Maybe he should have chosen to just print black and white.
So this is based on an article I recently read about a 3D printing company that got into hot water for making guns! You heard that right! They’re printing guns! Now, this may seem a little “Star Treky”, but the technology is here and it’s getting better every day. First it was with simple plastics, but as time progresses, more durable materials like harder plastics or even metals will be used to make whatever you want.
The idea behind this project is actually quite amazing. They wanted something sort of a “wiki” or “database” to just upload designs to and allow members to download an item to print at home. Fully functioning. Just imagine the implications of this. Well, beyond the obvious “every idiot can now just make a gun” one. Because it means we’ll have absolute freedom to create anything and everything we desired, as long as we have a design code, a printer, and raw materials. Think about it, you’d be able to print anything from computers to games to toys to well, guns and ammo… And the concept doesn’t stop there. I’ve seen work being done with “chemistry printers”, that mix a few basic elements to create complex chemicals. This was more for the pharmaceuticals so you could just print up some Advil when you have a headache. Beyond that, when the tech improves, we may even construct organisms like cells or bacteria and I can’t imagine we’d stop there.
Then there’s the other side to that… See, we as a species are totally stupid. For all the imaginative and amazing creations we come up with, we find ways of using those creations to kill eachother off. So, these printers will see immediate abuse in making weaponry, piracy, and illegal drugs. I mean, how the heck would you stop this? All you’d need to do is download the blueprints. The printers do the rest of the work. And who will regulate what gets downloaded or printed? The government? Right, because they do such a great job with all those movies and games on Pirate Bay already… Point is, this is a wild new territory that we’ve entered; there is absolutely zero legislation to regulate the “printing” of items. Which brings us around to the point of this article, which is… well… who and how do we approach this type of thing? The company in the article got nipped in the bud from the printer manufacture’s end by revoking their lease agreement, but that’s not going to work when these things go mainstream. Which, of course, will happen.
So you can see the problem here. While there are regulations against just smithing a gun outright, what regulates the print of it? And if it falls under that ATF jurisdiction, how will they monitor and control, say, millions of printing machines? And who’s going to stop pirates from just printing up a few Skylanders or a nice new iPhone? Or drugs? Answer… they’re not going to be able to control it. This will rapidly get out of control and probably result in some MAJOR reworkings of how consumers purchase items or what consumers will have access to.
See, all of this is what they were talking about when they said most “type 1″ civilizations don’t make it for very long. Meaning, trying to transition to a “Star Trek” esque civilization will be the greatest challenge our species will ever face. Seems a bit grandiose, but it’s true. The problem is that people will have access to technology so powerful that it could easily destroy us all. That’s the problem. It’s not like just printing up a few MLP action figures will cause the world to end, rather having the power to print up a nuke or deadly disease or destroy the consumerist driven economy… You can see things escalated a bit quick, but there are issues here that we’ve never had to deal with before and will be at our doorstep sooner than we think. Personally, I think it’ll just even itself out and people will complain about it until the end of time… just like with every other bit of technology we have. But a cool outcome would be something like a Star Trek system where you get paid in some sort of credit that you purchase things in the replicators with. So the prices become fixed and have a massively stable economy. It also mean it will be heavily regulated and watched, kind of like those postage printers. There may even be limits built into the machines as to what is printable and what is not.
In any case… this is all very exciting! Sure there’s going to be abuse of the system, but just imagine all the great things that can come of this type of technology! Though I’m sure the folks at Steam will find a way to integrate it into their DRM… >)
(Ps… for those of you that don’t have printers… or at least the old ones, some make you buy a new color cartridge if you run out of just one color! And they’re expensive! And it’s always cyan it seems… the color that you’d think is used the least… freakin’ cyan!)
Source: Escapist
Here’s this week’s question:
How do you think 3D printing should be regulated?
I don’t think it should be regulated at all.
MLP action figures for EVERYONE!!!! >D
We’ll probably see a change in how we look at consumerism. I mean, why should I pay for a phone, if the company can just print one out? I can do that at home myself.
and that’ll be the main issue… why buy when you can just piratebay the blueprints and whip you up a copy?
It seems something brightened my day up a little :)
teehehehe! >D
Well it will play havoc with our economy for a while and force our monetary system to go completely digital to avoid people printing money.
But long term the concept of value is in two parts:
1.) Physical labour and materials, (reduced to the energy cost to power the printer and the cost of “ink”) Once we get the technology far enough along this should put an end to sweatshops and factories of all kinds. It will be cheaper and faster for the company to sell the blueprint and have the consumer print it out themselves. The manufacturing industry we be redundant and everyone in it will need to get a job doing something else. Most of the transportation industry too, not to mention all of the warehouse workers we will no longer need.
While this will be a MAJOR shift and cause a significant recession as people switch to other jobs; I think it will be a long-term net gain for society. The jobs that are being removed are the minimum-wage mind-numbing tasks that promote mediocrity. If we can automate away the jobs the low end of society does, hopefully those same people will be able to start doing things that improve society as a whole instead of just being cogs in the machine.
It will suck for those people in the affected industries, but humans are pretty resilient. The move from an agrarian society to an industrial one was a similar shift. Almost everyone was a farmer originally because if you didn’t farm, you didn’t have food to eat. Within a generation or so technology became advanced enough that most of the people who used to be farmers were doing other jobs yet still having enough food to eat.
2.) The design or intellectual property value. This is a lot more of an issue. We are already struggling with it in the world of digital sales and piracy.
Currently manufactures make money by forcing you to buy a new X every couple of years, (either through it wearing out or by producing a better X.) They make money every time they make a new X so they have actually done something to benefit society and they get rewarded for it.
In the world of digital sales however there are 2 different models currently fighting each other. What the big corporations want and try to enforce through governments, (and fail horribly at.) Where every time the consumer gets something the corporation gets paid, (even if the corporation didn’t do anything to enable that consumer getting the product because they made it 30 years ago and haven’t thought of it since.)
The other system being what the pirates and consumers want where the corporation only gets paid if the consumer thinks the product is worth supporting. Many songs, TV shows and movies have earned huge profits because they were pirated by people who weren’t sure about them or couldn’t afford them and those people either later bought the product, (less often) or more often told all their friends the product was good and their friends bought it legally.
The corporation’s desired system can only work in a totalitarian system where people don’t dare pirate information, (not a feasible system in my mind.)
The pirate’s system on the other hand I’d like to think is feasible but it does rely on the kindness of the people… not something most of us would want to bet our lives or livelihoods on.
I see one possible future as a bunch of kickstarter campaigns. If enough people support Apple then the iPhone 9 gets designed and the plans are available for anyone to torrent then 3D print.
TOO MUCH! IT R TOO MUCHEZ 4 BRAINZ 2 HANDLEZ!
whellp… couldn’t've said it better myself! though I wonder even if we’ll get to the point where this becomes a problem. folks seem so lethargic to change even 1 thing about society (just look at our current situations) that it may be centuries before we have to deal with it. then again, that’s the problem with progress… cause it might just force us to deal with things we were never prepared for.
as foor drugs, its meen illegal business will fall. THEY will make sure its not on internet. more likely they have on USB stick or something. then the thin alredy mentioned in the comic, cost. i think it would be easier to just go to the shop. as for the creating cells… YEARS have to pass to be even close to this. same with working with metals. so the real guns and rocket launchers are not a threed. maybe toygun. politics are just a fat ******** nobody care about, and they dont care about much. what i am waiting for, is the ‘warp tech’ like in startrek and some videogames, but it probably wont be in my time :/ WARP TECH FOR EVERYONE!! BANK ROBBERY NO PROBLEM anymore, just warp the emoney out of the bank.
I can just see it now… a guy on the street corner in a rain coat selling thumb drives…
XD
If something like this were to get big, tracking who downloads what probably would get alot bigger too. The guy on the corner with a coat full of thumb drives might not be too far off for buying something that is illegal but not too serious.
When reading this the first thing that comes to my mind is the printer in the sponge-bob episode “Not normal”
ha! yes!
I was discussing this the other day with someone. With nanotechnology becoming more and more advanced soon (within 20 years easy) we’ll see home based nano assemblers. Assuming we don’t completely wipe each other out… what kind of economic system evolves in a society where all basic material wants are satisfied? We kicked around the idea of information as currency but with systems for illegal exch ange of information already in place that kind of kills that idea.
Seriously, google “The Technological Singularity” it’s scary.
you’d think they’d have economists working contingency plans for when stuff like this happens… you’d think anyways…
If it ever comes and they actually allow the technology “out there” then the old model will die but the raw material suppliers will be top of the chain. Add in the public domain / donate if you like it market and the big boys will be relegated to the back pages of the dark ages where they belong.
The only constraint / limitation to this technology I speculate is the “ink” and the power to run the systems. Phone booth reactor in the backyard might be a solution BUT we have all these stone age idiots running around still so I would be highly nervous about the whole thing betting out past the first world into the knuckledragger zealots hands.
eh, and this is assuming they’ll be used for evil purposes… in reality, it’ll just be nerds like me printing up life-sized action figures of super heroes… XD
I forsee the system going to subscription and service based rather than item based. So anyone who has the materials can make a phone, but to get any use out of it you have to pay for the right to use the network.
much like the way gaming/movies are going now. like steam/origin/amazon.
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