As 3D printing grows as a market and online 3D design marketplaces are being created, we must consider the possible impacts of 3D printing on the global scale, on life standards, wealth distribution and education.
Were 3D printing to become the new means of producing from everyday goods like bottles to large construction works like houses, it would have a large impact on a global scale. But what shape would this impact take?
How would it affect the opportunities of people and communities, the economies of countries or the life standards of people? Could under-developed countries really benefit from this technology when water and electricity is not yet accessible in many rural communities?
On the one hand, some might argue that only educated, highly trained and specialised individuals will be able to work on the manufacture of 3D printers and design 3D product blueprints. This would therefore be reinforcing the gap in knowledge and education between developed countries with high rates of literacy, high university attendance and a large technically skilled workforce, and low literacy under-developed countries.
On the other hand though, some examples in our recent past may be a hint that the opposite could happen. New demand for skilled labour would be responded to by the education of and outsourcing to overseas workforces, as has happened with IT in India since the rise of the Internet.
Other historical evolutions of civilisations support this view. There are several instances in history where cultures have only managed to evolve once their basic needs for survival had been met, thus giving people the opportunity to utilise their time for other things.
Could the 3D printer be a way to meet basic material needs more effectively and thus enable under-developed countries to grow faster?
Historically, the areas with better agricultural environments, milder climates and easily available resources were the first in which early civilisations emerged.
Had Egypt not had fertile land because of the Nile, the population would most likely not have had time to start building and organising the roots of a large civilisation and empire. Had Greece not known a mild, fertile climate, more time, resource and people would have been required to insure survival and less time would have been readily available for the emergence of the rich cultural, social and scientific environment that shaped the world today.
Taking this thought further, if goods and designs were available anywhere in the world without discrimination, with only basic raw materials needed, some of the inequity in wealth distribution might be countered.The value of a product would not, then, depend on its physical reality but on the underlying design or digital presence. The world might move away from the materialistic approach to goods that is strongly ingrained in the way trade and commerce operate and move to an even more digital way of doing business. Shipment would no longer be a problem, as, as long as the base material is locally available, any product could be printed instantly anywhere.
But this is also the main argument against this view, which supposes that raw material can be found or bought with ease anywhere. The availability of a plethora of materials would be required to ensure that a range of products may be printed, which would constitute a barrier to entry of the 3D printer to already poorer communities that - were a 3D printer cheap enough for them to acquire it - may not be able to supply the necessary materials to benefit of this new technology.
An example of this would be the humanitarian aids providing local communities with powdered milk, aiming to provide short-term nutrition for babies and small children. What the humanitarian organisations often failed to identify is that clean water (or any water at all) is frequently unavailable which then leads to more illnesses and higher infant mortality in the targetted communities.
Applying similar thinking to 3D printing, we need to think about the resources that would need to be available locally for the printer of objects or food to have a real impact. To the contrary of purely virtual goods like ebooks or music files, the products printed from a 3D printer would still be physical products and therefore fail to address the shortages in goods that already stem from the shortage of raw materials.
Additionally, some see 3D printing as a way of reviving local manufacturing and design companies. But even though the expansion of the 3D printer might help small or medium design enterprises, the need for such companies might stay a niche market as 3D printing hits the global mass market and market leaders in good design impose themselves. An example of a similar situation at present is that of the smartphone app stores: what was seen as the opportunity for small developer groups to expand has become a market let by larger game and app design companies, and very few high earning app designers.
Finally, 3D printing design blueprints are currently almost exclusively accessible through online marketplaces, which would once again privilege more developed areas that have access to electricity, computers and the internet around the clock.
It is therefore hard to tell at this stage what the impact of 3D printing will have socially, both at a wealth distribution and at an education level.
Having been in Egypt last year, I saw the impacts firsthand off have a rich vien on source, such as the Nile, and what was contructed around it to meet supply and demand. I believe that technologies such as internet and 3D printing, are just a modern version of a rich resource, so get things are capable (and have been done). But I also saw were Egypt had lost the empire, from a number of different reasons, but includes GREED. I wonder...
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