“With your household duplicator, you can make everything you need for life, Channing. The Terran Electric label on your duplicator is the label of the New Way of Living.”
- Venus Equilateral, Pandora's Millions by George O. Smith (1945)
Since the dawn of modern Science Fiction the instant creation or replication of objects on the spot has been a recurring theme. With the success of Star Trek and its (food) replicators, the idea became widely popular - and dismissed as impossible.
But as it happened quite often in recent decades with concepts of science fiction, the idea of such “replicators” is now almost within humanity’s grasp - the advent of 3D printing is opening up new and previously unknown paths of technological development. From printing houses to actual human limbs - current experiments are promising and give a glimpse of the potential of this technology that might usher in an era of new economic and social paradigms.
In this blog we will explore the current and potential future impact 3D printing has on a variety of fields and society and economy as a whole. We will portray specific applications like printing food, weapons or organs as well as create scenarios of how a future society might look like. We will also take a more high-level view and critically discuss what the implication of 3D printing will be for social and economic interaction.
What is 3D printing?
Classical manufacturing processes as they have been known and practiced by humanity for thousands of years work either by “subtracting” parts from the raw material till it became the intended shape (e.g. sharpening an axe or when making a statue from a block of marble), by casting the (heated) material into a shape and/or by assembling smaller (in one of the other two ways) pre-made parts to a larger entity.
3D printing in the other hand works in an additive process (that’s why it is sometimes - though not often - called “additive manufacturing”) i.e. an object is constructed by adding more and more raw material (currently usually in layers) till the object is completed. While this sounds quite similar to casting material, it does not require any mould - it just creates the object on the spot. The most important difference to the other processes is however how the 3D printing process is controlled by a computer. 3D models, that can be created e.g. with Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs or by 3D scanning an object, are fed into the printer to start the manufacturing of a real-life version of the 3D model. In its most basic version nothing else is needed for starting the manufacturing but the printer and its raw material - which means no specialised expertise and equipment is necessary for manufacturing relatively complex structures. The technology of 3D printing has actually been around since the 1980s, but only in early 2010s became available commercially and accessible also by regular users.
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| The Makerbot 2 - currently one of the most popular household 3D printers |
Applications
Since 3D-printing is more of a certain process and method only possible due to the progress and combination of different technologies, the applications of 3D printing are only limited by the ability of materials to be assembled by additive layering. While this is commonly associated with classical “construction” material like metals or plastic, recent advances in biotechnology made it possible to print with organic material, leading to experiments with printing organs, body parts and food. Similarly chemists managed to create chemical compounds using 3D printing techniques.
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| A 3D printed prototype of a potential city layout |
There are many more areas that might be or are already being changed by 3D printing, such as design (by quickly creating design or product prototypes), manufacturing of objects in small numbers (no need to re-module an entire assembly line), logistics (many objects do not need to be shipped anymore, but can be downloaded and printed), art, clothing, archaeology (by being able to replicate objects just by scanning and printing them instead of creating a mould which can often damage ancient objects) and even the construction of housing. These topics emerged already now in the infancy of the technology and one can only fathom the massive changes that might still be there to come.
Problems
With great potential for change also comes great potential for disruption and abuse. One 3D printing has spread into mainstream and the technology improves enough to also use more difficult materials like alloys, this will essentially mean that the physical enforcement of bans on certain objects (like symbols, weapons, toys) as it has been practiced for hundreds of years, will have to change. Getting a virtual 3D model in the internet is significantly easier, faster, cheaper and less risky than getting e.g. an AK47 in Dublin.
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| First entirely 3D printed gun |
Additionally the intellectual property right - which is anyway already heavily challenged by the emergence of the internet - will need to be completely re-thought just as the definition of the connection between intellectual and physical property as this tie will be much more relevant in the future.
The applications and problems are just the most immediate impact 3D printing will have in the next one or two decades. However one can assume that this will also accelerate developments fields that need a whole array of technologies like space exploration, waste management and the organization of states and economies.
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| A man holding a model of his face that was scanned and 3D printed |
Whatever one’s stance on the topic is - it cannot be denied that huge changes lie ahead of us.
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