Gantolandon wrote:

So, after a "your child can print a gun at home" scare, suddenly there are talks about DRM and restricted items... I bet no one have seen that coming.

We were discussing it back on the Extropians mailing list in the mid-90's. Just saying. As always the question is "who owns your technology?" After all, most of the software on most computers is licensed rather than owned and has a disloyal tendency to call home - it might actually work for somebody else. You likely do not have access to the digital internals of your car. And you are not allowed to mess with the electricity system of your house. Some of these limits are fairly sensible, others less so. To properly DRM manufacturing you need to limit what can be constructed to an approved subset that cannot be used to make a manufacturing system. That is likely very, very hard to do unless the number of objects you can make is very limited (bad for consumer interest) and their resolution is much lower than the printer requires to function. Typically people select fairly open technologies when they find that the restrictions prevent them from doing what they want: walled gardens only work when there is no serious desire to climb the walls.

Gantolandon wrote:

So, after a "your child can print a gun at home" scare, suddenly there are talks about DRM and restricted items... I bet no one have seen that coming. Well, good luck with that. This system seems extremely vulnerable - one could falsify the output from the authorization server. Not to mention that this won't work with open source printers like RepRap.

Actually, this has little to nothing to do with the gun printing. In fact, quite the opposite; it's more about big businesses securing their products and patents than anything more than it's about DIY projects. Honda will not appreciate it if people have the power to download unrestricted copies of Civic blueprints and print out as many cars as they'd like, without getting permission or paying Honda beforehand. Even Baretta probably doesn't care if you design your own guns. That said, I see this having a huge potential of biting companies in the ass. If the authentication system simply checks the blueprints against a database, then the question becomes "how similar does the product have to be to set off alarms?" If the system isn't sensitive enough, then its simply a matter of creating DRM-free versions that are just barely different so they pass muster. If the system is too sensitive, it has the potential to trample DIY projects. They'll be walking on glass trying to implement such a restriction system.

thelabmonkey wrote:

I can see this pretty quickly going the way of things like home distilling... easy to do on your own, but highly illegal. If you have a DIY printer instead of a licensed name brand with all the attendant DRM, it's a federal crime.

Except even in the case of home distiling, the government learned that it needed to back off a bit. Hence why it is fully legal to homebrew up to a certain amount of spirits. Even with heavy regulation of 3d printing, I imagine that homemade printers will not completely disappear or be banned. Otherwise we'll be looking at the next-generation prohibition era… and we all know how that turned out.

I'm a little confused. I can make guns in my garage *right now*. What exactly is the big deal about 3d printers?

3d printers are not only dangerous due to ability to construct guns, but also due to their potential to rapidly increase unemployment and destabilize world economy.

GreyBrother wrote:

Its getting easier, especially for laymen. Compare hackers to script kiddies.

Why are script kiddies a problem?

Well, 3D printers are useful, but they are not going to be economy shattering straight away. Yes, they might destabilize a few countries dependent on low-end manufacturing like current China, but they are not a major issue globally because manufacturing itself is a fairly small part of the economic cake. Check out the numbers of people in the manufacturing industry: they are going the way of the farmers. This might not stop politicians from doing stupid things, they have "saved jobs" in bad ways before. And think of the children - they might be able to print out naughty objects! But the real power of micromanufacturing is radical customisation. If you have an idea, you can make it. Now. (I just saw a gleaming 3D printer in the cryonic patient handling facility I visited today. They used it to make custom device parts and very neat models of their cryotanks.)

Extrasolar Angel wrote:

Looking at the destructive potential of 3D printing to society, I am all for it to be heavily regulated by the government. I am not against some societies using 3D printers at will and in totally free manner-but I would like them to be in far off colonies on Mars or in Asteroid Belt. But to unleash them on our society might be very, very harmful.

I disagree. I see 3D printing no more dangerous to society than the printing press or the internet. It will change the world, perhaps shake the current societal model at its foundation, but probably won't make it any worse.

Extrasolar Angel wrote:

That depends, alcohol was widely in use before prohibition, therefore it was difficult to control it. This is an emerging technology. There are examples of successful prohibition/government control-nuclear propulsion, guns, LSD come to mind.

Arguable. Drugs like LSD and guns are still widely distributed throughout the world (LSD is an especially ironic one, considering the U.S. government is largely responsible for its popularity). Nuclear propulsion is kept under control simply by preventing the public from having the resources and understanding to replicate it. But 3D printing isn't much like any of these. Resources for 3D printing are not significantly difficult to acquire, and the production materials are very cheap. Like homemade distilleries and fermentable plants, how do you control common plastics, circuitboards and metal to a large enough degree to prevent 3D printing? Plus, 3D printing is nearing a decade old already, and already becoming a burgeoning market. It will be as easy to shut down at this point as peer-to-peer filesharing (something that is only slightly older). The genie is out of the bottle, there's no stopping it now.

Improved efficiency in the economy tends to lead to job loss. The people who lose their jobs are simply not needed anymore. This is not a world ending disaster. We have survived many such transitions before such farming, industry, and computers. People will inevitably get new jobs to reflect the new abilities of the market. Once they need money, survival instincts will begin to speak loudly and they'll shallow their pride (they might still make a fuss though). I would also like to point out that sometimes society advancement occurs because the old ways die with the old people who support them. To an extent, you have to be prepared to ignore some of the criticisms of others and press forward. It is the doers that change the world, not those who criticize. Just try not to do anything too rash as sometimes the people supporting the old ways do have a valid point (for instance, allowing for the production of guns or nukes might be a bad thing).

Arenamontanus wrote:

Economies of scale. How many nails per second do you think a factory can produce? How many can a 3d printer make?

One of the perks of distributed manufacture is that mass manufacture stops having as much appeal. Why would we need a factory-scale production of nails if people can print however many nails they may need for personal use? Now large scale projects (such as engineering projects, building construction and the like) will still have use for mass manufacture, but even then crowdsourcing might be a more appealing and versatile option. Why have a factory produce thousands of parts per day when you can have the entire citizenry of a metropolis produce millions together at their homes?

Arenamontanus wrote:

3D printing is awesome, but it is slow because it is general. This makes it good for customisation and unusual goods, but it is not going to win against special purpose devices making common objects.

I see that argument in the same light as the detractors of parallel processing a decade ago. We thought that faster processors would outclass parallel processing in every respect because of the difficulties in producing efficient parallel processing algorithms. Today, parallel processing is becoming the de facto standard for computing, and virtually all non-mobile devices today have multi-core systems (and we only avoid parallel processing for mobile devices because of the power draw). The biggest disadvantage I see for 3D printing is scalability. If you need a large component, the average home printer will not suffice. I imagine that despite the fears of people, printing cars won't be all that common... unless it's some sort of legocar-esque vehicle that consists of nothing but small component assembly. Furthermore, many aspects of home construction will require larger scale manufacture, as a home printer couldn't build frame components, or drywall slabs, or many other parts of a home which are generally somewhat large. But even then, I still see the potential for 3D printing. [url=www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdbJP8Gxqog]Contour Crafting[/url] showed us that a large-scale 3D printer could be used to mass manufacture homes at a fraction of the time (and potentially cost) of regular manufacture OR factory manufacture. As the technology improves, general manufacture might achieve a pace rapid enough that any advantages of a specialty factory are negligible. We're already seeing that happen in the printing industry, as print-on-demand becomes a cheaper and more effective means of book publishing, gradually catching up to traditional press-printing. It isn't there yet, but it shows the potential.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

Having used 3D printers, let me say I'm really not TOO worried about it. Just looking around my work space, I see two or three objects I would make with a 3D printer (a fork and a mirror). The rest? Paper and formica -- wrong materials. Printer, laptop, monitor -- too complex, too small scale, using difficult-to-handle materials. Food? Well I might customize it, but most of food is in the foodstock, not so much the shape. Sure, if my car breaks a fender, I'll fab up a replacement. But I'm not going to be able to fab up a new transmission or a tire.

For now. New prototype 3D printers use materials beyond the usual ABS plastic. There are 3D printers in the works that utilize cement mixtures, metal powders, and even rubber synthetics. Down the line, it may very well be possible to print those very things you don't see as likely today. It is a burgeoning technology. Who knows where it will be in a couple decades.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

For me, the big excitement isn't that I can reduce costs by not buying stuff. It's that I can get stuff that's otherwise not available. I can get an Eclipse Phase miniature, or d7s, or funny glasses. Super-customized novelties that, if they're available, are too expensive. There's only a handful of objects around the house I'll be able to print up, and they make up such a small amount of my annual budget, it's hardly worth mentioning.

I see this sort of hobby interest in 3D printing being the standard reason for it for at least the next 10 to 15 years. I think we are still a long ways for serious utility 3D printing in the home. But I'm still very excited about it all. I wish I could afford a 3D printer myself.

Extrasolar Angel wrote:

3d printers are not only dangerous due to ability to construct guns, but also due to their potential to rapidly increase unemployment and destabilize world economy.

They also have the potential to let people who have been unable to find jobs for the past four or five years earn livable incomes with their skills.

Decivre wrote:

I see this sort of hobby interest in 3D printing being the standard reason for it for at least the next 10 to 15 years. I think we are still a long ways for serious utility 3D printing in the home. But I'm still very excited about it all. I wish I could afford a 3D printer myself.

Visit your friendly neighborhood hackerspace (http://hackerspaces.org/). And if you happen to visit the DC metroplex sometime, by all means pay HacDC a visit, we would love to have you. :)

RustedPantheress wrote:

With so many new technologies, people have complained about the potential that it has to destroy jobs. My question about those new technologies: How many jobs can it create?

The economist Tyler Cowen had an interesting chapter in his book "The Great Stagnation" about the Internet. He argued that while most of the past big innovations have produced a lot of jobs (and removed old ones) Internet is somewhat different: the amount of good it can produce is not strongly correlated to the number of people working. Twitter doesn't need that many employees, despite connecting millions. This is bad news from an economic growth perspective, but he points out it might be good from a happiness growth perspective. Too bad happiness and reputations cannot pay pensions yet. So 3D printing might potentially be just like that: now we can all print out the best objects somebody designs and opensources - which means that there is no real market for the second, third and tenth best cases unless they fulfill some niche need. So it might indeed destroy jobs but make our lives better.