"Today, 3-D printing remains a small part of manufacturing. For mass-produced consumer products, injection molding is typically faster and cheaper. Increasingly, though, businesses will use 3-D printers to complement their old-fashioned equipment to make specialized goods. In a few decades, an aerospace company like GE could be manufacturing jets in silent factories, with rows and rows of 3-D printers churning out cutting-edge parts in proficient solitude, and not a human laborer in sight. "
how-3-d-printing-could-disrupt-the-economy-of-the-future
Comments
Yes, interesting topic. I was thinking the other day that the 3-D could possibly have the potential of creating a Star-Trek environment, where you simply tell the "replicator" to create whatever you might need. Potentially truly massively disrupting to the economy as it is now structured.
I'm also curious to know if 3-D printers will be used to crank out more 3-D printers to be used to crank out more products and so on and so forth. What a mess.
These are complex and functional items that 3-D printing with today's technology cannot deliver. There were even discussion how to produce human organs and that is a stretch...
Chk this Econtalk or more: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/12/chris_anderson_2.html
from Econ talk:
"Chris Anderson, author of Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his new book--the story of how technology is transforming the manufacturing business. Anderson argues that the plummeting prices of 3D printers and other tabletop design and manufacturing tools allows for individuals to enter manufacturing and for manufacturing to become customized in a way that was unimaginable until recently. Anderson explores how social networking interacts with this technology to create a new world of crowd-sourced design and production."
"What's cool, though, is that that very same file that you designed on the web or with pretty software, you can upload it to services like Shapeways and they can be printed in anything--stainless steel, silver, titanium, glasses, resins of all sorts. You can make really beautiful jewelry or mechanical gears, things like that. A friend of mine is doing an entire silverware set, all 3D printed and uploaded to Shapeways. So, the home technology tends to be plastic, but the same design file sent to a service bureau on the web can be produced in any substance."
http://gizmodo.com/why-3d-printing-is-overhyped-i-should-know-i-do-it-fo-508176750
http://www.wired.com/design/2012/11/3d-printed-autonomous-airplane/
http://www.realcleartechnology.com/lists/technology-hype-mckinsey/
Good stuff. It's hard to argue with that even if you might want to. Would have liked to have seen Carbon sequestration and Advanced water purification have the certainty to go up the list a bit but maybe it leaves it open to better solutions.
Somehow this little old lady gets the cloud creeps. Things will evolve though and they will figure out that interoperability doesn't end on your captive cloud (if you want to keep your customers you can't try to own them exclusively).
Still think my life (1948-now) has been the best of times in terms of watching technology evolve/change.
http://news.yahoo.com/doctors-save-ohio-boy-printing-125228957.html
Great story... but the end product (the tube) looked pretty unremarkable to my untrained eye...could have been a sawed off piece of a bic pen as far as I could tell.
I recall NASA working on an anti-gravitional pen so that astronaunts could scribble in space. Millions went into this invention. The Russian continue to solve the problem using a 5 cent pencil.
We need to remember that KISS (Keep It Simple Silly) is often the best design solution.