Is autofabrication on the verge of changing the world?

[Lumpy]

Inspired by the record-setting hijack discussion in THIS (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=492696) thread by Tuckerfan and Lobohan. Is this the next big paradigm shift? Something that's going to introduce a "gee-whiz" alteration of how the world works, akin to the original development of machine tools?

[Palo Verde]

I started reading the thread, but it's mostly about Star Trek and is many pages long. If there is something in there you want us to read, understand, and discuss, then paraphrase it, quote it, or at least link to the specific part.

[Lumpy]

I started reading the thread, but it's mostly about Star Trek and is many pages long. If there is something in there you want us to read, understand, and discuss, then paraphrase it, quote it, or at least link to the specific part.Umm... I kinda thought the whole point was to discuss the subject I gave in the title up there in THIS thread, but to briefly summarize: In discussing the plausibility of manual construction of star ships vs robotic and/or autofabrication, Tuckerfan and Lobohan got into an debate about the merits of universal fabricators vs. dedicated mass production facilities. Several posts revolved around emerging autofabrication technologies, which in principle hold out the promise of being able to build something close to a fictional "replicator". Particularly there is the idea that fabricators may be approaching the "desktop publishing" level of home use rather than as purely industrial technologies.

[XT]

Not going to read through the thread either, but I'd have to say that 'autofabrication' (by which I assume you mean some kind of nano-technology based self replicating assembler/disassembler) is definitely not on the verge of changing the world since it's not on the verge of being a real, viable technology. I'm not sure we'll get anything like this in my lifetime in fact, though I know great strides are being made in nano-tech, and some amazing things are going to be coming out in the next few decades (I'm still holding out for DNA repairing nano-bots to extend my lifetime by decades if not centuries :)...but then hope springs eternal).

-XT

[Unintentionally Blank]

I have absolutely no doubt it will change a LOT of things, but like the internet and processed cheese, it will find a niche.

You should not buy your catfood online. You _should_ pay your bills that way.

You should not make fondue out of Velveeta. You _should_ make Mac n Cheese with it.

Likewise: You SHOULD print out your cellphone, kidneys, OLED displays, and car keys with a rapid-prototyper, you should NOT use it to print out the Enterprise. :D

[mswas]

Lumpy Yes it will be a paradigm shift. A confluence of inflation (reduction of the value of the dollar) and a deflation of the costs for consumer goods, IE iPod price reductions, combined with newer and cheaper methods of mass assembly will result in a world where consumer goods are so cheap and plentiful that we change fundamentally how we interact with them. I don't see autofabrication a la Diamond Age or Star Trek entering the world within this century, but I do see industrial fabrication plants becoming the way machine shops are. IE, where you can have people produce circuit boards at the local machine shop. There is already a bit of this, but it's a niche market.

http://www.emachineshop.com/

Companies like emachineshop will become more common. Custom modification to consumer goods will become more ubiquitous. People will be able to interact with a machine shop in the way they interact with their architect or contractor today making specialized industrial goods available at the consumer level, but you'll still require a vendor who owns the expensive equipment to assemble your order.

[mswas]

(I'm still holding out for DNA repairing nano-bots to extend my lifetime by decades if not centuries :)...but then hope springs eternal).


Even if this occurs you'll still have to deal with parasites and viruses.

[Tuckerfan]

It depends upon what you mean by "verge." The fabbers we have today are (roughly) comparable to the early computers which appeared after WWII. The advantage modern fabbers have over those computers is their small size and that we understand what they can be used for.

Right now, fabbers can make not only plastic parts, but metal, human tissue/organs, electronics, casting cores (out of sand or foam), and food. They are, however, not cheap. Costs range anywhere from around $14K to several hundreds of thousands of dollars. The fab@home unit is estimated to cost around US $2300 and its limited in what it can do in comparison to professional units.

There are efforts underway to make ones which can produce a fully finished product on the order of a cellphone, but the technology is not going to stop there. Its still in the "big idea" stage, but there's proposals to use fabbers to build large scale solar arrays. (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_n10_v16/ai_17449595) Folks have also kicked around the idea for constructing colonies on the Moon and Mars.

Once the machines reach the point where they can handle a wide variety of materials at one time, you will see them building everything you can imagine (as well as things you can't even imagine). They simply offer too many advantages over conventional manufacturing methods for them to be ignored. For one thing, the eliminate the papertrail associated with "mission critical" items like we have now.

I worked in a shop which made fasteners for Boeing and the amount of crap tied to those jobs was huge. First of all, we couldn't source the raw materials from just any metal supplier, it had to be one certified by Boeing, and every order came with a mountain of paperwork, tying it back to the mine where the ore was extracted from. We had to used Boeing certified tooling on Boeing certified machines, and all used/broken tooling was turned over to Boeing, as was all scrap/execess material. Boeing also had inspectors to observe that we followed all proceedures properly.

The reason for this is that you simply can't afford to have a nut fall off a jet at 30K feet. The detailed and extensive nature of the paperwork was so that if the fastener failed, they could trace it back and pinpoint the problem. Mind you, it did not take a fatal accident to start an investigation, a fastener just had to fail before the end of its expected life to trigger an investigation, and the guys were thorough. They wanted to inspect your measuring tools, the tools you used to work on the machine, the machine, and generally probed you about everything other than what you had to eat that day.

A fabber which can accept raw materials and spit out a finished product cuts all of that out. You don't have to do a backtrace through the contractor, sub-contractors, sub-sub-contractors, the various distributors supplying everyone, their suppliers, etc., etc., etc. You've got the fabber and the mines, that's it. That's a huge time and money saver.

Then there's the personnel costs saved by using a fabber. Forget the wages and benefits side of the equation, just think about the hassles of having humans work on things. First of all, they have to be trained. Even someone who's got years of experience as a machinist can't be pulled off the street and allowed to tap holes. Why? Because the specs dictate everything you can possibly image. Not only the size and location of the hole to be tapped, but the RPM of the tap, the amount of cutting oil (as well as age and type) used, and which side of the part you start the tap on (even if its something as "simple" as a nut), to name but a few things. They do this so that they can more accurately predict when the part will fail and remove it from service before it has a chance to fail.

Next, you have the variablility humans put into the equation. Nobody can duplicate exactly how they did something, so this means that you're going to have an unaccountable error factor in your estimates for how long a part should last. Not to mention, humans have the annoying habit of ignoring the specs. The spec might say you're supposed to change the tap out after 10 parts, but the human might not feel like changing the tap then, or might forget.

Finally, there's the crap which humans leave behind on everything they touch. Dead skin cells, oils, food residue, fecal matter, and more. All of that goes away with fabbing.

Presently, aircraft (and spacecraft) are held to the highest quality standards possible, simply because the cost of having somehing going horribly wrong. Now, lets say that a "Model-T" fabber can build an aircraft with the same level of quality as humans presently do. It does this without the help of hundreds of thousands of human beings. The cost savings afforded by this are enough to justify building one of those fabbers.

But, think about this: You can't presently buy a car built to the same high standards as an aircraft. You can get close, but even a Ferrari isn't put together as well as a fighter plane. With a fabber programmed to make cars and not planes, you can. That would be a huge selling point for the cars. You'd be able to know almost exactly when a part was going to fail. No more need to spend the money to have the car checked out before going on a long trip, you'll know that its okay.

There's also huge savings for the car makers, and not just from being able to ditch the humans on their payrolls. A customer comes in complaining about a problem with their car, you've got a perfect record of the build process of the car (which car makers don't have), you'll easily be able to find out if there was some kind of design flaw, material problem, or if the customer has done something in violation of their warranty. No more of this "Is it gonna break or not?" or "Why'd it break and who's fault is it?"

Additionally, if the market wants SUVs one day, and then convertables the next, no problem. Just load up the new program and you can be turning out convertables as soon as its done loading the appropriate software. Not to mention, adding customized features to a car will be a snap. How many people would pick a car built the traditional way over one that could have exactly those features and options they wanted, for either the same cost, or perhaps less?

[Unintentionally Blank]

I'll add that all of the Intellectual property law that's being created now for things like books and music will extend to fabbing in the future. What's the cost when someone downloads the description of that new Apple MacBook and fabs it out? Heck, it wasn't STOLEN, nobody was HURT, but when you can fab the physical device as easily as you can copy a file, what's gonna happen?

[mswas]

I'll add that all of the Intellectual property law that's being created now for things like books and music will extend to fabbing in the future. What's the cost when someone downloads the description of that new Apple MacBook and fabs it out? Heck, it wasn't STOLEN, nobody was HURT, but when you can fab the physical device as easily as you can copy a file, what's gonna happen?

Well since we are highly unlikely to see personal fabs held in people's homes, the companies that perform custom fabrication can be governed by regulations just like any other business. Likely Apple will just provide their product cheaply enough with enough customization options that there will be no point in seeking the product elsewhere.

[Uosdwis R. Dewoh]

I'll add that all of the Intellectual property law that's being created now for things like books and music will extend to fabbing in the future. What's the cost when someone downloads the description of that new Apple MacBook and fabs it out? Heck, it wasn't STOLEN, nobody was HURT, but when you can fab the physical device as easily as you can copy a file, what's gonna happen?
Open source fabrication? You can operate a computer today without any commercial programs. If home fabbers ever becomes reality, a huge culture of creating and sharing fabrications would likely emerge.

[mswas]

Open source fabrication? You can operate a computer today without any commercial programs. If home fabbers ever becomes reality, a huge culture of creating and sharing fabrications would likely emerge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_hardware

[Der Trihs]

Well since we are highly unlikely to see personal fabs held in people's homes, the companies that perform custom fabrication can be governed by regulations just like any other business. You mean like we are highly unlikely to see people ever own personal computers ?

[Tuckerfan]

I'll add that all of the Intellectual property law that's being created now for things like books and music will extend to fabbing in the future. What's the cost when someone downloads the description of that new Apple MacBook and fabs it out? Heck, it wasn't STOLEN, nobody was HURT, but when you can fab the physical device as easily as you can copy a file, what's gonna happen?Well, as the intartubes are showing, intellectual property law as we now know it, is pretty much a goner. It won't go all at once, however. You will probably have, for things like consumer goods, a patron system for the designers.

Here's a hypothetical situation. Say you've got fabbers which can turn out consumer sized goods, PCs, TVs, etc., and everybody has one. Now the people who design consumer goods know that the moment they release one of their designs to the public, its going to get ripped off, so how do they maintain the "exclusivity" that their design has? A couple of ways come to mind. One is that they constantly rework the design and have a new one ready to go every day. So that people will pay them to be the first to get the design, and when someone shows up with their knockoff, they can look at them and say, "Oh, that design is so yesterday. You really need to get with the version he released half an hour ago." Another way is for them to provide you something in exchange for the purchase price which can't be duplicated easily. It'll be a long before we have home fabbers which can spit out copies of DNA. So a designer could snail you a snippet of his DNA (encased in a nice glowing housing) and you could plunk that into the item you replicated. Anyone wishing to verify that you've got a real Archibald Q. Snootington III design and not a cheap knock-off, could scan the DNA section embedded in the item with the DNA scanner built into their cellphone (yes, we'll have those, too) and see if its real or a knockoff.

Well since we are highly unlikely to see personal fabs held in people's homes, the companies that perform custom fabrication can be governed by regulations just like any other business. Likely Apple will just provide their product cheaply enough with enough customization options that there will be no point in seeking the product elsewhere.
People already have them. (http://fabathome.org/) The base price starts out at $2,300, and goes up from there.

[mswas]

You mean like we are highly unlikely to see people ever own personal computers ?

Feeding iron molecules through a tube to a home is a little bit more difficult than transmitting binary signals over a fiber optic line. I'm not saying it'll never happen, I just don't see it happening within say the next 20 years.

[mswas]

People already have them. (http://fabathome.org/) The base price starts out at $2,300, and goes up from there.

I stand corrected.

Then I change my stance to:

It will change the world MORE dramatically than the personal computer or the industrial revolution.

The Diamond Age should be mandatory reading in HS.

[Der Trihs]

Feeding iron molecules through a tube to a home is a little bit more difficult than transmitting binary signals over a fiber optic line. So you just buy the occasional can full of feedstock for the machine.

[mswas]

So you just buy the occasional can full of feedstock for the machine.

You'd need multiple types of feedstocks to make complex items.

[Tuckerfan]

You'd need multiple types of feedstocks to make complex items.

The early models, yes, but not the later models. They'll be able to economically sift through the garbage you dump in them and spit out what you want.

[XT]

I doubt they will be able to do that in our lifetimes. I'll be shocked if this becomes reality....pleased but shocked.

-XT

[Superfluous Parentheses]

Well since we are highly unlikely to see personal fabs held in people's homes, the companies that perform custom fabrication can be governed by regulations just like any other business. Likely Apple will just provide their product cheaply enough with enough customization options that there will be no point in seeking the product elsewhere.

I think it's completely obvious personal fabs, as in physical printers, will be pretty common in 2 to 3 decades. They're not even that expensive right now (though pretty limited) - pretty much comparable to the PC DIY kits of the early 80s. And that's even without taking into account the possibilities in "real" nano technology which is less predictable, but will probably take longer to reach common households.

[Unintentionally Blank]

Consider that you now have a device that can not only place (using frikkin _Lasers_) a single black dot, on a page that can optionally contain 31 680 000 dots (600dpi^2 * 8 * 11), in MILLIONS of Colors and do that 22 times a minute, and do so for less than $500.

Now consider that fabricators are nothing more than scaled up ink jet printers. (You know, the ones you throw out because it's cheaper than buying a new ink cartrigde?)

I think personal fabricators will happen sooner then you expect.

[Unintentionally Blank]

take a look at the samples on this page...then wonder whhat can happen when they do more than just 'look pretty'

http://www.zcorp.com/Products/3D-Printers/ZPrinter-650/spage.aspx

[Tuckerfan]

take a look at the samples on this page...then wonder whhat can happen when they do more than just 'look pretty'

http://www.zcorp.com/Products/3D-Printers/ZPrinter-650/spage.aspx

And compare it to computer technology when the first machines were developed in the waning days of WWII. Nobody back then would have thought that less than 60 years later, you'd have watches more powerful than the building sized machines they were using then, or that a breadbox sized device could serve as a complete home entertainment device. Even the science fiction writers of the day figured we'd have, at best, "dummy" terminals in the home, incapable of doing much more than talking to some ginormous mainframe hidden within the bowels of the planet.

[Voyager]

You'd need multiple types of feedstocks to make complex items.

I doubt very much that any home system will be able to produce ICs with feature sizes anywhere close to commercial products. Personal fabs making the cases and maybe even displays, sure - processors, unlikely.

However, if you want limited performance, you can buy cheap FPGA programmers with free software, and open source hardware designs today. It's not pushbutton yet, and FPGAs aren't cheap, but it is in the price range of many people.

[DocCathode]

I wouldn't say we're on the verge. But we are at a time when amazing things are happening.

[New Beginning]

For what it's worth, my fiancee designed her wedding ring (in conjunction with a jewler) using CAD software, and the ring itself was built using one of these machines. The result is phenomenal, and the time from design to production is amazing.

I hope these things advance as quickly as some of you are suggesting. We shall see.

[Unintentionally Blank]

Perhaps the phone part will be a sim card. Once storage, the radio, and the processor get to a certain size, the limiting factor becomes: How big do you want your phone?

Assuming the fab can handle making a display (very likely, that's how they want to make OLED displays now), then having a new phone could be as simple as printing out a flip-phone, candybar, or tablet of whatever size, decorate it suitably, print, and insert the featurecard.

I could see a phone kit being a featurecard and a battery, the rest you make yourself.

Lose the remote? Print another out.

Liver feeling a little over-used? Print another out.

Need a new monitor? Order it online, go pick it up at the local Home Depot.

Need a 72" screen for the livingroom wall? Go to Fabmart, pay $75, unroll onto your wall.

Print your own flat panel speakers for that killer 12.4 surround system.

I predict certain things will become SO cheap, you'll forget you ever paid for them, and others, which continue to be physically made, will go up in value just because they're hand made.

[Cervaise]

Is there any reason you couldn't use a fabricator to make another fabricator?

If that ever becomes possible, then the very nanosecond the technology matures and a reasonably home-market-appropriate fabricator is perfected, the fabricators will be used to make more fabricators and the price will drop like an anvil aiming for a coyote.

So my question, leaving aside the technical practicalities of the device, and the likely time frames for realistic development, is this: Where's the profit?

[XT]

If that ever becomes possible, then the very nanosecond the technology matures and a reasonably home-market-appropriate fabricator is perfected, the fabricators will be used to make more fabricators and the price will drop like an anvil aiming for a coyote.

Or we might cross the Fabricator Event Horizon where more and more resources go to making more and more fabricators until eventually civilization collapses and we do the equivalent of hating our feet so much that we all learn to fly, cursing shoes and shoe makers as we squawk in the ruins of civilization....

-XT

[Uosdwis R. Dewoh]

Or we might cross the Fabricator Event Horizon where more and more resources go to making more and more fabricators until eventually civilization collapses and we do the equivalent of hating our feet so much that we all learn to fly, cursing shoes and shoe makers as we squawk in the ruins of civilization....


Theres a Philip K. Dick short story called Autofac (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac) where out of control fabbers consume more and more of earths resources with nobody able to stop them.

[The Tao's Revenge]

Is there any reason you couldn't use a fabricator to make another fabricator?


Nope.


If that ever becomes possible, then the very nanosecond the technology matures and a reasonably home-market-appropriate fabricator is perfected, the fabricators will be used to make more fabricators and the price will drop like an anvil aiming for a coyote.

So my question, leaving aside the technical practicalities of the device, and the likely time frames for realistic development, is this: Where's the profit?

I believe one of the goals of Fab@home is to be able to print it's self, or atleast pieces you could easily assemble into another Fab@home unit.


With open source hardware profit isn't the motivation. You could print out a table of future fab@home units. Set it up in the park downtown and anyone who want their own fab@home unit can bring down some feedstock and leave with their own unit.

[Tuckerfan]

Or we might cross the Fabricator Event Horizon where more and more resources go to making more and more fabricators until eventually civilization collapses and we do the equivalent of hating our feet so much that we all learn to fly, cursing shoes and shoe makers as we squawk in the ruins of civilization....

-XTThe other question is: How do you keep such a machine from producing WMDs? Nanotech means that the fabbers will be able to sift through tons of material relatively quickly to extract the stray atoms of Uranium that are no doubt found here and there. Might take some time, but it could be done, and it could no doubt be done with a much lower profile than a conventional nuclear weapons facility currently has.

Even if there's not stray atoms of uranium to be found, surely it could produce other things like mustard gas.

[The Tao's Revenge]

The other question is: How do you keep such a machine from producing WMDs? Nanotech means that the fabbers will be able to sift through tons of material relatively quickly to extract the stray atoms of Uranium that are no doubt found here and there. Might take some time, but it could be done, and it could no doubt be done with a much lower profile than a conventional nuclear weapons facility currently has.

Even if there's not stray atoms of uranium to be found, surely it could produce other things like mustard gas.


Couldn't you also have protective nanhides? Say hunters that crawl around everywhere looking for signs of WMDs. For that matter if you nanotech advanced enough it can looking for individual atoms couldn't you also have regenerative nanotech in the body?

Who cares if you get mustard gased? The, the poison will automatically be removed/filtered and the damage will be automatically repaired leaving you with a bit of a nasty headache. If you opted out of the automatic pain management system.

[Der Trihs]

Couldn't you also have protective nanhides? Say hunters that crawl around everywhere looking for signs of WMDs. For that matter if you nanotech advanced enough it can looking for individual atoms couldn't you also have regenerative nanotech in the body?

Who cares if you get mustard gased? The, the poison will automatically be removed/filtered and the damage will be automatically repaired leaving you with a bit of a nasty headache. If you opted out of the automatic pain management system.Possibly; but that's all a different field of technology. And one that's probably more difficult even if it's doable. Most likely we'll see fabbers everywhere well before we have that kind of nanotech, if we ever do.

[Unintentionally Blank]

_Truly autonomous_ nanotech is pretty unlikely (grey goo), mostly because, even if they're small, they still need some kinda power source, and some kind of Command & Control.

Okay, suppose capacitor and solar technology get to the point where nanoscale machines can recharge in the sun and operate on a cloudy day, what happens when a minor gust of wind comes along?

[Tuckerfan]

Couldn't you also have protective nanhides? Say hunters that crawl around everywhere looking for signs of WMDs. For that matter if you nanotech advanced enough it can looking for individual atoms couldn't you also have regenerative nanotech in the body?

Who cares if you get mustard gased? The, the poison will automatically be removed/filtered and the damage will be automatically repaired leaving you with a bit of a nasty headache. If you opted out of the automatic pain management system.Problem is, there's a limit to how small you can shrink electronics, and we're getting pretty close to that now. I honestly don't think we'll ever see nanobots small enough to be injected into the human body and able to operate completely independent. The best you could hope for would be nanobots which could function but had to have a much larger external control system.

So, if you went in for nanobot surgery for example, you'd get an injection of nanobots, and then lay on a specialized table which would transmit power and instructions to the nanobots swimming around inside of you.

This would mean that you can't have free roaming nanobots scouring the planet looking for cover WMD programs, but the guy with the covert WMD program would be able to have a robot mower going over his lawn, which is beaming instructions down to the nanobots digging through the soil, looking for uranium (or whatever) atoms, that they could then extract.

I know its fun to think about having nanobots swimming around inside of us all the time, so we can drink, smoke, and eat as much as we like, but that's probably not going to happen. Right now, it takes an entire trunk full of computers to control a car, which only moves in 2 dimensions (for all intents and purposes), doing it in three dimensions is going to require much more computing power and more sensors and detectors. Then you have to shrink all of that down to the size of a blood cell, and add things like control surfaces and power supply. You can't have the electronics that small with current materials, and it may not be possible to do it that small with any material.

[The Tao's Revenge]

_Truly autonomous_ nanotech is pretty unlikely (grey goo), mostly because, even if they're small, they still need some kinda power source, and some kind of Command & Control.

Okay, suppose capacitor and solar technology get to the point where nanoscale machines can recharge in the sun and operate on a cloudy day, what happens when a minor gust of wind comes along?

Same thing that happens to nature's nanotech?

[Der Trihs]

_Truly autonomous_ nanotech is pretty unlikely (grey goo), mostly because, even if they're small, they still need some kinda power source, and some kind of Command & Control. Not really. They can feed off of chemical energy, like us. A nanotech "immune system" could simply be fueled by blood sugar. And if they are out of control or self organized ( like an insect hive or slime mold ) they don't need external control either.

Grey goo by the way refers to out-of-control, destructively replicating nanotech; not just any autonomous nanotech. And even the guy who came up with the idea now thinks that it's unlikely barring extreme stupidity, because it should be easy to build it so it can't function or replicate if it gets out of control. Don't build in the capability to evolve, and build in a need for something hard to scavenge, for example, and it would be hard for it to get far out of hand.

Okay, suppose capacitor and solar technology get to the point where nanoscale machines can recharge in the sun and operate on a cloudy day, what happens when a minor gust of wind comes along? They either spread, or stick to something.

Problem is, there's a limit to how small you can shrink electronics, and we're getting pretty close to that now. Which is why ever since the nanotech idea was created, the idea has been for them to use molecular scale mechanical computers; like tiny Babbage Engines. They probably won't use what we'd consider electronics at all, any more that cells do.

I honestly don't think we'll ever see nanobots small enough to be injected into the human body and able to operate completely independent. I think we will; it's just a more sophisticated version of what nature does with blood cells.

So, if you went in for nanobot surgery for example, you'd get an injection of nanobots, and then lay on a specialized table which would transmit power and instructions to the nanobots swimming around inside of you.Or you'd have free roaming nanobots in you all the time; and when something beyond their sophistication was needed THEN you'd go to "external control mode". I doubt they'd need much if any extra power; they can't really USE much more power than your body already can provide for them without killing you by overheating. For just that reason I suspect that someone with a nanotech immune system would have the natural version disabled.

This would mean that you can't have free roaming nanobots scouring the planet looking for cover WMD programs, but the guy with the covert WMD program would be able to have a robot mower going over his lawn, which is beaming instructions down to the nanobots digging through the soil, looking for uranium (or whatever) atoms, that they could then extract.Yes, and no. I think you probably could, but it would be a cure worse than the disease. For one thing, while you could perhaps create some that would be able to detect large concentrations of uranium and then explosively grow and destroy it; but that would mean you've released nanotech that's dangerously independent. And probably more important, that guy's uranium scavenging lawnmower will probably just have nanobot defenses that destroy your anti-WMD nanobots. And if you build some that are both independent AND can overwhelm such defenses - now you've just released stuff into the environment that's flexible, independent AND is designed to overcome anti-nanobot defenses. Which is the kind of grey goo creating "extreme stupidity" that I referred to above.

[XT]

Pretty much what DT said. Energy is pretty easy...it would run just like natural nano-tech off the same kinds of power sources. In fact, I think IF we get to nano-tech it will be either modeled on or fully using bio-technology to do so.

As for intelligence, think of a highly distributed neural network where every part is pretty stupid but collectively they have the capacity for some level of intelligent action (sort of like bees or ants) with the ability for data communications between the individual units. The systems don't necessarily have to be intelligent in terms of human intelligence.

That said I think we are decades if not centuries away from constructor/deconstructor technology that will allow fabricators to break down garbage into separate molecules in order to produce any kinds of materials. This will put limitations on the Star Trek type fabricators that can produce your iPod, a table, a base ball bat or anything like that. I've seen demos of fabricators and they all have either some kind of feed stock (in the case of the printer types) with very narrow and specific materials that can be used and produced or use some solid or gel which is machined or otherwise with lasers (but no sharks).

So no...I don't think we are on the verge of this technology changing the world and bringing about a paradigm shift in manufacturing as we know it today. And I doubt I'll see it in my lift time...unless that medical nano-tech magic comes about and I'm able to live a few more centuries.

-XT

[Tuckerfan]

Which is why ever since the nanotech idea was created, the idea has been for them to use molecular scale mechanical computers; like tiny Babbage Engines. They probably won't use what we'd consider electronics at all, any more that cells do.The problem with that idea, however, is all the problems and limitations which that entails. Despite what Bruce Sterling and William Gibson would have you believe, mechanical computers are severely limited in what they can do. They can't be anywhere near as flexible as the software we currently have, and when you have a large gear train (like you'd need for one to travel around your innards and hunt for cancer cells), you spend a lot of time just waiting for the gears to "spool up." Even dropping things down to the nanoscale, you'll wind up with something that's hardly comparabe to a pocket calculator from the 1980s.

I think we will; it's just a more sophisticated version of what nature does with blood cells.Its more sophisticated version of the computers we have now.

Or you'd have free roaming nanobots in you all the time; and when something beyond their sophistication was needed THEN you'd go to "external control mode". I doubt they'd need much if any extra power; they can't really USE much more power than your body already can provide for them without killing you by overheating. For just that reason I suspect that someone with a nanotech immune system would have the natural version disabled.Yeah, but how much heat could those things put out? After all, its not like they'd ever be a significant portion of your body mass.

Yes, and no. I think you probably could, but it would be a cure worse than the disease. For one thing, while you could perhaps create some that would be able to detect large concentrations of uranium and then explosively grow and destroy it; but that would mean you've released nanotech that's dangerously independent. And probably more important, that guy's uranium scavenging lawnmower will probably just have nanobot defenses that destroy your anti-WMD nanobots. And if you build some that are both independent AND can overwhelm such defenses - now you've just released stuff into the environment that's flexible, independent AND is designed to overcome anti-nanobot defenses. Which is the kind of grey goo creating "extreme stupidity" that I referred to above.All of which depends upon how much processing power, and how flexible it is, in the nanobots, and we won't know that until they build them.

[mswas]

Consider that you now have a device that can not only place (using frikkin _Lasers_) a single black dot, on a page that can optionally contain 31 680 000 dots (600dpi^2 * 8 * 11), in MILLIONS of Colors and do that 22 times a minute, and do so for less than $500.

Now consider that fabricators are nothing more than scaled up ink jet printers. (You know, the ones you throw out because it's cheaper than buying a new ink cartrigde?)

I think personal fabricators will happen sooner then you expect.

Tell you what, when they can make a machine that will put a dot using a laser onto a piece of paper for less than $ 500 that won't jam on a single 8.5 x 11 piece of letter paper, then I'll start looking into these new fangled 3D printers. ;)

[mswas]

What kind of substances can it operate with? My wife's first response was, "Can it make me a cheesecake?", and I thought about that. The consistency of a cheesecake is quite different from the toy airplane propeller it carved out of plastic in the image on the wiki article.

[Tuckerfan]

What kind of substances can it operate with? My wife's first response was, "Can it make me a cheesecake?", and I thought about that. The consistency of a cheesecake is quite different from the toy airplane propeller it carved out of plastic in the image on the wiki article.

Homaro Cantu is no doubt working on it. (http://fringehog.com/2007/01/22/sushi-smackdown/) For instance, if you’re not able to digest a steak we can print one up for you that will dissolve on your tongue. MB: How do you ?print up a steak’?HC: Well, it’s patent pending… but in short, you press a button [on a desktop printer] and out comes your edible substrate [aka, edible paper] and you can eat it. We can alter the texture, the flavor, we can print text on it to communicate with you. We’re also working on a 3D food printer with the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC)…We’re dissecting, for example, the ingredients in an apple -pectin, water, chlorophyll, sugars, acids, etc. and after we dissect those, we place them into say, ink-jet cartridges, and we can reformulate it with a 3-dimensional printer. [The result is] a direct replication of the original product that looks and tastes just like it, but has an indefinite shelf life.

[Hellestal]

I hope y'all realize that this is the machine that will rise up and destroy the human race. It won't even be intentional. It will simply follow its mindless programming to harvest available resources to continue its mission of self replication. Eventually, the most convenient input will be the nearest human skull. It will suck our veins dry for iron, and pound our bones to make its bread-shaped energy pellets.

I'm looking forward to owning one.

[Unintentionally Blank]

I hope y'all realize that this is the machine that will rise up and destroy the human race. It won't even be intentional. It will simply follow its mindless programming to harvest available resources to continue its mission of self replication. Eventually, the most convenient input will be the nearest human skull. It will suck our veins dry for iron, and pound our bones to make its bread-shaped energy pellets.

I'm looking forward to owning one.

I think you've been watching too many of those crappy Sci-Fi channel movies. ;)

Tell you what, when they can make a machine that will put a dot using a laser onto a piece of paper for less than $ 500 that won't jam on a single 8.5 x 11 piece of letter paper, then I'll start looking into these new fangled 3D printers.

I'm trying to be tactful here: You need a new printer. If you don't need color, I've seen B&W laser printers for well under $100.

[msmith537]

It will suck our veins dry for iron, and pound our bones to make its bread-shaped energy pellets.

I'm looking forward to owning one.

Ah yes, the Fe-fi-fo-fabricator 3000.

Is it just me or do objects created by those 3D printer look sort of rough?

[Unintentionally Blank]

They do, and I have no idea how fragile they are, but it's easy to understate how game-changing this process is for manufacturing. To go from CAD design to something you can hold in your hand in a day is stunning, considering that the process _used_ to be very time intensive and required a lot of resources. Even more so considering that the part you spit out on the printer can then be used as a mould to create an investment cast item. You've taken what used to be a multi month process and reduces it to a few weeks (or less).

See here: http://home.howstuffworks.com/product-prototyping-process.htm

[Der Trihs]

I hope y'all realize that this is the machine that will rise up and destroy the human race. It won't even be intentional. It will simply follow its mindless programming to harvest available resources to continue its mission of self replication. Eventually, the most convenient input will be the nearest human skull. It will suck our veins dry for iron, and pound our bones to make its bread-shaped energy pellets.
No worries ! Someone will come by it sooner or later, press RESET, and then print out a new copy of you !

[mswas]

I'm trying to be tactful here: You need a new printer. If you don't need color, I've seen B&W laser printers for well under $100.

LOL, it's funny how often attempts to be tactful make an innocuous statement seem less tactful. Like you are judging me for not having a good enough printer.

I actually don't have a working printer, but I've seen enough printers jam in my time (Worked IT tech support for years) that I have a pretty good idea of how often they do so. So before I am going to believe that 3D printers are these amazing whiz bang world changing items, I'd like to see it print over 1000 parts without needing maintenance.

[Unintentionally Blank]

Hmmm. Well then...untactfully...

If you consider total number of pages printed, printers don't jam. You just notice when it does. (Selection bias) I suspect that, when you unjam that next printer, if you query how many pages it's actually printed successfully, the jam rate will be less than 0.01%

The point of personal fabricator, though, is NOT to print 1000 of anything. You want _a_ phone, _a_ wire wisk, _a_ alarm clock, _a_ TV remote control, _a_ water bottle, _a_ serving plate, _a_ fly-swatter, _a_ Door Key.

See where I'm going with this?

[mswas]

Hmmm. Well then...untactfully...

If you consider total number of pages printed, printers don't jam. You just notice when it does. (Selection bias) I suspect that, when you unjam that next printer, if you query how many pages it's actually printed successfully, the jam rate will be less than 0.01%

Jamming one out of every 10,000 times is still too often. 1/20,000 is too often also. I've seen printers less than a week or two old jamming, and then continuously jamming. Printers jam and they jam a lot. At least the sub $ 500 models.

The point of personal fabricator, though, is NOT to print 1000 of anything. You want _a_ phone, _a_ wire wisk, _a_ alarm clock, _a_ TV remote control, _a_ water bottle, _a_ serving plate, _a_ ly-swatter, _a_ Door Key.

Obviously. I am not talking about mass production. I am talking about printing out 1000 things, they don't need to be the same thing.

See where I'm going with this?

Let me see if I can put this tactfully. It isn't me who doesn't understand, it's you who is assuming I don't understand. :D

[Tuckerfan]

Ah yes, the Fe-fi-fo-fabricator 3000.

Is it just me or do objects created by those 3D printer look sort of rough?

That's a side effect of the resolution offered by the lasers. The really fine tunable lasers are still incredibly expensive, so to keep costs down, they use the less expensive ones. So, they're not really comparable to inkjet printers yet, more like dot matrix printers (without that annoying "Breeeet! Breeeet! Breeeet!" noise).

[jackdavinci]

Probably in the next twenty years it will start to have an effect on the types of objects that are made of only one or two basic materials - toys, simple tools, knock knacks, etc. It's not going to have an effect on electronics, anything that made of multiple materials, or anything that is large or depends on material strength.

At least not until it graduates from the 'ink jet' sort of machine to the true 'atomic replicator' type.

[Unintentionally Blank]

Let me see if I can put this tactfully. It isn't me who doesn't understand, it's you who is assuming I don't understand. :D

The plural of anecdote is not data, It's hard to know _what_ you're assuming with what you're saying, it's also pretty difficult to tell how you expect me to take what you're saying.

Don't have a printer? one in 20,000 isn't good enough? Worked in IT support as a qualification? What are you shootin' at?

[Tuckerfan]

New fabber machine built. (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081201110003.htm) Improving the productivity of machining processes is one of the basic requirements in every machine-tool engineering specification. The Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS in Dresden has integrated a laser module into the tool station of a milling spindle.

The five-axis, computer-controlled milling center can now perform two jobs: Three-dimensional deposition welding using a 1.5-kilowatt diode laser and component finishing using 5-axis milling. The IWS’s manufacturing experts will be exhibiting their two-in-one machining solution on the joint Fraunhofer stand at the EUROMOLD trade show in Frankfurt from December 3 to 6, 2008 (Hall 8, Stand L113).

[mswas]

The plural of anecdote is not data, It's hard to know _what_ you're assuming with what you're saying, it's also pretty difficult to tell how you expect me to take what you're saying.

Don't have a printer? one in 20,000 isn't good enough? Worked in IT support as a qualification? What are you shootin' at?

You're not going to convince me that laser printers jamming isn't a common occurrence.