but tempering is difficult especially when it is next to rubber.
3. Long Nylon fibers for the strengthening plies.
A tire is actually a very complex object requiring many different materials most of which can not be 3D printed.
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.
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.
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.
Assuming you could do all that, there'd be a massive safety concern as well.
You may have concerns about safety. But the people who subvert the evil tire cartel may not. To attempt to impose your narrow view of "safety" upon others is the very essence of statism.
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.
This is what people that think 3D printing will take over the world fail to realize.
THE MATERIAL PROPERTIES ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE SHAPE
You cannot 3D print out high tensile strength steel wire, because that strength comes from the orientation of the atom and molecules. That orientation is achieved by drawing it through a die.
Same the polymers that make up the Nylon wire.
Also the strength in a tire also comes from the directions rubber sheets are applied in.
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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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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.