3D Printing and Copyright

[Milo]

Interesting point about bigger and bigger numbers, I take a certain sick pride in being the first person on the planet to use tera ton to describe the mass of a certain substance being released from the Chutchki sea, all that came before have used giga ton, including Semiletov and Shakov.

HNy9uxcRedU

[Nonc Hilaire]

3D printing needs a paradigm shift. If they could get it to create objects capable of lost wax casting that would be a milestone. 3D is still at a sandcasting level.

[Enki]

3D printing needs a paradigm shift. If they could get it to create objects capable of lost wax casting that would be a milestone. 3D is still at a sandcasting level.

It is still called rapid prototyping and still reduces manufacturing costs significantly.

[Demon of Undoing]

3D printed guitar

Don't worry. You'll get your paradigm shift the first time some pissed off college kid shoots someone with a 3D printed pistol.

[Mr. Perfect]

Is dying from a printed pistol worse than a non-printed pistol?

[Demon of Undoing]

Is dieing from a printed pistol worse than a non-printed pistol?

The talking heads will think so. No serial numbers, kids could make it, probably try that " sneak on an airplane" crap again.

[Mr. Perfect]

Oh and reality check, you can't print food, you can't print water and electricity, you can't print a car, you can't print refrigerators and washing machines, computers, televisions, iproducts, etc.

Many people cannot change a car tire let alone build a transmission, and despite clothesmaking being relatively simple with a low capital investment (I can do it) hardly anyone does.

Printing will be the province of mock up people and hobbyists mostly.

[YMix]

you can't print a car, you can't print refrigerators and washing machines, computers, televisions, iproducts, etc.

Yet.

Printing will be the province of mock up people and hobbyists mostly.

Bet you could've said the same thing of personal computers in the '70s and early '80s.

[Demon of Undoing]

Actually, they have printed food, though if by that you mean creating the core biomaterial, well, that's just a matter of recycling. Pretty much the same as now. Best not to think on it.

Circuit boards? Printed already ( flexible ones, for that matter). Hardware and whatnot? Of course you can, just nobody has, as the price of traditional methods is still so low and standardized that it makes no sense to do so. Keep in mind that virtually all current design is minor variation of what Henry Ford would have recognized. It's like saying that you cant make a Model T purely with CAD/CAM because Henry didnt. It just doesn't lend itself to it as currently envisioned. Oddly enough, if you were to try to produce a Model T right now, you'd almost certainly have to use CAD to do it.

There is much more a limitation of imagination here than capability. They can print sintered metals and titanium. I seem to remember them working on stainless. It's just a matter of time and permutation.

[Zack Morris]

I don't think there's anything novel about these 3D printers that could not have been done ca. 1980. They are extremely impressive do-it-yourself projects but technologically, they aren't really anything new, unless there's something remarkable about the plastics they deposit that I'm unaware of. I think there's some interesting potential for businesses that want to manufacture customizable toys made-to-order for children.

The reason 3D printers remain uninteresting right now is because it is simply impossible to fabricate most things with simple deposition. For instance, metals need to be worked at very high temperatures: melted and then slowly cooled to form a coherent crystalline structure. Other materials and interfaces are formed with chemical or kinetic reactions. And integrated circuits require techniques similar to metallurgy, nano-scale and near-atomic precision, and involve complex chemical and kinetic reactions. Flexible electronics exist but apart from low-performance interconnects, there's not much a 3D printer would be useful for there.

A car or a computer? Out of the question.

Food? Possibly. Printing techniques are becoming pretty commonplace in biotech. Just look at Organovo.

Maybe the buzz surrounding 3D printers might catalyze research efforts to integrate metallurgical techniques into similarly sized general purpose prototyping devices. If that happens, then this will really be worth paying attention to.

[Mr. Perfect]

I guess we all have different definitions of food.

[Enki]

Mr. Perfect's argument is the argument of the sort that thinks, "Revolutionary", means, "Keeps no parts of the thing that came before it.", which is not true. All of those things he says we cannot print (many of which people are already happily printing) will be prototyped by 3D printers. It's not going to be the instant end of industry, but like computers it's going to drastically reduce the barrier to entry for certain types of labor. Just like you have people doing fancy econometric analysis from their bedroom in their skivvies today, you'll have people building an operational prototype of their latest invention. It will be a combination of pre-fab parts and 3D printed custom parts. It will be an explosion in manufacturing at all levels. I know basement hackers already making crazy lavender.

[Enki]

Actually, they have printed food, though if by that you mean creating the core biomaterial, well, that's just a matter of recycling. Pretty much the same as now. Best not to think on it.

Circuit boards? Printed already ( flexible ones, for that matter). Hardware and whatnot? Of course you can, just nobody has, as the price of traditional methods is still so low and standardized that it makes no sense to do so. Keep in mind that virtually all current design is minor variation of what Henry Ford would have recognized. It's like saying that you cant make a Model T purely with CAD/CAM because Henry didnt. It just doesn't lend itself to it as currently envisioned. Oddly enough, if you were to try to produce a Model T right now, you'd almost certainly have to use CAD to do it.

There is much more a limitation of imagination here than capability. They can print sintered metals and titanium. I seem to remember them working on stainless. It's just a matter of time and permutation.

You can get Sintered Stainless Steel from Shapeways.com for $ 10cm3

[Enki]

I don't think there's anything novel about these 3D printers that could not have been done ca. 1980. They are extremely impressive do-it-yourself projects but technologically, they aren't really anything new, unless there's something remarkable about the plastics they deposit that I'm unaware of. I think there's some interesting potential for businesses that want to manufacture customizable toys made-to-order for children.

People say things like this and yet 3D printers were not being sold commercially in 1980. So your statement cannot possibly be true as 3D printers are being sold commercially now, but they weren't in 1980, so obviously they can do something they couldn't do in 1980. Arguing that a factory with millions of dollars of fabrication equipment could do it, is just kind of missing the point so utterly and entirely that it boggles the mind how someone could be that slow. They had big-ass powerful computers in 1960 too.

The reason 3D printers remain uninteresting right now is because it is simply impossible to fabricate most things with simple deposition. For instance, metals need to be worked at very high temperatures: melted and then slowly cooled to form a coherent crystalline structure. Other materials and interfaces are formed with chemical or kinetic reactions. And integrated circuits require techniques similar to metallurgy, nano-scale and near-atomic precision, and involve complex chemical and kinetic reactions. Flexible electronics exist but apart from low-performance interconnects, there's not much a 3D printer would be useful for there.

I'm sorry. But most people do not think 3D printers are uninteresting. Only people who have very little creativity and want to sound smart with their academic critique say things like that. There is a Makerbot store here in Manhattan now. Makerfaire is quite popular.

A car or a computer? Out of the question.

Except it's already happening.

Food? Possibly. Printing techniques are becoming pretty commonplace in biotech. Just look at Organovo.

Maybe the buzz surrounding 3D printers might catalyze research efforts to integrate metallurgical techniques into similarly sized general purpose prototyping devices. If that happens, then this will really be worth paying attention to.

Maybe 3D printers will become more advanced as time goes by? GENIUS!!!

Obviously (to me) maybe not so obvious for those who are too smart to be excited by 3D printers, the industrial fabrication capacity of the top ends will outpace the consumer levels. It will fundamentally alter the landscape of manufacture. Man, how much money could I save on stupid Thomas trains if I had a 3D printer? Those carved wood blocks are genuflecting $ 26 a pop! Right now for 3D printing it's like the 1980s were for computing. You're going to see this generation of children explode with creativity and there will be 12 year olds building robots. If I'd had one when I was 12, that's what I would have been doing, instead of building RC car kits and playing with Robotix. Arduino would've been so much cooler than Robotix.

[Skin Job]

They had big-ass powerful computers in 1960 too.

Well, they were big-ass, and required a ton of power, but powerful by today's standards? Not even close. Your phone has an order of magnitude more computing power. Going too far over the top damages one's credibility.

3D printing is certainly an interesting field to watch. It will need to be augmented with technologies that do not yet exist in order to produce the wide range of products we now expect from normal manufacturing processes. Something akin to a precise form of quantum sintering might turn out to be capable of producing the correct types of molecular lattice structures needed in metals, for example.

[Skin Job]

Food? Possibly. Printing techniques are becoming pretty commonplace in biotech. Just look at Organovo.

The NovoGen MMX Bioprinter™ is a novel hardware and software platform at the forefront of bioprinting research and development. The NovoGen MMX™ was developed to meet challenges in biological research. The platform takes primary or other human cells and shapes them into 3D tissue, with tremendous cellular viability and biology that is superior to even an animal model. The platform is being used by Organovo's Pharma partners today to enable cutting edge research into drug discovery.

By allowing creation of three dimensional biological structures, Organovo creates functional human tissue that is superior to current disease models. By enabling printing of tissue in a laboratory environment, investigations on the constructs can be integrated into your current analysis methods.

A little bit creepy but very exciting at the same time! Sounds like it's not ready for prime time yet (transplantation).

[Zack Morris]

I don't think there's anything novel about these 3D printers that could not have been done ca. 1980. They are extremely impressive do-it-yourself projects but technologically, they aren't really anything new, unless there's something remarkable about the plastics they deposit that I'm unaware of. I think there's some interesting potential for businesses that want to manufacture customizable toys made-to-order for children.

People say things like this and yet 3D printers were not being sold commercially in 1980. So your statement cannot possibly be true as 3D printers are being sold commercially now, but they weren't in 1980, so obviously they can do something they couldn't do in 1980. Arguing that a factory with millions of dollars of fabrication equipment could do it, is just kind of missing the point so utterly and entirely that it boggles the mind how someone could be that slow. They had big-ass powerful computers in 1960 too.

Fused deposition modeling -- depositing plastic through a nozzle fed by a filament -- was conceived in the late 1980's. It didn't exist any earlier because nobody had thought of it not because of any fundamental technological breakthrough. Newer designs use inkjet technology and would not have been feasible then. Lots of things exist today that could have existed decades ago. For example, Twitter would have been possible on the mid-90's web. It didn't exist because nobody thought it useful at the time, not because it couldn't be done.

I'm sorry. But most people do not think 3D printers are uninteresting. Only people who have very little creativity and want to sound smart with their academic critique say things like that.

Most of the stuff being sold at Shapeways is the kind of crap you'd find on a table at a street fair. Jewelry, dipping dishes, static stuff. These printers are very impressive devices but extremely limited in capability. Creative people are always going to do interesting things with any limited medium available to them.

A car or a computer? Out of the question.

Except it's already happening.

Plastic car bodies have been fabricated on enormous printers for industrial prototyping. Not engines, fuel injectors, axles, brakes, or tires. Arguably, the industrial-scale printers are not the same thing as "maker bots". They are just another manufacturing tool. Printing technologies for biotech are truly exciting but again, these are purpose-built systems. What the hobbyists seem to think is that we are on the verge of being able to manufacture nearly anything from a single printer.

Computers aren't happening. A computer is little more than a CPU. Printers cannot build integrated circuits like that.

Maybe 3D printers will become more advanced as time goes by? GENIUS!!!

You're downplaying the technical challenges here. Special purpose 3D printers will exist but there's still no reason to believe they will supplant traditional manufacturing techniques. I don't think home-based printers are going to be able to build anything remotely "high tech" for the next couple of decades. Beyond that, it's impossible to predict anything, but there's a good chance technological progress in general will have slowed to a crawl by then.

Obviously (to me) maybe not so obvious for those who are too smart to be excited by 3D printers, the industrial fabrication capacity of the top ends will outpace the consumer levels. It will fundamentally alter the landscape of manufacture. Man, how much money could I save on stupid Thomas trains if I had a 3D printer? Those carved wood blocks are genuflecting $ 26 a pop! Right now for 3D printing it's like the 1980s were for computing. You're going to see this generation of children explode with creativity and there will be 12 year olds building robots. If I'd had one when I was 12, that's what I would have been doing, instead of building RC car kits and playing with Robotix. Arduino would've been so much cooler than Robotix.

Arduino is another great example of something that could have been done in 1980, albeit at a higher cost. Remember that the first personal computers were do-it-yourself kits at first. In those days, you could breadboard or wire wrap just about any kind of computer. Circuits became quickly too complicated to manufacture at home. The same could happen with 3D printers, especially if they start doing clever things at the nano-scale. It won't be a desktop machine anymore.

But like I said, toys are a fantastic application of 3D printers. Imagine combining 3D printing, Tinkercad, and Arduino into a seamless web-based application. There's a fun little business. Maybe I'll do it next year.

[Zack Morris]

Sorry to be a wet blanket, everyone, but there will be no more industrial revolutions.

In his widely discussed National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?” Gordon predicts a dark future of “epochal decline in growth from the U.S. record of the last 150 years.” The greatest innovations, Gordon argues, are behind us, with little prospect for transformative change along the lines of the three previous industrial revolutions ...

Although pessimists have been famously wrong ("everything that can be invented already has been"), there is a plausible case to be made here that progress may be hitting fundamental limits.

[Enki]

Sorry to be a wet blanket, everyone, but there will be no more industrial revolutions.

In his widely discussed National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?” Gordon predicts a dark future of “epochal decline in growth from the U.S. record of the last 150 years.” The greatest innovations, Gordon argues, are behind us, with little prospect for transformative change along the lines of the three previous industrial revolutions ...

Although pessimists have been famously wrong ("everything that can be invented already has been"), there is a plausible case to be made here that progress may be hitting fundamental limits.

Computers will one day be as small as a room.

We are not predicting the future, we are predicting the recent past. One can simply analyze the saturation points of certain technologies and recognize how much room for growth there is. Kind of like how cell phones are in the past 5 years completely changing the way Amazonian farmers get their goods to market in Manaus, but shaving weeks off of the process. I was talking to a rep of a development company, I mean third world development, who was asking about how we can create medical sharing networks that propagate information via SMS since SMS is the only data transfer mechanism in most of the world. My wife has done case studies on SMS based massively multiplayer games that are popular in the third world and have user bases that dwarf anything we see in the west with our higher requirements for graphics and other such amenities. That's just SMS, which is essentially just character limited e-mail.

These sorts of predictions are the predictions of luddite idiots. You can see quite clearly what access to information and technology that people have. My company is building applications for existing data to help enterprises understand their own business better. The little tiny bit of service we provide makes their prior access look primitive compared to what they have afterward, and we are only doing SQL database dev. The company has been in existence less than three months and I have had the conversation with the CEO about how we are going to remove him from the supply chain because he's already a bottleneck in our ability to develop business. We're working on creating vendor relationships with large scale development operations to offload work and moving into developing whole market segments based on large networks that haven't tapped the types of data services we provide. If database technology which is a well established industry has this much room for growth, then new technology absolutely has plenty of room. There is an entire world out there that doesn't have access to the information economy, and whole sectors that do not even exist yet as a result. As you achieve new scales with technological saturation, whole new markets come into existence that previously did not exist.

I can imagine a ton of different potentials for 3D printing. If you cannot, that's just you. When I've got some budget to play with I am going to try and develop some business in that direction. That should be about 5 years out for me personally, and I already know specific people I would hire if I had the funding.

In short, I think we will see more technological development in the next century than we have seen in the past 1000 years.

Anyone who says there will not be another industrial revolution while we are standing in the middle of the inferno of the new industrial revolution just boggles my mind. I can't tell you what will be invented, if I could, I wouldn't be telling you, I'd be inventing it, but I have a lot of ideas and know there are lots of creative people out there with much higher levels of technical competency than I have.

[Zack Morris]

Sorry to be a wet blanket, everyone, but there will be no more industrial revolutions.

In his widely discussed National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?” Gordon predicts a dark future of “epochal decline in growth from the U.S. record of the last 150 years.” The greatest innovations, Gordon argues, are behind us, with little prospect for transformative change along the lines of the three previous industrial revolutions ...

Although pessimists have been famously wrong ("everything that can be invented already has been"), there is a plausible case to be made here that progress may be hitting fundamental limits.

Computers will one day be as small as a room.

We are not predicting the future, we are predicting the recent past.

The flaw in this kind of optimistic thinking is that you assume because things progressed farther than you initially thought possible, they can progress further still. You are saying to yourself: if I was wrong then, surely I must be wrong now because I understand even less of the magic that makes this technology possible.

But what if early 20th century physics opened up a vast but limited void of possibility that we have now nearly filled? Moore's Law scaling is not the norm and the average person does not understand why it came about in the first place, so they naively assume some "other" breakthroughs will happen to sustain it. The fact of the matter is, VLSI technology has progressed incrementally and based on the same fundamental physical principles since the 1950's and 1960's. Getting to the end point has been a difficult challenge in patterning ever smaller lines using optical and electron beam lithography but the underlying physics that govern how electrons are manipulated to perform calculations has not changed. It is an atomic process and now that we are producing features at an atomic resolution, there is nowhere else to go. A hard limit is being reached.

Decades before transistors were first demonstrated, the basic idea had been articulated. But now, there is nothing out there -- not even in conceptual form -- that can replace them. Quantum computing is a close candidate but it cannot accelerate the most common computing tasks we rely on. Biologically-inspired, intelligent computational devices are a distant dream. Nobody knows how they might function and we cannot even replicate a brain yet, let alone devise novel computing architectures that exceed the capabilities of nature and our current digital computers. Slowly, progress is going to become more incremental. Expect parallel programming, reconfigurable architectures, and maybe even ASICs to make a comeback. Nothing is new in computing these days: it was all invented by the 1980's and just keeps getting repackaged.

[Zack Morris]

These sorts of predictions are the predictions of luddite idiots. You can see quite clearly what access to information and technology that people have. My company is building applications for existing data to help enterprises understand their own business better. The little tiny bit of service we provide makes their prior access look primitive compared to what they have afterward, and we are only doing SQL database dev. The company has been in existence less than three months and I have had the conversation with the CEO about how we are going to remove him from the supply chain because he's already a bottleneck in our ability to develop business. We're working on creating vendor relationships with large scale development operations to offload work and moving into developing whole market segments based on large networks that haven't tapped the types of data services we provide. If database technology which is a well established industry has this much room for growth, then new technology absolutely has plenty of room. There is an entire world out there that doesn't have access to the information economy, and whole sectors that do not even exist yet as a result. As you achieve new scales with technological saturation, whole new markets come into existence that previously did not exist.

You've got to put things into perspective. You think any of this stuff is going to be as transformational as computing was in the first place, or the first databases? Not to mention electricity. Everything you've discussed is comparatively marginal. In that respect, there was progress in the 1300's. The 1400's. The 1500's. That's not what we're talking about here. Think about the revolutionary inventions prior to 1750. Even things like banking and the printing press took decades if not centuries to make an impact on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, and arguably none led to the sort of drastic improvement in quality of life that inventions like electrical power did.

We could be entering that age again. There will be lots of exciting things going on still, but it won't be the same as the 19th and 20th centuries.

Think of it another way: who do you think lived through more dramatic change -- you or your grandfather? In my life, I've seen computers become hand held. Well, not really that, even, because such devices existed in the 70's (calculators) and 80's (Gameboys, graphing calculators, early PDAs). Someone just a little bit older than me could claim cell phones but over-the-air voice transmissions have been around since the 19th century.

We had men walking on the moon in 1969. And before that, airplanes. TV. Radios. Electricity. Running water. And you're going to tell me that SQL databases and SMS messages are comparable? Puh-lease.

[Enki]

The flaw in this kind of optimistic thinking is that you assume because things progressed farther than you initially thought possible, they can progress further still. You are saying to yourself: if I was wrong then, surely I must be wrong now because I understand even less of the magic that makes this technology possible.

It has nothing to do with optimism. And pretty much every time I've made tech predictions I've been right. I remember when people were telling me we were a long way from a genuine computer phone like a year or two before the iPhone came out. I wasn't wrong before, I was right before. Every time.

But what if early 20th century physics opened up a vast but limited void of possibility that we have now nearly filled? Moore's Law scaling is not the norm and the average person does not understand why it came about in the first place, so they naively assume some "other" breakthroughs will happen to sustain it. The fact of the matter is, VLSI technology has progressed incrementally and based on the same fundamental physical principles since the 1950's and 1960's. Getting to the end point has been a difficult challenge in patterning ever smaller lines using optical and electron beam lithography but the underlying physics that govern how electrons are manipulated to perform calculations has not changed. It is an atomic process and now that we are producing features at an atomic resolution, there is nowhere else to go. A hard limit is being reached.

I am not talking about any sort of physical scaling. Physics is irrelevant. I am talking about economic impact. I am talking about people having machine shop labs in their garages. I have spent time around DIY Synthetic Biology Labs, and small boutique robotics manufacturers. We are clearly talking past each other, because I do not hold the same physical obsession that a lot of hard science geeks do. I am talking about innovation, not invention. I am talking about more people having access to technology that is already proven and already exists. I am expecting consumer grade techonology that already exists getting made better and more inexpensively because the technology lends itself to its own advancement.

Decades before transistors were first demonstrated, the basic idea had been articulated. But now, there is nothing out there -- not even in conceptual form -- that can replace them. Quantum computing is a close candidate but it cannot accelerate the most common computing tasks we rely on. Biologically-inspired, intelligent computational devices are a distant dream. Nobody knows how they might function and we cannot even replicate a brain yet, let alone devise novel computing architectures that exceed the capabilities of nature and our current digital computers. Slowly, progress is going to become more incremental. Expect parallel programming, reconfigurable architectures, and maybe even ASICs to make a comeback. Nothing is new in computing these days: it was all invented by the 1980's and just keeps getting repackaged.

This has nothing to do with 3D printers and whether or not people will be making machine shops in their basements.

[Enki]

You've got to put things into perspective. You think any of this stuff is going to be as transformational as computing was in the first place, or the first databases? Not to mention electricity. Everything you've discussed is comparatively marginal. In that respect, there was progress in the 1300's. The 1400's. The 1500's. That's not what we're talking about here. Think about the revolutionary inventions prior to 1750. Even things like banking and the printing press took decades if not centuries to make an impact on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, and arguably none led to the sort of drastic improvement in quality of life that inventions like electrical power did.

I see it as an extension of the information revolution. I am talking about an increased level of access to higher level industrial functions. People have been making spreadsheets and tables for centuries. It's just that Excel and PowerPivot allows a person with a PC to do high level data-analysis that was previously only done in corporate departments.

We could be entering that age again. There will be lots of exciting things going on still, but it won't be the same as the 19th and 20th centuries.

Not could be. We have been in it for my entire lifetime. The Genome, a dude skydiving from space, all of that enabled by computers. Now computers with the ability to print 3D models, or even moreso, 3D moulds, will allow the homebrew inventor a lot more freedom to pursue his creative work than ever before.

Think of it another way: who do you think lived through more dramatic change -- you or your grandfather? In my life, I've seen computers become hand held. Well, not really that, even, because such devices existed in the 70's (calculators) and 80's (Gameboys, graphing calculators, early PDAs). Someone just a little bit older than me could claim cell phones but over-the-air voice transmissions have been around since the 19th century.

Current me, or me when I am in my 70s like my Grandfathers? My grandfather went from horse and buggy to the moon landing, sure. But I have seen the PC (which started really hitting the market the year I was born) and a robot landing on Mars. When I am 70 and the entire world economy is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than it is today and we have ten times as many engineers, scientists, software developers and 3D modelers, it's going to be pretty crazy.

We had men walking on the moon in 1969. And before that, airplanes. TV. Radios. Electricity. Running water. And you're going to tell me that SQL databases and SMS messages are comparable? Puh-lease.

Well then, I guess you're going to live at teh consumer end of the spectrum. I'm working my way into the producer end of the spectrum. That's why some people are entrepeneurs and other people are not. You are like, "Only a fundamental discovery in physics makes a difference.", but that's not even on the same planet as what I am talking about, and as long as that's your attitude you're never going to even understand the innovation that's going on all around you right now.

Advances in physics are a total straw man. I am talking about new developments that are changing people's lives in real ways. SMS may be nothing special to you, but to the rural clinic in Haiti that has access to gauze because of it, it means the people of that village not dying of minor flesh wounds. That's the sort of thing I'm involved with, and perhaps one day that Haitian physicist will make a new breakthrough because his Mother and he didn't die of Sepsis when he was born.

[Zack Morris]

I am not talking about any sort of physical scaling. Physics is irrelevant. I am talking about economic impact.

Let's talk about economic impact. You can start by reading the article I linked to. Arguably, the economic impact of computers has reached its zenith. Large-scale robotics and artificial intelligence are perhaps the only trump cards left. They could potentially have a truly enormous impact but given their track record to date, I wouldn't bet on any sort of compounding growth from machines designing themselves any time soon. If it turns out to be like anything else in computing, there will be practical limits.

I am talking about people having machine shop labs in their garages.

People didn't want to build their own computers and they stopped making their own clothes a long time ago. Why would they want machine shops? To make what? The same kind of trinkets we have now. The article I cited points out that much of the "progress" in computers recently has been targeted at entertainment.

I have spent time around DIY Synthetic Biology Labs, and small boutique robotics manufacturers. We are clearly talking past each other, because I do not hold the same physical obsession that a lot of hard science geeks do. I am talking about innovation, not invention. I am talking about more people having access to technology that is already proven and already exists. I am expecting consumer grade techonology that already exists getting made better and more inexpensively because the technology lends itself to its own advancement.

Sounds like you are putting too much faith in people. Have you ever considered that we already have a surplus of productive capacity? We cannot think of interesting things to do fast enough to consume all this capacity.

This has nothing to do with 3D printers and whether or not people will be making machine shops in their basements.

They won't be. You can easily do that already. People generally don't want to make things in their garages.

[Zack Morris]

I see it as an extension of the information revolution.

How much more information do we need? Probably not much. What are your databases going to be used for? Have you given that any thought? They're going to be used for targeting ads at people or figuring out what they'll want to consume next. Wow!

The information revolution is petering out just like the industrial revolution did.

Not could be. We have been in it for my entire lifetime. The Genome, a dude skydiving from space, all of that enabled by computers. Now computers with the ability to print 3D models, or even moreso, 3D moulds, will allow the homebrew inventor a lot more freedom to pursue his creative work than ever before.

Guys were skydiving from space in the late 50's/early 60's. And I still don't understand how ordinary peoples' creativity is going to create economic growth on par with what the industrial revolution produced. People have always been creative and artistic. So what?

Current me, or me when I am in my 70s like my Grandfathers? My grandfather went from horse and buggy to the moon landing, sure. But I have seen the PC (which started really hitting the market the year I was born) and a robot landing on Mars.

Robots landed on Mars in the 70's, and on the moon before that. Maybe if you're lucky, they will land humans on Mars in your lifetime, but that was thought possible in the 50's and will largely be the end product of technology and ideas developed then. And you know what's going to happen when we land on Mars? Nothing for a long time. Just like with the moon.

When I am 70 and the entire world economy is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than it is today and we have ten times as many engineers, scientists, software developers and 3D modelers, it's going to be pretty crazy.

Or we will have proportionally fewer because of automation.

Well then, I guess you're going to live at teh consumer end of the spectrum. I'm working my way into the producer end of the spectrum. That's why some people are entrepeneurs and other people are not. You are like, "Only a fundamental discovery in physics makes a difference.", but that's not even on the same planet as what I am talking about, and as long as that's your attitude you're never going to even understand the innovation that's going on all around you right now.

You don't need 3D printers to be an entrepreneur.

Advances in physics are a total straw man. I am talking about new developments that are changing people's lives in real ways. SMS may be nothing special to you, but to the rural clinic in Haiti that has access to gauze because of it, it means the people of that village not dying of minor flesh wounds. That's the sort of thing I'm involved with, and perhaps one day that Haitian physicist will make a new breakthrough because his Mother and he didn't die of Sepsis when he was born.

That's great but it still does not disprove the hypothesis that growth is slowing down. These are all incremental changes that are slowly bringing rural Haiti in line with the developed world ca. 1950.