3D printing

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing

by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman  · 20 Nov 2012  · 307pp  · 92,165 words

aesthetic Computers that act like nature Printing wavy walls and custom gargoyles Chapter 11: Green, clean manufacturing A tale of two plastic toys Greener manufacturing 3D printing a more beautiful landfill Chapter 12: Ownership, safety, and new legal frontiers Printing weapons, drugs, and shoddy products Rip, mix, and burn physical things

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Grey. Hot. A bicycle for our imagination The language of shapes Changing the shape of design tools Chapter 14: The next episode of 3D printing The three episodes of 3D printing Cofabrication of multiple materials Moving from printing passive parts to active systems The final episode—from analog to digital Machines making machines References

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specialized fuel injector parts for military and commercial airplane manufacturers. To get into this particular network, his business had to demonstrate its manufacturing prowess by 3D printing sample airplane machine parts in a specified time frame. The manufacturing network stress-tested his sample parts and they performed well. After some negotiation on

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in Boeing’s new premium airplane, the 787 Dreamliner, you’ve placed your life into the hands of at least thirty-two different 3D printed parts. The secret to 3D printing could be summed up as follows: 3D printers are more accurate and versatile than any other mode of production—be it a human

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who would get a commission for printing my mechanic’s custom tires locally. Decoration aside, custom tires could harness the power of 3D printing to improve product quality. Each 3D printed tire could be designed using computer algorithms to afford the best traction tailored to the local climate. Owners of specific car models (or

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be replaced by agile and independent small manufacturers able to respond quickly to fluctuating inventories and market demands. Less directly, perhaps the biggest contribution of 3D printing technologies to the economy will be to reduce the risk and friction associated with trying out new business models. Like ants with factories One future

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platform, individual writers struggled to make their voices heard. Now, the collective communicative capacity of bloggers exceeds that of journalists working for large media companies. 3D printing technologies will make Makers, consumers, and small companies into ants with factories. Each individual manufacturing node will be autonomous, yet connected. Manufacturers will form and

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a few times. These analogies are seductive because it’s difficult to concisely describe the sweeping social effects that will be wrought by 3D printing technologies. Consider the parallels. 3D printing technologies, like mainframe computers, got their start in industry. The first personal computing kits were primitive, low-cost and involved home assembly. The

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the people who have embraced home-scale 3D printers. There’s another complicating factor that increases the allure of personal computing and industrial revolution metaphors: 3D printing is more than a single technology. It’s a broad platform technology that will drag along other technologies in its wake. Similarly transformative technologies like

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of manufacturing is slimming overhead costs, keeping within the boundaries of environmental and workplace regulations, and efficiently moving physical goods from one place to another. 3D printing lowers the risk and cost of introducing novel products to the marketplace. Less investment upfront enables small manufacturers to make a few products at a

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method, in particular, are in widespread use: stereolithography (SL) and laser sintering (LS). Stereolithography (SL) Stereolithography (SL) was one of the earliest commercial methods of 3D printing. Imagine a small vat of liquid polymer sitting inside a printer the size of an apartment-sized refrigerator. The printer sweeps a laser beam over

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is that users are discouraged from experimenting with cheaper materials because they risk voiding their manufacturer’s warranty. The upside of proprietary materials is that 3D printing manufacturers are eager to invest in developing high-performance and profitable raw materials that will move the technology forward. Someday print materials will contain living

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to be fabricated. Fast forward three decades, and STL files remain, yet their original benefit has become a limiting factor on the design possibilities for 3D printing. If 3D printing is going to fulfill its potential, the STL format, as valuable as it has been for decades, needs to be honorably retired. Design software

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,” he joked. If capturing the design details of physical things becomes a quick and painless process, then everybody can become a designer. Once 3D printing becomes as ubiquitous as 3D printing, everyone can become a manufacturer. “My 11-year-old son will design a complex object that once took me 3 years to learn

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thousands of humans worldwide. Phil Reeves, the managing director of Econolyst, a consulting company dedicated to the 3D printing industry, estimates that today there are “ten million 3D printed hearing aids in circulation worldwide.”4 Invisalign braces—3D printed, custom-made, clear disposable plastic braces that hide over a patient’s teeth to pull them into

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models also help surgeons communicate surgical procedures to the patient’s families. Veterinarians practice an upcoming hip surgery for a dog using 3D printed surgical models of the dog’s bones. 3D printed surgical models and inanimate prosthetic body parts are just the beginning. Bioprinting will take personalized medicine to new heights. In the

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may take years to encourage practicing surgeons, doctors and health insurance companies to accept bioprinting as a standard medical practice. Rapid advances in medical and 3D printing technologies will transform medicine. Today’s modern medicine would have looked miraculous if presented to someone living 100 years ago. Perhaps in 100 years bioprinting

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design concepts pictured were real food printers or just skillfully rendered design concepts. Eventually, the confusion was sorted out and (much to the disappointment of 3D printing enthusiasts and technology-inclined foodies) food fans learned that the Cornucopia prototypes were not yet commercially available products. The intent of the Cornucopia design concept

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Jason Bowman, University of Washington Brandon found his way to food printing while working on a research project in tissue engineering. His research involved applying 3D printing technologies to help victims of severe burns quickly re-grow destroyed bodily tissue. Brandon’s initial research goal had been to print biodegradable tissue scaffolding

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traffic or lingering late at work. Processed food Printing custom food, even healthy and nutritionally optimized food, raises philosophical questions and stirs people’s emotions. 3D printed food is processed food. Like bioprinting, tissue engineering, and particle accelerators, food printing could be viewed as a direct assault on the natural world. Processed

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made of a complicated blend of chemicals and other materials whose design and composition exceed the technologies we have currently available. The killer app for 3D printing 3D printing food will change the way we eat and how we manage our health. When digital cuisine is as widely accepted as personal computing is today

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art and sculpture became too strong to resist. In 2008, Josh returned to art full-time to explore his passion for digital sculpture and 3D printing. Josh initially embraced 3D printing to fabricate the elaborate geometries he creates on the computer. “I used to create geometries on the computer that were too complex to

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of her current collaborative research projects is called eSkin, which uses cellular data to inspire designs for responsive building materials. She and her team utilize 3D printing to explore and capture biological behavior in component-based generative models. We asked Jenny to help us understand the role of generative, biologically inspired design

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of systems, or ecologies. In a sense, these systems are alive. They grow and co-evolve.” Printing wavy walls and custom gargoyles 3D printed structures already exist. Today, researchers are 3D printing cement homes using conventional design software and custom-made 3D printers. Like their small-size cousins, construction-scale 3D printers can form

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to global proportions, there would be nothing green about it. Greener manufacturing The promise of cleaner manufacturing lies in fully exploiting the capabilities unique to 3D printed manufacturing. 3D printing technologies have the potential to disrupt mass manufacturing in the following ways. First, 3D printers can fabricate products whose shape is optimized for its

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recyclable since it tends to lose its material properties if it’s reheated or reused. These findings indicate that despite the precision of the 3D printing process, not all 3D printing is a wasteless manufacturing process. The Atkins study discovered that the manufacturing process for printing printed plastic objects that had lots of large

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hot and require coolants. Frequently, to pry plastic out of an injection mold, factories use toxic chemicals called “release agents.” In contrast to printing plastic, 3D printing metal enjoyed several advantages over traditional metal manufacturing techniques. The Atkins Study found that nearly 100 percent of leftover metal powder from a print job

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, since 3D printers grew up on the factory floor, they have retained an appetite for the same raw materials used in mass manufacturing. 3D printing a more beautiful landfill Exotic 3D printing materials get a lot of media attention, for example chocolate or gels containing living cells. Other printing materials such as metal, ceramic

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people and businesses quickly discovered that existing laws and regulations were woefully inadequate. Core legal definitions of ownership, location and format had to be redefined. 3D printing, like any industry that experiences rapid technological leaps forward, will also experience new legal challenges and novel forms of consumer safety and criminal activity. Law

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mean new unregulated substances, or new recreational drugs. In the abstract of his breakthrough paper on this project, Lee Cronin describes its potential: “Three-dimensional (3D) printing has the potential to transform science and technology by creating bespoke, low-cost appliances that previously required dedicated facilities to make.”3 In other words

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consumer markets, the infamous Napster case marked an inflection point, the formal declaration of war between music consumers and the entertainment industries. The world of 3D printing has not yet faced its own large-scale “Napster moment.” People speculate that big aggressive companies known for fiercely guarding their intellectual property—the toy

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existing intellectual property laws when the culprits are career pirates or counterfeiters who maliciously and intentionally disrespect other people’s intellectual property rights. However, as 3D printing technology reaches the mainstream, simple “bad guys” will be the exception. Trademarks Once when I was in the Caribbean at an open air market,

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cells. The ability to create arbitrary shapes is already having profound implications beyond engineering design. Mass manufacturing is becoming mass customization. In the future, as 3D printing technologies improve, everyone will gain the ability to design and make complex products. Barriers of resources and skill that are associated with traditional manufacturing will

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is moving from printing passive single-material parts to printing active, multimaterial integrated systems. Printed battery A good example of an integrated system is a 3D printed battery. If you open a battery chemistry textbook, you’ll find dozens of recipes to make batteries—standard alkaline batteries, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries,

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materials.” To distinguish these printers from their analog ancestors, we called these members of the new generation of machines “rapid assemblers.” The next revolution after 3D printing will be the transition from analog to digital materials. Hybrid analog-digital printing Imagine a future where human-made artifacts are composed of billions of

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New Application Fields for Advanced Ceramics.” Ceramic Industry (2011): 15–16. 4 Grant Marchelli, Renuka Prabhakar, Duane Storti, and Mark Ganter, “The Guide to Glass 3D Printing: Developments, Methods, Diagnostics and Results.” Rapid Prototyping Journal, 17, no. 3 (2011): 187–194. Chapter 6 1 John Walker, “The Autodesk File: Bits of

Money in the Metaverse: Digital Assets, Online Identities, Spatial Computing and Why Virtual Worlds Mean Real Business

by David G. W. Birch and Victoria Richardson  · 28 Apr 2024  · 249pp  · 74,201 words

–$150 ­billion market (smaller than comparable estimates for ‘industry 4.0’ markets, as you would expect, given that it excludes technologies such as robotics and 3D printing as shown in figure 5), but its conservative estimate for the end of the decade is that the sector will have grown to be worth

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in-game wearables or digital collectibles.’ We can see one way that this may be heading if we pull together ideas from the industrial metaverse, 3D printing and virtual worlds. It is very plausible that when the cost of 3D printers is sufficiently low, people will select perfectly sized shoes on .SWOOSH

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, J. (2023). Amazon takes a 50% cut of sellers’ revenue. Marketplace Pulse, 13 February (http://tinyurl.com/2lh9cj6e). Keane, P. (2023). Nike reveals 3D printed shoes designed with AI. 3D Printing, 18 November (https://tinyurl.com/yrqq468x). Keeble, J. (2023). Executives fear greenwashing and the economy will stall sustainability progress. Transform with Google Cloud

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court orders Mirror Trading International to pay $1.7 billion in restitution for crypto fraud. ­Reuters, 7 September (http://tinyurl.com/2ay22kk3). Schwear, C. (2023). 3D printing meets the billion-dollar footwear industry. Forbes, 11 November (https://tinyurl.com/yrdw8mxr). Searls, D. (2013). Sovereign identity in the great silo forest. Blog, 27

A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to the Shard

by Simon Jenkins  · 7 Nov 2024  · 364pp  · 94,801 words

the least efficient modern American industry. California’s Silicon Valley promptly became a hotbed of digital design. From self-built and self-powered houses to 3D-printed facades, bespoke rooms, craft robotics and decoration, AI promised not just a revolution in methodology; it also proved peculiarly suited to retrofitting. In 2019, Google

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

by Paul Kingsnorth  · 23 Sep 2025  · 388pp  · 110,920 words

, the farmers who work it and the culture it creates. Excitable admirers are already explaining that this may give us the ability to one day 3D-print our own food.[6] I’m salivating already. Older, crustier greenies like me, labouring under the yoke of a pre-modern sensibility which makes us

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

by Jeremy Rifkin  · 31 Mar 2014  · 565pp  · 151,129 words

of distributed and collaborative power, I would highly recommend reading Jeremy Rifkin’s new book. He clearly joins the dots on how the likes of 3D printing, crowdfunding, and online education platforms are all connected and describes the disruptions that lie just around the corner for most sectors.” —Rachel Botsman, author

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Nature through a Capitalist Lens Part II The Near Zero Marginal Cost Society 5: Extreme Productivity, the Internet of Things, and Free Energy 6: 3D Printing: From Mass Production to Production by the Masses 7: MOOCs and a Zero Marginal Cost Education 8: The Last Worker Standing 9: The Ascent of

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zero marginal cost in a collaborative networked world. And now the zero marginal cost revolution is beginning to affect other commercial sectors, including renewable energy, 3D printing in manufacturing, and online higher education. There are already millions of “prosumers”—consumers who have become their own producers— generating their own green electricity

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again, at near zero marginal cost, is the next great task for a civilization transitioning from a capitalist market to a Collaborative Commons. Chapter Six 3D Printing From Mass Production to Production by the Masses The distributed, collaborative, and laterally scaled nature of the Internet of Things will fundamentally change the way

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infrastructure. Hundreds of companies are now producing physical products the way software produces information in the form of video, audio, and text. It’s called 3D printing and it is the “manufacturing” model that accompanies an IoT economy. Software—often open source—directs molten plastic, molten metal, or other feedstocks inside

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players learn from one another by making things together. The elimination of intellectual-property protection also significantly reduces the cost of printing products, giving the 3D printing enterprise an edge over traditional manufacturing enterprises, which must factor in the cost of myriad patents. The open-source production model has encouraged exponential

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create a single customized product at virtually the same unit cost as it can producing 100,000 copies of the same item. Fifth, the 3D printing movement is deeply committed to sustainable production. Emphasis is on durability and recyclability and using nonpolluting materials. William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s vision

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could afford advertising across national and global markets, greatly limiting the market reach of smaller manufacturing enterprises. In the Third Industrial Revolution, a small 3D printing operation anywhere in the world can advertise infofactured products on the growing number of global Internet marketing sites at nearly zero marginal cost. Etsy is

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of green space, might slowly replace dense urban cores and suburban sprawl in a more distributed and collaborative economic era. Democratizing the Replicator The new 3D printing revolution is an example of “extreme productivity.” It is not fully here yet, but as it kicks in, it will eventually and inevitably reduce

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Movement. The players collaborated with one another on the Internet, exchanging innovative ideas and learning from each other as they advanced the 3D printing process.8 Open-source 3D printing reached a new phase when Adrian Bowyer and a team at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom invented the RepRap, the

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Zach “Hoken” Smith and Bre Pettis, created a website called Thingiverse—owned by MakerBot Industries—in 2008. The site is the meeting place for the 3D printing community. The website holds open-source, user-created digital design files licensed under both the General Public Licenses (GPL) and Creative Commons Licenses. (These

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industrialized countries, but many, surprisingly enough, are in developing countries where access to the fabricating tools and equipment creates a beachhead for establishing a 3D printing community.11 In remote areas of the world, unconnected to the global supply chain, being able to fabricate even simple tools and objects can greatly

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near zero marginal cost. Xerox’s silver ink process is still experimental, but it is indicative of the new infofacturing possibilities opened up by 3D printing.15 Making 3D printing a truly local, self-sufficient process requires that the feedstock used to create the filament is abundant and locally available. Staples, the office

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from the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Khoshnevis is experimenting with a 3D printing process called “contour crafting” to print buildings. He has created a form-free composite-fiber concrete that can be extruded and that is strong enough

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of designing architectural blueprints is high, construction materials are expensive, labor costs are steep, and the time necessary to erect the structures is lengthy, 3D printing is not affected by these factors. Three-dimensional printing can use the cheapest building materials on Earth—sand and rock, as well as virtually any

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that 3D hobbyists are creating, if put together, make up the essential nodes of a do-it-yourself TIR infrastructure. The really revolutionary aspect of 3D printing, which will take it from a hobbyist subculture to a new economic paradigm, is the impending “Makers Infrastructure.” This development will spawn new business

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instructions for printing objects are globally shared rather than privately held, yet the material feedstocks are locally available, making the technology universally applicable. While 3D printing promotes self-sufficient local communities, the products can be marketed on websites at nearly zero marginal cost and made accessible to a global user base

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social entrepreneurs, and communitarians, all of whom favor a distributed, transparent, collaborative approach to economic and social life rather than a centralized and proprietary one. 3D printing brings these various sensibilities together. The social bond is the deep abhorrence of hierarchical power and the fierce commitment to peer-to-peer lateral power

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a distributed, collaborative, laterally scaled TIR infrastructure. Germany is far ahead of the other major industrialized nations in advancing the IoT technology platform for 3D printing to plug into and play. As already mentioned, the country has surpassed the target of producing 20 percent of its electrical power with distributed renewable

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of the efficiencies and productivity potential afforded by the new Internet of Things. This allows German infofacturers to leap ahead of the United States, where 3D printing firms find themselves adrift in an inefficient and outdated Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure whose productivity capacity has long since peaked. Germany’s small- and

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outskirts, isolated towns, and rural locales—where infrastructure is scant, access to capital spotty, at best, and technical expertise, tools, and machinery virtually nonexistent—3D printing provides a desperately needed opportunity for building a TIR Makers infrastructure. Marcin Jakubowski, a graduate of Princeton University with a doctorate in fusion energy from

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a “global village construction kit” to make its own TIR society. Thus far, Jakubowski’s open-source ecology network of farmers and engineers have used 3D printing to make prototypes of 8 of the 50 machines: “bulldozer, rototiller, ‘microtractor,’ backhoe, universal rotor, drill press, a multi-purpose ‘ironworker,’ . . . and a CNC

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near zero. This was followed in quick succession by the plunging marginal cost of harvesting the sun and wind and other abundant renewable energies, the 3D printing of “things,” and online courses in higher education. The Internet of Things is the first general purpose technology platform in history that can potentially

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it is. New communications technologies are turning the broadcast spectrum from a scarce resource to an abundant one, just as with information, renewable energy, 3D printing, and online college courses. The journey to an economy of abundance, however, is cluttered with roadblocks that could delay and even derail the collaborative era

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of the airwaves. Because IT computing, wireless telecommunications, and Internet technology are increasingly being deployed to organize and manage information, green energy and electricity, 3D printing of infofactured products, online higher education, social media marketing, and plug-in clean transport and logistics, the networked Commons becomes the governing model that envelopes

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bioinformatics has fundamentally altered the nature of biological research just as IT, computing, and Internet technology did in the fields of renewable-energy generation and 3D printing. According to research compiled by the National Human Genome Research Institute, gene-sequencing costs are plummeting at a rate that exceeds the exponential curves

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a question of how, not if.”39 At present, computational technology is spreading to every other field, becoming the communication medium for organizing renewable energy, 3D printing, work, marketing, logistics, transport, health care, and online higher education. The new computing language for reorganizing society has brought together varied interests, including info

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cost society. Like the democratizing of information on the Internet, the democratization of electricity on the Energy Internet, the democratization of manufacturing with open-source 3D printing, the democratization of higher education with MOOCs, and the democratization of exchange in the sharable economy, the potential democratization of health care on the

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Few are suggesting that the quickening pace to near zero marginal cost that is beginning to impact the media, entertainment, and publishing industries; renewable energies; 3D printing of manufactured products; and open-source online higher education are any more than variations that can be fit comfortably within the existing economic paradigm. Even

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financial gain. Breakthroughs in renewable energy have come from government and university laboratories as well as from private companies working the marketplace. Similarly, the 3D printing revolution is being spurred by both nonprofit Fab Labs and commercial developers. The point is that while the entrepreneurial spirit of the marketplace is helping

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CNN, June 5, 2013, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/05/business/etsy-leweb-craft-disrupting (accessed June 28, 2013). 6. “A Brief History of 3D Printing,” T. Rowe Price, December 2011, http://individual.troweprice .com/staticFiles/Retail/Shared/PDFs/3-D_Printing_Infographic_FINAL.pdf (accessed November 2, 2013). 7. “

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11, 2013). 18. “Plastic, Fantastic! 3-D Printers Could Recycle Old Bottles,” Tech News Daily, January 18, 2012, http://www.technewsdaily.com/5446-filabot-3d-printing-material-recycled-plastic.html (accessed February 2, 2013); “Filabot Wee Kit Order Form,” Filabot: the Personal Filament Maker, http://www.filabot.com/collections/filabot-systems

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Structures on the Moon,” Foster and Partners press release, January 31, 2013, http://www.fosterandpartners.com/news /foster-+-partners-works-with-european-space-agency-to-3d-print-structures-on-the-moon/ (accessed February 18, 2013). 24. Ibid.; “Building a Lunar Base with 3-D Printing,” European Space Agency, January 31, 2013,

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Marcel Rosenbach and Thomas Schulz, “3-D Printing: Technology May Bring New Industrial Revolution,” Der Spiegel, January 4, 2013, http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/3d -printing-technology-poised-for-new-industrial-revolution-a-874833.html (accessed August 5, 2013). 35. Goli Mohammadi, “Open Source Ecology: Interview with Founder Marcin Jakubowski,” Makezine

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Laura Ungar, “Researchers Closing in on Printing 3-D Hearts,” USA Today, May 29, 2013, http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/05/29/health-3d-printing-organ-transplant/2370079/ (accessed July 11, 2013). 72. Mikayla Callen, “Scientists Advance 3-D Printing toward Fabrication of Living Tissues and Functional Organs,” Objective

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Standard, May 9, 2013, http://www.theobjectivestandard.com /blog/index.php/2013/05/scientists-advance-3d-printing-toward-fabrication-of-living-tissues -and-functional-organs/ (accessed July 11, 2013). 73. “The Text of President Bush’s Address Tuesday Night, after Terrorist

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GPL), 94, 175–176 Germany and cooperatives, 213–216 flood in, 287 and Google, 201 and renewable energy, 82–83, 101, 141, 253, 257 and 3D printing, 101–102 Gershenfeld, Neil, 94 Gillespie, Tarleton, 203 Girsky, Stephen, 228–229 globalization versus reopening the global commons, 187–192 GM, teams up with RelayRides

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and cyberterrorists, 291–292 and environmentalist(s), 170–172, 187–188 and the Free Culture Movement, 173–174 and the Makers Movement, 99–104 and 3D printing, 95 Hall, Andy, 87 Hansen, James, 287 Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Layard), 277 Haque, Umair, 253 Hardin, Garrett, 155–159 Hazen, Paul,

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to, 84–87 the last worker standing, 121–133 and marginal cost controversy, 135–138 MOOCs, 109–119 reluctance to come to grips with, 5 3D printing, 89–108 see also paradigm shift from market capitalism to Collaborative Commons network neutrality, 197–198, 203 The New Capitalist Manifesto (Haque), 253 Networked

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212 thermodynamic efficiencies, 10–15, 70–73, 78, 91, 143–144, 186 the third Industrial Revolution. see Collaborative Commons The Third Industrial Revolution (Rifkin), 11 3D printing, 89–108 and automobiles, 98–99 and bioprinting body parts/organs, 246–247 and construction of buildings, 96–97 and customization, 91 democratizing the replicator

Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time

by Steven Osborn  · 17 Sep 2013  · 310pp  · 34,482 words

world are rapidly becoming more intelligent, more seamless, more connected. It’s hard to think of the maker movement without mentioning digital manufacturing technologies like 3D printing, CNC milling, and laser cutting. Although these technologies are not extremely recent—the first 3D printer was developed in 1984, the first laser cutter in

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1965—the availability of 3D printing and other digital manufacturing methods are becoming more affordable, easier to use, and more accessible to designers, engineers, and hobbyists. The advances in these

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a global community and share our experiences and designs with the rest of the world. 3D printing is being used in almost every job field imaginable, from culinary masterpieces 3D-printed in chocolate to 3D-printed prosthetics and custom-fitted transplants for medical patients, these tools are changing the way the world itself is prototyped

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find something that you think you’ll be passionate about, that resonates with you. I mean, the maker culture is so big now. There’s 3D printing. There’s electronics. There’s all the subparts of electronics. There’s the craft side of it, the clothes making, and then of course combining

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my understanding. Seidle: Awesome, I'll see if I can't get on that list! Osborn: A lot of people seem to be getting into 3D printing. I have a 3D printer and a CNC laser, for instance, and I’ve even seen pick-and-place machines in people’s garages. Have

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me.” Those sorts of things are, I think, the creative spin that I’m really interested in. Osborn: So there’s the short-run manufacturing, 3D printing, the Internet of Things, these common themes throughout the maker community. Do you see any other interest groups or topics, maybe wearable computing or something

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third industrial revolution.3 I really believe that that’s happening right now, where there is this idea that people are excited about things like 3D printing. People are excited about personal manufacturing. People are excited about Kickstarter. I used to feel like I worked on stuff that I was interested

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in. You sort of had to be an engineer to understand. Now, my mom is sending me articles about 3D printing. It’s not just that it’s happening to industry. The world is taking notice. What I wrote in the blog post is that the

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question, but to break it down: patent law hasn’t caught up with where technology is. You’ve got issues of marketplaces trying to regulate 3D printing and different marketplaces having different ideas and different rules, because no one has any idea of exactly what the standard should be. I don’t

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the mechanical end, and I was determined to get it working. So I ended up building a machine myself. That was exciting. Osborn: So besides 3D printing, what are some things you are passionate about? Linder: My other passion was in the field of projected augmented reality. In that space, there were

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printer. It’s trying to offer a new design, both in the product design sense and in the usability and the technology, making high-resolution 3D printing affordable and accessible for designers, engineers, and makers right on their desks. While that has been a promise, it’s yet to be fulfilled despite

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some successful venture companies and lots of projects in that space that we now call the maker community. From Formlabs’ perspective, the promise of routine 3D printing that can help you realize projects in 3D form has yet to be fulfilled. What we’ve discovered is that on the price-point side

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of other niches, more vertical areas, such as medical usage, and so on and so forth. To achieve that, we had to think about 3D printing from the point of view of 3D printing users. In a way, the Form 1 is the first 3D printer that has been designed by users of

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is a stereolithography machine. Stereolithography is a thirty-year-old technology or so, and it’s been around. It’s is the gold standard of 3D printing in terms of quality. It’s basically a laser that draws layers a pool of liquid plastic, a photopolymer resin. Wherever the light hits the

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s not coincidence. It’s design. Design is how it works. And the way it works is that it lowers the complexity that comes with 3D printing, because 3D printing is not as simple as printing, which you don’t even think about right now when you hit Print on your computer. Osborn: It

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are mature products. So we’re trying to address that from a different perspective. We’re also trying to address the postprocessing part of the 3D printing process. So we provide this finishing kit and work through the process. We try to celebrate it. Many people were making molds before the day

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of all these together is what makes Formlabs and the product, the Form 1 unique. Osborn: Can you tell me a little bit about the 3D printing landscape and some of the interesting things you’ve seen people doing with 3D printers? What are people using these for now? What are some

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unusual examples of how people are using 3D printers? Linder: So people have been using 3D printing from the point they were available to do product design and rapid prototyping. That’s the key use case. You also see companies like Invisalign

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that have a whole process of creating a dental solution based on 3D printing. You see companies like Nervous Systems6 that have jewelry lines. You see service bureaus like Shapeways making 3D printing available and different types of processes to basically print whatever. Then there’s the long tail

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. A lot of people have little uses for 3D printing, but there’s this big bright future where people talk about 3D printing as a replacement for manufacturing. There are companies doing that as well, and those processes are still very expensive

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, but they’re making commercial parts for airplanes with 3D printers. More and more car manufacturers are considering adding 3D printing to action-manufacturing processes. While I personally think that’s indeed going to happen in the future, I think we’re still quite far from

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you have just machines, that are part of a manufacturing process. But at the other front, the home front or the personal front, I think 3D printing is going to potentially change how we consume things and how we design things for our own—customize them. The IP of an object is

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people who don’t design web sites than people who do. So it’s really hard to say what would be the killer app of 3D printing—and I don’t pretend to know. People ask us this a lot. Honestly, we think the more interesting thing is taking the existing

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You don’t need to explain to your boss why you’re buying a new Mac. It’s obvious—you just need it. But if 3D printing is $20,000 or $50,000 to get what you need, that’s going to be a bunch of work just to get it through

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you think about it—many of the great hardware products that you are familiar with came about. Osborn: For somebody who is really interested in 3D printing and wants to get started maybe doing 3D design or CAD design, what do you recommend? How does somebody get started? What are some materials

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to read or some program that you should check out? Do you have any pointers for somebody who’s interested in 3D design or 3D printing? Linder: There are tons of different resources online for people who do 3D design and there’s open-source software available. SketchUp is a

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side, you can spend so much time just doing tutorials and whatnot online. But on the printer side, there’s lots and lots of 3D printing projects out there, and some of them are for the do-it-yourself type. People who just want to learn about the process of

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3D printing. And if they just want to do that, then you can get a kit, an FDM7-type kit, for $300, and you build your

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planning to launch it with a community web site and a bunch of tutorials. We plan to improve it and try to make 3D printing and the process of 3D printing accessible by providing resources to do that. That’s my personal hope for the Form 1. As for taking it to the next

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Awesome. I’m excited to see you guys get this out the door. I’ve thought about the different 3D printing methods and I’m making some assumptions about the future of the 3D printing technology. I’d like to hear your opinion on some of my assumptions. It seems like the filament-extrusion

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all have pros and cons. I agree on your analysis of the FDM. So just so you know, in full disclosure, I’m not a 3D printing process expert. It’s not my key contribution. I’m a product guy who cares about user experience. I’m a software system person who

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to me. What exactly that process would be, it’s a little bit too early for us to say. But there are many options. Osborn: 3D printing is a really exciting space in general, it’s exciting to see so much great innovation and competition in this space. I’m excited about

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an article today about that. Osborn: I was wondering what your thoughts are. Do so see things going in that direction? Do you think with 3D printing and technologies like it will become practical means for manufacture? Heck: This is going to be the same book as you interviewed the MakerBot guys

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, right? Osborn: Yeah, but you guys don’t have to have the same opinion. Heck: I’m sure we don’t. I love 3D printing. I go to Maker Faires and a lot of the conventions. I guess for me that’s my vacations. I saw 3D printers years ago

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specifically the pinball machines, which is both my hobby and job. And I was like, “Oh my God, this is a killer app for me.” 3D printing—physical things I can stick in a game and bash the hell out of—it’s amazing. Yeah, it’s slow, but you just do

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in one shot using injection molding, versus using two hundred watts of power over three hours to print them using a 3D printer. Right now, 3D printing can’t really replace it. And, yeah, sometime in the future, maybe we can say, “I’d like some Earl Grey tea. Hot,” like

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it just sort of prints them all out. That can be fun. Osborn: So let’s see. There’s the Internet of Things. There’s 3D printing. You do a lot of work with wearable technologies. Is there any other vertical or category that you think is interesting or you’ve seen

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allow them to shine. Osborn: I think the most controversial 3D project was Defense Distributed. It is this really shoddy 3D printed weapon, but has got a lot of attention because 3D printing is an exciting topic right now. Pettis: I would say there are many things that are way more interesting. Have

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work, specifically for kids. It opens the door for all sorts of other ways of thinking about how 3D printing can change any industry. Osborn: There are definitely some interesting medical use cases for 3D printing. I saw where they printed a woman’s entire lower jawbone. One thing you guys did recently

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still at the beginning. We’ve got a lot of work to do to make people feel comfortable with 3D printing. Osborn: It seems like MakerBot has become the go-to printer for 3D printing. I read that Ford bought a MakerBot for all of their design engineers to have on their desks.

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interested in talking to our president?” And we started talking about it and basically, they’re just really cool people. They’re just as big 3D-printing geeks as we are. Before the acquisition we had to work around a lot of patents in this space. That’s one thing I think

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get the best solution. You get a solution. I’m super excited to have access to the Stratasys IP. Plus, these folks have been doing 3D printing for twenty-five years and there’s a lot we get to learn from them in terms of expertise in being able to just put

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the pedal to the metal on what we’re doing. They have the same mission: We want to grow the worldwide adoption of 3D printing, so that more 3D printers can be out there. More people can be empowered to make the things that they need in life. Osborn:

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to be creative without having to go deep into the CAD world. Osborn: Do you have any words of wisdom for people getting started in 3D printing? Pettis: I would kind of circle back to where I started and just say that it’s just an amazing time to be a creative

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video game console atomic bomb, destructive technology Brittany Spears effect bullshit buying and modding buying, equipment design and manufacture pinball machines design circuit board systems 3D printing and technology expensive to make controller Geocities web site graphics artist MakerBot/3D scanner making independent films N64 Oculus Rift guy Palmer Lucky physical capability

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system wireless sensor networks Linder, Natan Brooks, Rodney (chairman and CTO of iRobot) CNC machine 3D and CAD design design-for-manufacturing 3D printer projects 3D printing landscape 3D QR code entrepreneurship filament-deposition method flexible-display technology Fluid Interfaces Group Form 1 Google glasses Jerusalem Venture Partners Kickstarter experience microfluidics MIT

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trade tricks transparent marketplace Pettis, Bre amazing model Arduino-based hardware Atmel microcontroller CEO and co founder (Makerbot.com) command-line tool 3D digitizing scanner 3D printing early experience Hackerbot labs MakerBot Digitizer MakerBot Replicator MakerBot Thing-O-Matic medical cases NYC Resistor professional-quality machine RepRap prototypes Robohand project Stratasys acquisition

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil  · 25 Jun 2024

your curiosity instead of being stuck watching Gunsmoke around your family’s single TV set, as was common back in my generation. The maturation of 3D printing and eventually nanotechnology will exponentially accelerate this diversification of our choices in the coming decades. US Personal Income per Capita[142] Sources: Bureau of

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can coat windows, producing useful electricity without blocking the view.[223] In the years ahead, nano-based technology will also reduce manufacturing costs by facilitating 3D printing of solar cells, which will make decentralized production possible so photovoltaics can be created when and where they are needed. And unlike the big,

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decentralized technologies will define the 2020s and beyond in many areas, including energy production (solar cells), food production (vertical agriculture), and production of everyday objects (3D printing). For water purification, this approach can take several forms, ranging from building-size machines like the Janicki Omni Processor that purify water for an entire

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, vertical agriculture represents turning food production essentially into an information technology. Lettuce growing in stacked layers in a vertical farm. Photo credit: Valcenteu, 2010. 3D Printing Will Revolutionize the Creation and Distribution of Physical Things For most of the twentieth century, manufacturing three-dimensional solid objects usually took two forms. Some

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layers and building them up into a three-dimensional shape. These techniques have come to be known as additive manufacturing, three-dimensional printing, or 3D printing. The most common types of 3D printers work somewhat like an ink-jet printer.[262] A typical ink-jet passes back and forth over a

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drug molecules built in to be gradually released into the body. Nanomaterials like graphene could be used to create lightweight bulletproof clothing and superfast electronics. 3D printing can also benefit from advances in artificial intelligence, such as software that can optimize an object’s strength, aerodynamic shape, or other properties, and

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designs requiring shapes that would be impossible to manufacture with contemporary methods. New, intuitive software is making it easier for people to create 3D-printed parts without advanced training. As 3D printing has become more widespread, it has begun to revolutionize the manufacturing industry. One major advantage is that it enables inexpensive and fast

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As a result, people with good ideas but relatively little money can bring their innovations to the marketplace and benefit society. Another key advantage of 3D printing is that it permits levels of customization that are not practical with mold-based manufacturing. Even a slight modification usually requires an entirely new mold

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, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars or more. By contrast, even major changes to a 3D-printing design carry no additional cost. As a result, inventors can have exactly the right parts they need to innovate, and consumers can affordably access

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One example among many is producing shoes made to the exact measurements of a customer’s feet for greatly enhanced fit and comfort. A leading 3D-printed footwear company is FitMyFoot, which lets customers use an app to take photos of their feet that are automatically converted into measurements for the printing

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also increasing, high-volume manufacturing will become more practical.[272] In addition to manufacturing of everyday goods like shoes and tools, new research is applying 3D printing to biology. Scientists are currently testing techniques that will make possible the printing of human body tissues and, ultimately, whole organs.[273] The general

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one person to another, which has profound limitations in terms of availability and incompatibility with a patient’s immune system.[275] One potential drawback of 3D printing is that it could be used to manufacture pirated designs. Why pay $200 for a pair of designer shoes if you can download the

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and the smaller objects that go into a building will dramatically lower the construction costs of homes and offices. There are two main approaches to 3D printing a building. The first is to create parts or modules that are subsequently put together—much like how people buy furniture parts from IKEA

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causes. This includes reducing factors such as waste and garbage, light and noise pollution, toxic dust, traffic disruption, and hazards to workers. In addition, 3D printing makes it easier to construct buildings out of materials that are readily and locally available instead of using resources that might be hundreds of miles

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away, like timber and steel. In the future, 3D printing may be used to make skyscrapers easier and cheaper to build. One of the main challenges of high-rise construction is getting people and building

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materials to the upper floors. A 3D-printing system, together with autonomous robots that can use building materials pumped up from ground level in liquid form, will make this process far easier

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to operate. For example, while early shoemaking machines were hand-operated presses that required no formal education to operate, today companies like FitMyFoot use 3D printing to create custom footwear that fits each customer perfectly.[82] So instead of a large number of low-skill jobs, FitMyFoot’s production depends on

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“Anthropogenic Transformation of the Biomes”; “Food and Agriculture Data,” FAOSTAT. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 260 For a closer look at the early history of 3D printing, see Drew Turney, “History of 3D Printing: It’s Older Than You Think,” Design and Make with Autodesk, August 31, 2021, https://www.autodesk.com/redshift/history-of

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-3d-printing; Leo Gregurić, “History of 3D Printing: When Was 3D Printing Invented?,” All3DP, December 10, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20211227053912/https://all3dp.com/2/history-of-3d-printing-when-was-3d-printing-invented/. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 261 For more on the process of

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3D printing itself, see “How Does 3D Printing Work? | The Deets,” Digital Trends, YouTube video, September 22, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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New 3D Printer Is 100X Faster Than What Was Possible: Video,” Inverse, January 26, 2019, https://www.inverse.com/article/52721-high-speed-3d-printing-mass-production; Mark Zastrow, “3D Printing Gets Bigger, Faster and Stronger,” Nature 578, no. 7793 (February 5, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00271-6; “Prediction

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98 abstraction, 35–37 Abundance (Diamandis and Kotler), 112 academic tests, 52 accelerating returns. See law of accelerating returns Acemoğlu, Daron, 129 additive manufacturing. See 3D printing aeroponics, 180–81 Africa Ebola virus outbreak of 2014–2016, 272 electricity, 175 famine and GMOs, 284 poverty rate, 117, 141 After Life, 100–105

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63 renewable energy, 172, 173 risks and perils, 278–85 superintelligent. See superintelligent AI symbolic computing, 14–19, 40 thought-to-text technology, 70–71 3D printing, 184 Turing test, 8–9, 12–13, 63–69 use of term, 13 vertical agriculture, 181–83 Asia, poverty, 138, 141 Asilomar Conference on Beneficial

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249, 252, 261, 276 broken windows theory, 150 Bronze Age, 250 Brown University, 71 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 207–11, 211 bubonic plague, 271 Buddha, 267 buildings, 3D printing of, 170, 187–89 butadiyne, 251 Butler, Samuel, 75–76 C cable TV, 220–21 California, automation and jobs, 197 Calment, Jeanne, 255 Cambridge Declaration

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and, 135–36, 189–94, 235–45 biosimulation, 189–94, 240–41 clinical trials. See clinical trials nanotechnology in, 192, 251, 257–63, 276–77 3D printing in, 184, 185, 186 memories, 38, 55 Merkle, Ralph, 247–48, 249, 251, 264, 393n messenger RNA, 272–73 vaccines, 237–38, 273 metabolism, 

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, 55, 56–58, 57, 61, 62, 63, 164–69, 165–66, 181–82, 211–13, 293–312 prime numbers, 15, 399n printing, 3D. See 3D printing printing press, 113, 122–23, 124, 159–60, 253 prions, 192 prior probability, 120–21 problem input to neural net, 19–20 productivity, 202, 210

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189–94 public perceptions vs. reality of, 111–21 renewable energy, 154, 155–59, 172–76 rising tide of, 194 spread of democracy, 159–63 3D printing, 183–89 vertical agriculture, 169, 171, 178, 179–83 Project Debater, 64 protein folding, 238–40, 284 protein synthesis, 261–62 protons, 7, 97 proton

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189–94 public perceptions vs. reality of, 111–21 renewable energy, 154, 155–59, 172–76 rising tide of, 194 spread of democracy, 159–63 3D printing, 183–89 vertical agriculture, 169, 171, 178, 179–83 teen pregnancy, 118 Tegmark, Max, 330n television, 130–31, 132, 143, 220–21 teleworking, 124, 

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Bottom” (Feynman), 246 third bridge to radical life extension, 135–36, 191–92, 348n Third Epoch. See epochs thought-to-text technology, 70–71 3D printing, 144, 178, 183–89 of buildings, 170, 187–89 medical implants, 184, 185, 186 miniaturization, 169 of solar cells, 173 thumbs, opposable, 8, 37, 245

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

by Adam Greenfield  · 29 May 2017  · 410pp  · 119,823 words

lives, and will be to a still greater extent in the years just ahead: the smartphone and the internet of things; augmented and virtual reality; 3D printing and other technologies of digital fabrication; cryptocurrency and the blockchain; and the dense complex of ideas surrounding algorithms, machine learning, automation and artificial intelligence. We

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welcoming, and that has yet to be achieved just about anywhere. What about the ability to work with a usefully wide variety of materials? Though 3D printing techniques have been successfully extended to concrete, food-grade edible materials and even living tissue,11 at the moment a boxfresh Replicator 2 can only

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. To a degree, we can surely pare down the waste that’s generated in the course of ordinary digital production. For depositional fabrication techniques like 3D printing, clever algorithms can be used to determine the optimal form of structural members; while this approach often lends an uncanny, posthuman aesthetic to machined objects

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. Perhaps mindful of the tendency toward iterative design that went hand-in-hand with its origins in rapid prototyping, this is something the inventors of 3D printing imagined from the outset. At present, the material most often used by printers is the familiar plastic polylactic acid (PLA); made from cornstarch, tapioca roots

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capitalism depends on it being accomplished at extremely low cost, and that in turn requires reliable access to cheap raw materials. For the moment, desktop 3D printing using MakerBots and Ultimakers remains the most accessible form of depositional fabrication. But the filament these printers make use of doesn’t come for free

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present printing things will almost always be more expensive than simply buying them. The high local cost of filament is already limiting the uptake of 3D printing in regions like sub-Saharan Africa: inevitably shipped from China, subject to all the exigencies of immature logistics and corruption, a reel of filament costs

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threaten standing models of production unless there are concerted and significant efforts to lower the cost of feedstock by an order of magnitude, particularly where 3D printing is concerned. The final element necessary to ultra low-cost production is free specification, in which files containing plans for fabrication devices themselves, as well

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made any bones about the fact that it is a commercial, profit-seeking entity,28 it is interesting how much of the early innovation in 3D printing specifically was generated by groups of people who explicitly situated their work in the informational commons, including the RepRap project itself, MakerBot and the community

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on openness. Similarly, both MakerBot and Ultimaker reinvented themselves as closed ecosystems, alienating a significant proportion of their community in the process, including some of 3D printing’s earliest and most prominent developers.29 There is excellent reason to believe that this retrenchment will have strongly negative consequences for the future of

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digital fabrication has been hobbled by practices aimed at securing a remunerative monopoly.30 During the period that Stratasys enforced its patents, the practice of 3D printing went more or less nowhere. It wasn’t until these patents began to expire, after twenty years of painfully slow progress, that the Cambrian explosion

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. The 3D-printing kiosk that used to stand in South London’s Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre was an excellent example of this tendency: it stood for months

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a far larger, younger and more diverse cohort imagining and developing emerging technologies than ever before in history—and precisely because of means like GitHub, 3D printing and cheap Shenzhen production, virtually everyone among that cohort is able to generate prototypes of a sophistication that would have taxed the capabilities of the

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, then we are bound to conclude that this is its sole actual purpose. This is the razor we need to apply to augmented reality, or 3D printing, or distributed autonomous organizations: what is salient is not anything their visionary designers may have had in mind when imagining them, but what states of

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the transition out of capitalism that are based on technologies they simply don’t understand very well. When Jeremy Rifkin argues, for example, that a “3D printing process embedded in an Internet of Things infrastructure means that virtually anyone in the world can [make] his or her own products for use or

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open-source software,” we may very well share his hope for the defeat of scarcity and the emergence of a planetary commons. But in proposing 3D printing, the internet of things and open-source software as the engines of this transition, we know he cannot possibly have reckoned with the contestations, the

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own parts when guided by a skilled operator, c. 1930. 4.Elliot Williams, “Getting It Right By Getting It Wrong: RepRap and the Evolution of 3D Printing,” Hackaday, March 2, 2016. See also Tim Maughan, “The Changing Face of Shenzhen, the World’s Gadget Factory,” Motherboard, August 19, 2015. 5.MakerBot Industries

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.The slightly less-polished Othermill is still cheaper. Other Machine Co., “Othermill,” 2016, othermachine.co/othermill/. 11.James Hobson, “3D Printing Houses From Concrete,” Hackaday, April 15, 2016; National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “3D Printing: Food In Space,” May 23, 2013; Sean V. Murphy and Anthony Atala, “3D Bioprinting of Tissues and Organs,” Nature

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, “How to Succeed When Printing in PLA,” April 29, 2016, matterhackers.com. 16.Protoprint Solutions Pvt. Ltd., “The World’s First Fair Trade Filament for 3D Printing,” 2016. protoprint.in/. 17.Megan Kreiger et al., “Distributed Recycling of Post-Consumer Plastic Waste in Rural Areas,” Proceedings of the Materials Research Society, Volume

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1492, 2013, pp. 91–6., dx.doi.org; Cecilia Paradi-Guilford and Scott Henry, “Can We Shift Waste to Value Through 3D Printing in Tanzania?,” World Bank Information and Communications for Development blog, September 23, 2015, blogs.worldbank.org; on SWaCH, see Solid Waste Collection and Handling Seva

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,” 2016, instructables.com and Definition of Free Cultural Works, February 17, 2015, freedomdefined.org/Definition. 28.Pieter Van Lancker, “The Influence of IP on the 3D Printing Evolution,” Creax, August 12, 2015. 29.Zachary Smith, “MakerBot vs. Open Source—A Founder’s Perspective,” Hoektronics.com, September 21, 2012; See also MakerBot cofounder

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and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 31.John Hornick and Dan Roland. “Many 3D Patents Are Expiring Soon,” 3D Printing Industry, December 29, 2013, 3dprintingindustry.com. 32.Josef Průša, “Open Hardware Meaning,” September 20, 2012, josefprusa.cz/open-hardware-meaning/. 33.Johan Söderberg, Hacking Capitalism

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,” Encyclopædia Britannica 1990 Yearbook of Science and the Future, Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1989, pp. 160–77. 26.Nick Hall, “Building with Robots and Recycled Plastic,” 3D Printing Industry, August 16, 2016, 3dprintingindustry.com/news/building-robots-recycled-plastic-93901/. 27.Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja, “Use Jugaad to Innovate Faster

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Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review, Volume 1, Issue 82, November–December 1973. Index 15M movement, 110, 169 3arabizi, 311 3D printing, 8, 85–6, 88, 93–6, 98, 100–4, 107–8, 110, 281, 295–6, 302, 312 5 Point, the (Seattle dive bar), 84 51

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free

by Cody Wilson  · 10 Oct 2016  · 246pp  · 70,404 words

the heartworms of history.” * * * The eminent science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Although 3D printing may seem like magic, it came from very practical beginnings. A man named Chuck Hull first demonstrated “solid imaging” in the lab in 1984. He

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lucky to have been attending the University of Texas at Austin when we began the work that would lead to the 3D printed pistol. The university was at the forefront of developing 3D printing techniques in the 1980s, and in the years since I began the project, I’ve been regularly surprised by its

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, what stood out to me most was his American optimism. He believed the technology was and would be a great boon to American enterprise. So, 3D printing has been around for a while. But the consumer at large mostly started hearing about it only in the last several years. Why? A New

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the first successful line of retail 3D printers in 2011. If the success of our printed pistol was not your introduction to the idea of 3D printing, it was most likely Makerbot in 2012 and 2013 that caught your attention: the company’s rise and disgraceful fall have been almost totally responsible

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for shaping the public’s perceptions and expectations of 3D printing. And here we are . . . I knew almost none of this when I began the work of Defense Distributed. People have asked me why we printed

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’t in manufacturing, then. It was in publishing. In one moment it solidified for me: we could produce a gun with the most widely available 3D printing technology and then freely distribute the plans over the Internet. We’d share the designs as open-source software. Go for the brass ring of

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with Ben. I had so quickly persuaded myself that besides American gun politics, ours would be a story of the history of the use of 3D printing. Running with an abstract and still undefined technology, we’d get to claim the highest ground of political realism. I fed Ben new lines on

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metal entrails athwart the stained concrete, a young man crossed to receive me. Moving toward him, I began, “My name’s Cody. We emailed about 3D printing.” “Oh. Yeah! Hey, man, welcome to J&B. I’m Brent.” We shook hands. Despite his boyish face, Brent’s battered work clothes and height

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me. I haven’t tried to hide any part of my project.” “Well, can you explain what you were doing?” “Have you guys heard of 3D printing?” No sign of recognition broke over my host’s face. “I am trying to determine if it’s possible to use one of these printers

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’t fail to quickly find opinions. I traced every backlink and screed. Every pseudo-profundity about fires in crowded theaters and corporo-social responsibility. The 3D printing world intersected with a group of self-identified “Makers,” modern successors of the backpage DIY culture, who loaded online comment sections and forums with the

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the words: “And say someone should kill you with your invention?” When it was posted, the piece itself drove the points home well enough. The 3D printing machines will be capable of reproducing themselves. No place in the federal budget for an ATF agent in every home. Kids printing guns while their

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and laughed. Ah, but look at him now. “The bottom line is I like to help people and share my knowledge from my history with 3D printing.” He spoke directly off camera. “I was involved in the early days of 3D Systems when Carl Deckard would roll into the lab in his

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seeing this moment because of the expiration of old patents. 3D Systems had been the first to market with the invention of stereolithography, or literally 3D printing. Like the abuse of laser patents in the early days, 3D practiced the ‘art’ of submarining patents by extending their claims back to the original

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finally expire.” Erin was taking notes. “SLA and SLS?” she asked. “Stereolithography and selective laser sintering. Two of the basic forms of rapid protyping. Remember, 3D printing has been around for a long time to produce prototypes—nonfunctional solid parts. Now we’re in the era of making functional objects. So, those

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blanked the lenses in his glasses and his mouth was agape. “What do you do?” My eyes traveled back to the moldering Teuton. “You know 3D printing?” “Mmm.” He blew smoke. “I’m the guy printing the gun.” He nodded, tapped his cigarette on a glass tray, and said something in German

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search engine, fine, but for the public. We worked together through the night. He on the crowdfunding site, and I on the video. What does 3D printing mean? And can it be subversive? The little clip had become personal to me, more my ode to the technology than a sales pitch. More

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I returned to New York and spent a few days at Hod Lipson’s invitation in Hell’s Kitchen before attending a conference called Inside 3D Printing. I met Andy Greenberg of Forbes at a little deli the evening before my talk and told him it was time for him to come

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and the founder and director of Defense Distributed, a nonprofit organization that developed and published the world’s first open-source gun designs suitable for 3D printing. The design for his famous Liberator pistol has been featured in Domus architecture and design magazine, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

by Martin Ford  · 4 May 2015  · 484pp  · 104,873 words

of reshoring won’t necessarily be around over the long term; as robots continue to get more capable and dexterous and as new technologies like 3D printing come into widespread use, it seems likely that many factories will eventually approach full automation. Manufacturing jobs in the United States currently account for well

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much broader front, let’s look in a bit more depth at two specific technologies that have the potential to loom large in the future: 3D printing and autonomous cars. Both are poised to have a significant impact within the next decade or so, and could eventually unleash a dramatic transformation in

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both the job market and the overall economy. 3D Printing Three-dimensional printing, also known as additive manufacturing, employs a computer-controlled print head that fabricates solid objects by repeatedly depositing thin layers of material

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to build dental crowns, bone implants, and even prosthetic limbs. Design prototypes and architectural models are other popular applications. An enormous amount of hype surrounds 3D printing and, in particular, its potential to upend the traditional factory-based manufacturing model. Much of this speculation is focused on the emergence of inexpensive desktop

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products. I think there are good reasons to be skeptical of such predictions. The most important reason is that the ease of customization offered by 3D printing comes at the cost of economies of scale. If you need to print a few copies of a document, you might do it on your

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home laser printer. If, however, you need 100,000 copies, it would be much more cost-effective to use a commercial printer. 3D printing versus traditional manufacturing involves essentially the same trade-off. While the printers themselves are rapidly falling in price, the same cannot be said of the

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also be a multitude of free or open source designs—probably for nearly any conceivable product—available for download. The bottom line is that personal 3D printing would come to look much like the Internet: lots of free or inexpensive stuff for consumers, but far fewer opportunities for the vast majority of

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people to generate a significant income. This is not to say that 3D printing won’t be a transformative technology. The real action is likely to happen at industrial scale. Rather than displacing traditional manufacturing

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, 3D printing will be integrated with it. In fact, that’s already happening. The technology has made significant inroads in the aerospace industry, where it is often

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used to create lighter-weight components. General Electric’s aviation division plans to use 3D printing to produce at least 100,000 parts by 2020, resulting in a potential weight reduction of 1,000 pounds for a single aircraft engine.1

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-effective: for example, in creating those parts that need to be customized, or perhaps in printing complex components that would otherwise require extensive assembly. Where 3D printing can’t be used to directly fabricate high-volume parts, it will often find a role in rapidly creating the molds and tools required in

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traditional manufacturing techniques. In other words, 3D printing is likely to end up being another form of factory automation. Manufacturing robots and industrial printers will work in unison—and increasingly without the involvement

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in printing human organs. San Diego–based Organovo, a company that specializes in bio-printing, has already fabricated experimental human liver and bone tissue by 3D-printing material containing human cells. The company hopes to produce a complete printed liver by the end of 2014. These initial efforts would produce organs for

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, the implications would be staggering for the roughly 120,000 people awaiting organ transplants in the United States alone.4 Aside from addressing the shortage, 3D printing would also allow organs to be fabricated from a patient’s own stem cells, essentially eliminating the danger of rejection after a transplant. Food printing

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is another popular application. Hod Lipson suggests in his 2013 book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing that digital cuisine may turn out to be 3D printing’s “killer app”—in other words, the application that motivates huge numbers of people to go out and buy a home

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to install doors, windows, and other fittings. However, it is easy to imagine future construction printers being upgraded to handle multiple materials. The impact of 3D printing on manufacturing may be relatively muted simply because factories are already highly automated. The story could be very different in the construction industry. Building wood

…

that more and more of the everyday objects we use are likely to incorporate advanced processors and smart software. To me, this suggests that personal 3D printing is unlikely to keep pace with the products consumers really want to buy. A hobbyist, of course, might print most of a product and then

…

_a_liver_is_expected_in_2014?taxonomyId=128&pageNumber=2. 5. Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman, Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 2013). 6. Mark Hattersley, “The 3D Printer That Can Build a House in 24 Hours,” MSN Innovation, November 11, 2013,

…

capacity, 63–64 innovation and improvements in, 69–73 predictions of impact of, 31–32, 33–34 S-curve of, 69, 70–71 construction industry, 3D printing and, 180–181 Consumer Price Index (CPI), 38n consumer robots, 197n consumers Chinese, 223–227 demand and, 196–197 permanent income hypothesis, 210–211 workers

…

, consumer demand in, 223–227 employment autonomous cars and, 176, 181–191 nanotechnology and, 246 offshoring and, 119–121 relationship between technology and, 175–176 3D printing and, 176, 177–181 See also unemployment Employment Policies Institute, 14 Engines of Creation (Drexler), 242, 244 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), 32n environmental

…

–131 eugenics, 236n “Eureqa,” 108–109 Europe, college graduates overqualified for occupations in, 251 European Union, job polarization and, 50 Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing (Lipson), 180 Facebook, xvi, 89, 92, 106, 114, 137, 152, 175, 231, 236 factory reshoring, 8–12 Fallows, James, 71 Fantastic Voyage (Kurzweil & Grossman), 235

…

(television program), 146 housing costs, guaranteed income and, 270 “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” (Krugman), 205 humanoid manufacturing robot, 5–6 human organs, 3D printing of, 180 humans effect of automation on skills, 254 merging with machines of the future, 121–128, 234–235 Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL), 156–157

…

, xii Macintosh OS, 6 Maguire, Eleanor, 209n malpractice, artificial intelligence and, 150 Manhattan College, 235 Manjoo, Farhad, 153, 172 Mankiw, N. Gregory, 116, 117 manufacturing 3D printing and, 177–180 jobs in, 8–12, 54–55 Marcus, Gary, 231, 237 market health care as dysfunctional, 161–174 as renewable resource, 264–267

…

, 258 “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” (Feynman), 241 Thiel, Peter, 64, 236 thinking machine, 229–233. See also Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 3D printing, 176, 177–181 three-dimensional chips, 70, 70n Thrun, Sebastian, 132, 133, 134, 135, 139, 182, 256 Time (magazine), 111, 160, 191, 235 Tokyo University

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