3D printers are going to change the world - and the future of work for everyone

[jmowreader]

144. I heard this before...

The subject that time was e-commerce, or whatever it was being called in 1998. Remember that e-commerce was supposed to close every store and everyone would just shop online. I was on ZDNet at the time and I described e-commerce as the new form of catalog shopping. Which it is, and mail order had been around for a bazillion years without killing the walk-in trade. What e-commerce HAS done, is cut back the catalog-printing industry; anyone setting up a mail-order firm today goes online without ever printing catalogs, and many catalog-printing companies have either reduced or eliminated their print catalogs.

I can see quite a few uses for 3d printers. Repair parts for obsolete things come very close to the top of the list...IIRC Jay Leno bought a 3d printer to make masters for old-car parts. The master goes to a job-work foundry who sends a metal piece back a week later. Things that would sell, but not well enough to afford to make tooling for them, can now be made.

I also heard the "industry will resist this thing that will destroy it" line many times before. Think back to the early days of e-commerce and small-scale manufacturing and the first thing the kiddies thought of was automaking: you would be able to go to a website, get a car made exactly the way you wanted it, and the car dealers would all close as a result. What actually happened in the interval was the day of the factory option came to an end. In the really old days you could go to a dealer and tell him (car dealers used to all be men) you wanted a car made a certain way, give him money and come back in six weeks after your car was made to order and shipped to your dealer. Now all cars are equipped identically, and any little options you might want are bolted on at the dealership. Good industrialists will always embrace the new; when autos replaced the horse-drawn carriage the smart buggy whip makers changed to making driving gloves and long coats. If 3d printing turns out to replace machining, well-run manufacturers will put 3d printers on the floor and dive in headfirst. But you will have to convince the factory owner that it is cheaper to print nails than to make them out of wire, or that printing cylinder heads uses less material than casting them does.

Some of the uses the author envisions for 3d printers are kinda weird. We already have a machine that will make a new shirt any time you need one; sewing machines have been in people's homes for centuries and work using proven technological means. We could print shoes...but ya know, they're gonna look like Crocs and those are butt ugly.

And no, the "average person" will NOT be able to make new products; you will still need to be able to envision and design a new thing, and most of us can't do that.

There are things the 3d printer is going to be great for. There are things it will be awful for, but those are the things it will be used for.