So far, 2013 has been the year of the 3D printer. How will the 3D printer change our world in the coming decades? Will the transition be as transformative as the internet revolution?
Nice article, though you may want to switch out that image as the 3D Touch by Bits from Bytes (pictured) was recently discontinued by their parent company, 3D Systems. The irony of that aside, I'd be careful to think that 3D Printing will follow any kind of accelerated adoption curve. What's driven down the cost of desktop 3D printing is not disruption in the cost of the components (as was the case in PCs) but the expiration of key patents held by their inventors (Stratasys and 3D Systems.) That's given a lot of false signals which suggest 3D printing is poised for exponential growth, but its important not to conflate cost to demand or volume. While the falling cost of 3D Printers makes the technology more accessible, a greater number of applications will be needed to drive demand. We should be thinking about those applications and the ecosystem which supports them rather than viewing this change as inevitable.
Thanks for suggesting to change the image! Very ironic. And I definitely believe that this year has indicated that there will be immense demand for the expansion of 3D printing (especially if 3D printers can be developed that can make meals/food). But your point is well taken, there growth may not be inevitable, but I feel it is highly likely. At the very least they will completely transform hospitals and manufacturing centres.
I agree there's huge potential, one of the reasons I'm working on a start-up in the space. However, I think the media has done a really poor job of explaining 3D printing and so its important to separate the narrative from the reality. I'm not sure I agree with that 3D printing will revolutionize mainstream manufacturing. While it's great for specialized, high-precession parts like this which could not be made any other way. It's highly inefficient for any kind of manufacturing at scale. The economics of 3D printing are fundamentally different from traditional manufacturing in that there's no economy of scale. That's exciting news for the medical industry because there is also no overhead, which means that customization (think implants, prosthetics) can be easily and inexpensively customized. However, its more likely 3D printing will be used for applications which are already customized (i.e. dental crowns) and replace existing tooling (i.e. CNC). That's likely to bring down the costs of medical devices, but hardly a revolution. As for food and houses, those seem pretty limited and while printed organs are super exciting, that process has about as much in common with 3D Printing as it does with gardening. That said, I think 3D Printing will change our lives in a number of equally important ways. 1. In the short term, the falling cost of 3D printing will allow designers and engineers to iterate and learn from their users much faster while reducing the barriers to entry for product design and development. This coupled with small-batch manufacturing services (like Protolabs), and crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter allow anyone to quickly design, market, sell, produce and distribute new products and services. In the same way elastic computing (the cloud) has enabled a new class of developers to create and distribute software faster and less expensively, elastic fabrication (3D printing) is enabling a new generation of makers to manufacture and sell hardware more efficiently. 2. In the longer-term, improvements in the performance of 3D printing have the potential to change the way we design a lot of things. While a lot of what we consume is well-designed for a generic customer, its easy to imagine a class of consumer goods which would benefit from deep customization, particularly anything that interacts with the body/ touches the skin. Shoes build around foot scan, represent a significant shift from standard US/ UK sizes. But its more than just automating bespoke design, digital fabrication and generative design tools can build objects from streams of data. What if that shoe was optimized for your walking patterns or local terrain. What if learned from each step you took and evolved with every print, what if all of our shoes communicated with each other, what would we learn about the way we walk and wear them. Exciting stuff, no? To get to a world of talking shoes, I think we need to deal with short-term adoption. As I see it we're in the early days of the cloud, before ec2 and heroku. The underlying technology is there but we have to build out the services and ecosystem to support people who want to take avantage of it.
My thoughts on this is that (depending on the sophistication and price of a 2020 or 2030 3D printer) mainstream manufacturing would be challenged in many niche sectors. If a 3D printer for your home can print out lipstick, shoes, a hamburger, a new dog leash, a new tire for your car, a new household robot, etc. then what is going to stop people from investing in a household 3D printer instead of going to Walmart or the mall?I'm not sure I agree with that 3D printing will revolutionize mainstream manufacturing.
I agree - though none of those examples are niche or well suited for 3D printing (except maybe the robot). It's not a question of whether the technology will continue to improve (it will) but how it will evolve and what it will be used for. Most manufacturing is complex and benefits from scale, not only economically but in terms of quality assurance. I wouldn't want to drive on a 3D printed tire (and I bet my insurance company wouldn't either). Furthermore, it seems the companies who design and manufacture goods would be hard-pressed to give that part of their business up and so long as they can produce goods for cheaper than you can make them on your own, 3D printed alternatives will be relegated to niche categories (i.e. luxury goods). I do think that homes will have 3D printers in the near future, though I don't think it will be as a cost-saving measure or alternative to traditional consumption. Rather I think it will serve an educational/ entertainment purpose if its not being used in some professional/ prosumer way.
3d printing is pretty exciting, but I think predicting everyone designing and manufacturing their own objects is overstating it. We don't have everyone writing software, we have a relatively small number of people writing software and everyone else living in walled gardens. We don't have really grassroots media, as people predicted when blogs were taking off, we have blogging coopted by old media and everyone telling Twitter and Facebook what they had for lunch. I felt like the Internet revolution was a real revolution when I was growing up, but it hasn't really been. We can barely defend the Internet itself, if anything we're losing ground. Maybe file sharing was a threat to the recording industry, until ITunes. Free software plateaued at developer boxes, servers and embedded system, and you can't even say "free software" instead of "open source" anymore without being perceived as an overzealous neckbeard. I don't think technology can really be revolutionary anymore, whatever looks promising gets defanged before it becomes widely adopted.
I slightly disagree with your opinion on grassroots media. There are tons of quality blogs, websites, podcasts, and YouTube channels that wouldn't exist without the internet allowing for cheap production and access. Actually most of my information comes from these sources.
When the New York Times, the Guardian, HuffPo and the Atlantic all say X and a thousand blogs say Y, X is the story. We had alternative weeklies, zines and tape culture before the Internet, but the power to shape what people believed still belonged to a handful of organizations. The details have changed and which few organizations have that power has changed, but there's been no revolutionary change.
Right, and especially with the veneer of serendipity that you get from stumbling across (or upon ) a news article, it's easy to miss that there's a common set of beliefs behind most of it. They're not all that nefarious as hidden beliefs go, but you could still easily get the impression if all you read was these sites that you were doing everything a good democratic citizen should just by reading 8th grade reading level coverage that's designed not to scare off any advertisers. There's a huge unrealized potential for a more educated populace if we could collectively move past that.
I fall in between your two opinions. There are tons of quality sites out there, but they take a little bit of effort to find. That effort seems to be just enough to bias postings on reddit, hubski, facebook and probably every other large social media site heavily in favor of a handful of massive sources. Just check how many top-rated submissions are from The Atlantic, HuffPo, The Guardian, BBC or PBS. There have been a few interesting posts in /r/TheoryOfReddit recently with stats to back this up. It takes a concerted effort on the part of an online community - or a good blocking feature, thank you hubski! - to keep from being flooded by the same news that's already getting exposure everywhere else.
Very true re: your opinion on blogs/websites. The world of podcasts and YouTube channels are a different story. Almost all of the best content for both are provided by "grassroots" entities. Especially on YouTube. Everything from The Young Turks (politics) to VSauce (science) is being dominated by people who started with no institutional support and have remained successful as independent entities.
Great article as usual. What sort of traffic does your website get? I post your articles to my Facebook whenever I read them, and I've recommended your blog to several people. It's entered my list of websites with required reading, which is awesome.
Thanks for your support flagamuffin! I appreciate it! Traffic fluctuates month by month depending on blog, podcasts, and video output. So far, always over 10,000 per month.
I see copyright infringement being the only regulated or illegal activity. The whole "YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CAR?" thing is becoming more real. No, we won't be able to print a car anytime soon or anything that complicated for a long long time, but what if you're printing designer silverware? Or some Sam Adams beer glasses? Or some other plastic parts that are for specific products, like the batter compartment cover for my remote that keeps breaking? The piratebay already has a section for "3D blueprints", so they are already working towards that type of activity. I see 3D printers no more of an inherit threat than DVD/CD burners, but the details will be in what you are printing and whether or not that's someone elses product you're duplicating at home. We get into the same argument as we did with movies/music/tv/media/etc... just because you can duplicate it at home and "aren't actually stealing a physical product", and are only "making a copy", doesn't mean that people aren't still taking intellectual property that someone else spent a lot of time on, and doesn't mean there are not losses with things like this. All the printer/burner/downloader is doing is bipassing the manufacturing process, which is only a small part of most intellectual property, and research, and engineering that goes into a product. So, I guess I just see more of the status quo as far as the intellectual property battles go, and it will just bring that more into the spotlight than ever before. It will be interesting to say the least once 3D printing takes on more widespread adoption.
I thought about that, but there really aren't many illegal items in most countries. Other than certain types of guns. Chemically printing drugs is probably a ways off.
3d printed cars aren't all that far off. It's just the body, and probably will be for some time because processes for 3d printing metal aren't ready for prime time (and using a mill or lathe makes more sense for many parts anyway), but 3d printing a body and buying off the shelf parts for what can't be printed is close enough to downloading a car. I don't think printers large enough to do it are practical for home use just because they're so big, but it's not much of a stretch to imagine going to a service bureau to do it, like you would go to Kinkos/a printer if you needed large format prints.
Those are good questions. I suppose it depends on whether we have a catastrophe related to someone 3D printing a virus or something like that. I'm not sure if they'll ever be illegal... but maybe regulated once portable home versions are cheap and easily accessible for the average person? Not sure, but really good question.
Emphasizes exactly what living through a revolution feels like. Dozens of consequences we have no clue about yet. I wonder what the proponents of the Green Revolution would say if they knew genetically-modified foods were being blacklisted by major grocery outlets for no good reason, fifty-odd years after they began saving millions of lives?