How is the 3D Printer Going to Change Your Life?

In September 2012, a company called Stratasys threatened legal action against an American law student and self-proclaimed crypto-anarchist named Cody R Wilson.

The interesting part of this story is that Cody Wilson was a customer of Stratasys’s product, a 3D printer, or as their marketing folks called it, a "rapid prototyping and direct digital manufacturing solution". They wanted him to stop using their product for "illegal purposes" and even sent a team to confiscate it. 

It did not stop our man – he went on to buy another printer from eBay, where sellers couldn't care less about how you used what they were selling, and was eventually successful in doing what Stratasys claimed was illegal. He 3D-printed a gun that he successfully demonstrated on his YouTube channel and released the blueprints of the design on the Internet. 

Shocking? Intriguing? Or are you wondering what the US ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) did in response to this seemingly dangerous precedent? They did question Cody about his internet project, brashly titled ‘Wiki Weapons’, but ultimately had no problems with his 3D printing a gun since he did have a Federal Firearms License that allowed him to manufacture and distribute weapons. 

But before you start thinking about the implications of a world where you can ‘download’ the design of a Kalashnikov for free and ‘print’ it in your home, let's step back a bit and consider some history.

The last 400 years have been quite a ride, mostly up an exponential curve of technological progress. Since the printing press, disruptive technology has found its way into our lives at an increasingly faster rate. Ray Kurzweil describes the phenomenon of Technological Singularity, where we will soon reach a point where it will become impossible to predict the social impact of changes in technologybecause they will happen faster than we can collectively process and digest them as a society.

The other, more Hollywood-friendly, version of this is that machine intelligence will eventually surpass our ability to figure out what to do with it. It's a bit like how my father felt when he took upwards of 15 years to finally figure out how the Windows operating system works, only to be handed an iPad that he now uses with this curious mix of facility and, in equal measure, angst at realizing that all of his Windows knowledge is largely useless now.

So while the world is still busy dealing with the geopolitical implications of the Chinese manufacturing everything in sight, 3D printing is a classic example of what Harvard professor Clay Christensen calls a ‘disruptive innovation’. 

He has a very precise definition of this: it's the kind of breakthrough that most people simply don't realize at first because it tends to be nothing more than an expensive hobby. 3D printing, till the inflection point of Cody Wilson and his functional homemade firearm, was pretty much that. 

The printers themselves were expensive and could only process plastic as a raw material and had limitations on size and complexity of the items they were fabricating. But now, all of a sudden, you can buy sub-$1,000 3D printers that can make coffee mugs and toys. And guns. 

The term ‘3D printing’ is a bit of a misnomer. Semantic fetishists tend to prefer ‘Personal Fabrication’, but since that sounds like an elaborate way to say ‘Big Fat Lie’, techies still prefer ‘3D printing’ because we have a history in grounding newer technology with metaphors from the previous generation of technology. 

Remember windows, files, folders and desktops? So, since we are quite familiar with the idea of putting a two-dimensional piece of paper into a printer (that demands a change in cartridge at disturbingly small intervals) and getting printed material out, imagine that same mechanism in three dimensions, except this time, you feed the printer plastic (or metal) as a raw material and a digital model of the object, and it will, lo and behold, ‘print’ that object. 

The historical arc of technology innovation has always fundamentally involved the democratization of production. The printing press democratized the publication of knowledge; prior to Gutenberg, Church scribes had a monopoly on the production of books. 

The industrial revolution made it possible to produce high quality goods without requiring highly skilled individuals. The internet, possibly the biggest disruption since the printing press, now makes it possible to democratize pretty much everything from the production of world class encyclopedias (Wikipedia) to the design and fabrication of stuff that traditionally required a large factory (and a larger bank loan). 

So when you get your hands on a 3D printer, what will you design and print? 

Think about it while I imagine being in a virtual reality immersive movie while artificial intelligence-driven swarm robots clean the mess in my house and molecular assembly nanobots work round the clock to keep my arteries unclogged – so that I can live long enough to be a space tourist and ask my 3D food printer for "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."

Source : http://in.news.yahoo.com/how-is-the-3d-printer-going-to-change-your-life--072658089.html