MIT has had a course for call “How to make (almost) anything”. It includes not just rapid prototypers, but CNC milling machines and laser cutters. There Fab Labs being set up around the world.
Printed circuit boards are already, um, printed. Can somebody tell me how 3D fabbers are going to revolutionize electronics? Are the components all going to be printed onto the boards, too? How do you “print” an ASIC? Or are we talking about printing ICs directly onto the silicon, perhaps with little p-type and n-type pixels?
I can see something like this making it a little cheaper and quicker for hobbyists to make their own prototypes. But a laser printer and a UV light is all you need to produce single-layer boards in your own home with today’s technology. Maybe this could facilitate homemade multi-layer boards, but not if all you can print is plastic.
Who I see this helping most is the mechanical engineering hobbyist, not the electrical engineering hobbyist. In fact it seems almost exactly analogous. I can currently build electronics projects at home and soon (hopefully) mechanical engineering students can build 3D prototypes at home too.
I think the point is that you won’t be printing just plastic. You’d have a feedstock of numerous substances. Carbon, for example, can be very versatile.
“It can’t form complex machines. Guns and explosives have chemicals, moving parts, it doesn’t work that way, but it can form solid metal shapes…knives and stabbing weapons.”
Möbius batliff!
I think some sorts of fabrication will happen in dedicated centres, where they can afford to stock the more exotic feedstocks and have more space. So instead of going down to your local Copy Shop to get some DTP layout done, you’d go to your nearest Fabber Shop to get that replacement palladium catalyzer or whatever. Just like how everyone has a printer, but not everyone knows how to use Photoshop or Pagemaker or whatever.
Stevenson’s The Diamond Age has a good go at imagining what a fabrication-centred society might be like. Yeah, cheap food and clothes, but you basically get the feedstock as welfare, and meanwhile the rich get handcrafted stuff.
It’s gonna be a long time before you can print out a replicated car.
It could knock the “plastic novelty junk” market into a tailspin though. If you really want a plastic gumball machine shaped like Boba Fett, you don’t go down to the local Wal*Mart and buy one manufactured in China, you just fabricate one based on specs put together by some bored teenager in Terre Haute Indiana.
And when people can replicate as much of this crap as they want, maybe people won’t feel the need to do it. This is why the minimalist aesthetic in Star Trek makes sense. You can make any crap you want anytime you want, so there’s no need to keep piles of crap around.
I was having a similar thought. Though not necessarily if the fabbers get godlike powers, but just if a readily reusable material is developed.
So you just feed your fabbed items back in and it can melt them down and use the material again.
People would keep a lot less junk around, because they can always make things to order. And meanwhile, far less plastic gets thrown away.
I suspect that, once we have the ability to make that junk anytime we want,we not only won’t purchase it, we also won’t bother to make it.
A lot of the stuff we’re talking about can be an impulse buy of the type “that’s kind of cool, I may not see something like that again, and it’s cheap…”.
Sort of like the phenomenon I’ve notice with myself regarding DVD sets of TV shows. Often, once I own a complete series I not only don’t bother to watch (or Tivo) scheduled broadcasts, I also don’t bother to watch the DVDs. I know it’s available whenever I want it so it’s never a priority. It may be like that with a lot of other consumer goods if we can make them ourselves.
I’d guess that home fabs will have roughly the same impact as home printers. Home printers have changed some areas (like printing home photos) but we don’t use them (normally) to print books. There will be room for mass-produced products for a long time.
Pretty much the question I asked in this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=12544612
Huh. Strangely unimaginative responses in that thread. The tone seems to be “Making a gun is the hardest thing eva and would require a magic machine. And it would make no difference anyway because you can get/make guns easily now…”
For availability, it’s kinda like saying “The Internet won’t change porn. You can already buy porn in sex shops or go to adult theatres”. It was a game-changer, and being able to print weapons would be too.
And for manufacturing difficulty; sure, that’s why the T-1000 couldn’t form one. Nonetheless, while it may not be feasible to print a .50 sniper rifle any time soon, I would find it difficult to believe that you couldn’t fab something that could fire projectiles fast and accurate enough to be deadly.
Worrying about automatic weapons is silly. In a couple of decades, we will have the technology to manufacture plagues in our basement.
It would be a lot more dangerous if they came up with some Matrix like technology that would allow criminals to fire their guns accurately without training.
Building something shaped like a gun is easy. The hard part is building something shaped like a gun that won’t come apart the first time you fire it.
Of course you could fabricate something that could fire projectiles. The technology to create firearms is 500 years old, and isn’t secret.
I guess I’m curious how many people wish they could have a gun, but currently don’t. It seems to me that since we have hundreds of millions of firearms in this country, anyone who wants a gun already has one.
Maybe he was talking about some guy in the UK or mainland Europe who wanted a personal gun of his or her very own-some? 
-XT
I have no doubt that there are a great many people who want a gun that don’t have them. I kinda want a pistol. I’ve looked a few times, but I can’t justify a thousand dollars for something I’d use on the range four times a year.
If I could fabricate a top of the line pistol for a hundred dollars of feedstock I’d do it. Unless it were illegal.
Also there are a lot of guns out there, but there aren’t that many Glock 18s or similar machine pistols. What it would do is make guns as available as the cost of materials and the labor to operate the machine.
It’s silly to assume that everyone who wants a gun now has one. For instance, if I wanted to begin a life of crime, I’d have no idea where to get an illegal gun. The Columbine duo had to get guns from a helpful adult. The barrier for them to acquire the weapons would have been significantly lower if this technology existed. How many similar crimes don’t happen because the teens have no idea who to approach for an illicit weapon?
Then we can use the technology to assemble more imaginative teenagers!
Predictions like this are always wrong, but I don’t think it’ll amount to much.
Look around you. What do you see? Chances are you see a lot of stuff. We already have a very viable method for creating and distributing stuff.
Buying a mass-produced item is going to be cheaper (or on par with) buying something made with a digital fab. So if you need a cell phone cover, sure you could go down to the digital fab store (since I doubt you’d keep a great variety of materials around at home if you could afford a home version) but you could also, well, go down to the cell phone store just like you do today. If you want a gun- why would you think a fab’ed one would be cheaper? Someone is going to want to be paid for the design, and you are going to have to pay for the materials. It wouldn’t be anything cheaper than the gun company (who is presumably using any new manufacturing technology, but with the advantages of scale) can sell.
SO who will use these things? Probably a lot of hobbyists. I mean, you can already make stuff today. Casting in resin enjoyed a brief fad. Mass produced ceramics are easy to make. If you really want to do small-scale manufacturing there are ways to do that now- but few people choose to. Because it’s a lot of work to design what you could just go out and buy.
There will probably be some lame marketing attempts- like those old booths at record stores that let you make mix CDs, or DiVX type schemes. Probably some niche that we have never even considered will end up finding a real use for it. Maybe it will even explode. But probably not in a way we predict. I mean, who predicted that the telephone would be the go-to gadget?
Or lets look at music. When digital distribution came around, people were really hopefully. They figured it would finally allow them to stick it to the music industry, more indy bands would flourish, and everything would be better.
What actually happened was that we had a brief period where we stole everything, until someone figured out how to make it easier for us to pay for stuff than steal it. Now we still listen to the same shitty music and pay the same shitty prices for it, but we do it in a different way. Indie bands have not taken over the world. And now we don’t have the once-much-loved institution of the record store.
Anyway, the point is we are in a post-consumerist society. Stuff isn’t going to change things. The only thing that is left to change is marketing.
Hehe, maybe it’s obvious from my perspective on this, but I’m not American.
I’m British, and to give you an idea of how things are here, it took customs about 2 months to release a low powered BB gun that I imported. :mad:
I don’t feel any huge need for a gun, not enough to start networking in the underworld anyway. But I’d print one if I could, as would millions of others, I’m sure. (I suspect that even many advocates of gun control would secretly keep a gun somewhere – because gun control is often really about other people).
You may well be right. In terms of physical objects that change the world (i.e. excluding software), it’s hard not to feel like progress has stalled. I had imagined that if I took my DeLorean to 2010, my shopping trip would involve more than buying an LCD TV and a bagless vacuum cleaner.
But maybe it’s the calm before the storm…