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.
Its more sophisticated version of the computers we have now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
