3D Printing (And Piracy)
Thatha has a post about 3D printing and 3D piracy. Apparently the Pirate Bay now has a section for 3D schematics, for 3D printers. Lest you think this is years away, there are working 3D printers on sale for around $1000, though the model I want costs $1,750. Which is what 2D printers used to cost.
My dad had an interesting bit of sorts sci-fi on this:
Gone were the days of massive manufacturing plants that made lots of identical things that were then transported to far places at great cost and damage to the environment. Instead, goods were now produced through decentralized smart manufacturing processes that were controlled from central design centers at the nodes of massive data networks. Instead of making the same thing in millions of copies, the new manufacturing allowed customer input into the design process in ways that made supply follow demand, not vice versa.
The relentless pressure to drive down transaction costs that emanated from the budget telecom network model that South Asia pioneered stood the region in good stead. Combined with the paradigm of design for extreme affordability that drove corporate strategy in the region in first few decades of the 20th Century, it gave South Asian tortoises an edge over the Chinese hares that had prematurely got locked-in to old style mass production. (LIRNEasia)
I’m not sure I’d go that far, but who knows how far 3D printing will go. The models I looked at make stuff out of lego material or other plasticky gloop. You’re not going to make an iPhone anytime soon. Even with home printing, people still use old Heidelberg machines for magazines and books. The Pirate Bay, however, has a view where people will be printing speakers, car parts, et cetera, and they already have files for toys and what’s labeled as 3D porn. Who knows. I’m pretty sure basic 3D printers will break the $500 mark in a few years, at which point you can imagine how powerful a $2000 printer will be. And this keeps going.
There’s a been a lot in the news about the 
India is by now famous for gang-rape and assault emerging from its slums, but it comes from all sides of society, really. Tarun Tejpal is (was) the editor of Tehelka, a powerful muck-raking Indian magazine. He was 
The Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting ended in Sri Lanka last week. Aside from messing up traffic for a few days, it was a big event that didn’t really have a big impact. The strange and by this point predictable thing was that it became, in the international media at least, about the war, war crimes etc. It’s like the only story Sri Lanka can conceivably be associated with is civil war. It also overshadowed whatever CHOGM was supposed to discuss. As far as I can tell from the 
India’s Manomohan Singh and Canada’s Stephen Harper are not attending the CHOGM summit in Sri Lanka. They say because of moral issues, but they act for political reasons – at best a crude approximation of the former. Singh is tired of getting shit from Tamil Nadu and Harper is tired of getting shit from the Tamil diaspora. For both of them disgruntled Tamils are a vote base and they respond to voters. Which is fine, that’s the political side. From that perspective it’s easy to say that these politicians are craven, but that’s missing the point, which is that politics does crudely approximate morality, sometimes, mainly on Thursdays.
Eventually, there WILL be a 3D printer that can print another 3D printer. This is both awesome and terrifying.
Updating your printer will just be a matter of downloading the new schematic and printing it out on your old printer. Voila! Hardware update complete.
I hope there’ll be a way to recycle the old printer :) Silly simple version :
Printer 1.0 makes Printer 2.0.
Printer 3.0 is made by recycling Printer 1.0
Only if it can push it’s own button as well. Isn’t that what God did?
Just curious, do you two brothers communicate via the internet instead of hollering through the wall, so as not to disturb the neighbours in the wee hours?
Printers today can be told to print stuff from your phone, so no obstacle there.
We usually leave each other blog comments like this.
The problem with your fathers idea is the distribution of raw material & labor. These two factors will always work to centralize production around certain locations.
The title of the piece includes the term “a social science fiction.” It would be against the rules to write science fiction that everyone agrees is immediately feasible!
But please note that I was not talking about “manufacturing” at the household level, but decentralized manufacturing that permitted customization and shortened transport distances. You’d still have warehouses and trucks; the warehouses/factories would be smaller and the transport distances shorter.
So when can we expect copiers that perform teleportation and time travel?