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.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn’t say we’re on the verge. But we are at a time when amazing things are happening.
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.
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.
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?
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
Theres a Philip K. Dick short story called Autofac where out of control fabbers consume more and more of earths resources with nobody able to stop them.
Nope.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Same thing that happens to nature’s nanotech?
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.
They either spread, or stick to something.
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 think we will; it’s just a more sophisticated version of what nature does with blood cells.
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.
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.
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