In my experience, the people most obsessed with disruptive technology, the robot future, AI and revolutionary technology are small bore liberals. These are the sorts who pass themselves off “nerds” having grown up on science and comic books. In reality they have never had much interest in any of that and they are usually innumerate and devoid of science.
It’s why my bullshit detector pegs at eleven whenever I hear someone prattling on about some new thing that will change the world. Inventions that changed the world were almost always accidents. In most cases the inventor did not know he was changing the world. Heck, in most cases there was not an inventor. Things just evolved to an inflection point and then took off like magic.
On the other side of the coin, most “revolutionary inventions” turn out to be Segways. Fifteen years ago Dean Kamen said he was about to change the world. Then he unveiled his two-wheel scooter that only managed to change our airports, letting fat cops on double time get from one doughnut stand to the next.
I’ve always thought 3-D printing was headed down the same path. There will be a narrow use of the technology, but otherwise it will be an expensive toy for hobbyists and weirdos. Exactly no one has ever sat around dreaming of the day they could manufacture their own household products. We used to do that. It sucked. That’s why we had the Industrial Revolution.
My skepticism seems to have been right.
The 3D-printing industry “is choking off its own revolution” with a combination of toy-like machines, over-priced materials and legal wrangles according to Francis Bitonti, the designer behind the printed dress for Dita von Teese (+ interview).
“3D printing has just become incredibly stagnant,” said New York-based Bitonti, who feels that many of the machines on the market are little more than “tinker toys”.
“A toy is not going to create the next industrial revolution,” he said. “The biggest barrier that we have in the studio is just scaling products because the price points are so high.”
Printing materials are too expensive, he added: “You’re paying 65 dollars for a kilogram spool of PLA, which is crappy plastic, and you can’t compete with injection moulding or any other type of production.”
Speaking to Dezeen in New York last month, Bitonti said that the 3D-printing industry needed to open up its intellectual property so that the design and manufacturing community could help drive forward improvements.
“They’ve got to open up,” he said. “It’s not that they need to open up all of their IP, but it’s a lot of things. You see a lot of tinker toys because they’re treating it like a copy machine. I think they need to change their mind and understand that it’s a manufacturing technology.”
He added: “The industry is just completely choked by intellectual property law right now.”
Maybe. It’s also possible that there’s not a lot of benefit to having a 3-D printer. If you are hobbyist who tinkers with things that have a lot of small plastic parts, maybe it makes sense for you. If you are producing volume, then this is a waste of money as you can get the work done better and cheaper by professionals.
The thing is, most people are not very creative or imaginative. Yeah, a creative mind with design skills can create magic on a 3-D printer. The other 99.99% of humans lack the creativity and design skills to create anything. We learned this with the PC. Even today, most people spend their time playing games on them, not doing productive work.
I could not leave this without my other criticism, which is that 3-D printing is whittling for the lazy. If you believe there was a huge barrier keeping a hungry populace out of the whittling game, then 3-D printing makes sense. If you really have an urge to make small things from big things, buy a pen knife and some wood. Put the $5K to better use.
Perhaps the scaling problem with 3D printers is solved if we get them to print themselves in a closet somewhere and presto! An assembly line is created!
I see two applications. First, time critical parts, situations where money is almost literally no object. An oil rig needs a widget to stay in operation. You can fly the part from Tulsa to a platform in the Gulf, or you can fab it on site using an expensive computerized maker. The second application is making parts that don’t lend themselves to scale production because you don’t expect you will ever need 5,000 framuses. The other application would be military spare parts for units at the end of an extended supply line. You always stock service parts, but invariably the… Read more »
3D printing? Let’s call it modeling shall we? But of course, in comparison to CNC machining, it’s just another campaign about “tolerance”, isn’t it? The market has ALREADY been injected with cheep, crappy linear bearings (bushings), positioning motors, (limited resolution), etc., for toy versions of “platforms”. Hmmm, I wonder, if I put a knife, or pen, or cake icing caulking gun, where the router is SUPPOSED to go on the CAD/CAM machine……… Hey, If I reverse the air flow/electric polarity of the vacuum/electromagnetic material hold down……. Hey, if I turn the wire EDM controls to “build up” instead of “vaporize”… Read more »
The 3D manufacturers will someday open up their choke on printers and consumables; right after they go bankrupt. Currently they’re operating on the ink-jet printer business model.
Uh oh, a robot just killed a worker in Germany. It seems straight out of science fiction, but we are really just in the infancy of robot technology. While I do love science, I’m not going to pretend that I know where the robotics field will take us. So many ways it could go. The whole 3D thing is interesting, yet clunky at this stage, but the tech behind it, used in ways we cannot now imagine, just might contribute to The Next Big Thing, changing humankind forever. As of now, I’m most interested in its application in the medical… Read more »
Surely the point of this piece here wasn’t a criticism directly of 3D printing per se, but about the fact that we think that the latest technology will change things dramatically, although it rarely does. Everything has an application. That’s a given. Some of the applications are more relevant to some people than others, and here I usually cite electric screwdrivers versus old-fashioned ‘hand-driven’ ones. Yes, the new-fangled electric screwdriver is faster, but once it goes wrong it goes wrong faster, but sometimes you need to ‘feel’ how the screw is going in and ease up if necessary. Therefore, best… Read more »
As I’ve said before, I’m a high school STEM teacher. Our program got our first 3D printer in 2006, before 3D printing was ‘cool’. (it’s always been cool, though) We now have six 3D printers in our program (including stereolithography), which allow our students to design a product and fabricate a mockup or prototype for their project. It really does help students to see how they can go from a design to a finished product, and it motivates them to get involved with engineering. But, we don’t just print cupcakes and chess pieces. That’s what people do with toys –… Read more »
3D printing technology right now is about where internal combustion engine technology was in 1889. A lot of the value is in modeling at this moment. If you are a car designer and want to show your boss’ boss — who is probably just a hopped up ex-fratboy salesman anyway — what your new design will look like, you’ll probably do better with a 3D model than an AutoCAD file. The rule of thumb from first practical device to mass adoption runs 20 to 30 years. (Another example is computing; it’s about 25-30 years from the first practical mainframes to… Read more »
Modeling is an application for 3-D printing that makes sense, but is hardly revolutionary. The trouble is 4-D video is going to lap 3-D printing here shortly. Giving the meathead boss a moving hologram of your idea that can be e-mailed to his phone is better than a puppet show with plastic figurines you printed in your office. Like I said, there’s a use for the technology, but we will not be printing out clothes at home.