The disruptive power of 3D printing
This distruptive invention will change the politics of jobs too.
Will 3D Printing Change the World?
By enabling a machine to produce objects of any shape, on the spot and as needed, 3-D printing really is ushering in the Third Industrial Revolution. It will transform the way goods are made—and change the politics of jobs too.
These first-order implications will cause businesses all along the supply, manufacturing, and retailing chains to rethink their strategies and operations.
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Why it matters
As 3D printing applications of 3D Printing technology expand and prices drop, writes Richard A. D'Aveni in the Harvard Business Review, the first big implications are that:
more goods will be manufactured at or close to their point of purchase or consumption.
many goods that have relied on the scale efficiencies of large, centralized plants will be produced locally. Even if the per-unit production cost is higher, it will be more than offset by the elimination of shipping and of buffer inventories.
parts could be made at dealerships and repair shops, and assembly plants could eliminate the need for supply chain management by making components as needed.
goods will be infinitely more customized, because altering them won’t require retooling, only tweaking the instructions in the software.
Government Carnage
Imagine what will happen, asks Greg Beato in Reason magazine ,when millions of people start using 3D Printing to make, copy, swap, barter, buy, and sell all the quotidian stuff with which they furnish their lives. Rest in peace, Bed, Bath & Beyond. Thanks for all the stuff, Foxconn, but we get our gadgets from Pirate Bay and MEGA now.
Beato continues:
Once the retail and manufacturing carnage starts to scale, the government carnage will soon follow. How can it not, when only old people pay sales tax, fewer citizens obtain their incomes from traditional easy-to-tax jobs, and large corporate taxpayers start folding like daily newspapers?
In time, Cornell University professor Hod Lipson predicts in the 2013 book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing (Wiley), 3D printers will be capable of constructing houses with plumbing and wiring in place, and printing "vanity organs" for people who want new or improved athletic abilities. Inevitably, such technologies and capabilities will trickle down, and probably faster and more radically than many people anticipate.
In January, Adobe announced that it is adding 3D printing capabilities to Photoshop, giving users the ability to design three-dimensional objects and send them to their own printers or 3D printers in the cloud.
While it will still make sense to produce some goods in large quantities using traditional methods, manufacturing is poised to become a far more local, just-in-time, customized endeavor.
Going Mainstream
Three-Dimensional printers are just now hitting the mainstream, reports Dino Londis at Invests.com and are already disrupting shopping the way the browser disrupted newspapers. Because almost everything can be printed: mugs, eyewear, toys, shoes, anything.
In fact Nike debuted its latest generation printed shoe during Superbowl 48. Nike will print a pair for you too, but that’s just the beginning. Soon customers will shop online for items that will be packaged in a CAD file that they download. They can then print the shoes at home
Three D printing will impact companies that manufacture, distribute and sell almost everything. A mechanic could print out hoses, custom screws and tools as he needed them. Instead of having the items shipped, which could take days, he could have them in a matter of hours.
Printing a hose instead of ordering disrupts the entire economy that the hose touches. Because the hose is no longer manufactured in a distant place, it doesn’t need to be transported in a shipping container, then trucked to a clearinghouse, and finally to the garage. All those actions are replaced with the click of a mouse.
NASA will be able to install 3D printers on the international space station so astronauts can print replacement parts as needed.
to printing scaffolding upon which stem cells can grow into new bones.
Examples include "bioprinting," or using a computer-controlled machine to assemble biological matter using organic inks and super-tough thermoplastics. They range from reconstructing major sections of skull
Global Impact
And a second-order implication, says D"Aveni, will have even greater impact.
As 3-D printing takes hold, the factors that have made China the workshop of the world will lose much of their force. It not only aggregates enough demand to create unprecedented efficiencies of scale but also minimizes a key cost: labor.
Under a model of widely distributed, highly flexible, small-scale manufacturing, these daunting advantages become liabilities. No workforce can be paid little enough to make up for the cost of shipping across oceans.
It seems that the United States and other Western countries, almost in spite of themselves, will pull off the old judo technique of exploiting a competitor’s lack of balance and making its own massive weight instrumental in its fall.
The great transfer of wealth and jobs to the East over the past two decades may have seemed a decisive tipping point. But this new technology will change again how the world leans.
Health | Medicine
Like so many emerging technologies, writes Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan in Gizmodo, rapid prototyping has found its foothold in a surprisingly different field: Medicine.
The Dark Side of 3D Printing
There's a "dark side" to 3D printing, writes Lyndsey Gilpen in TechRepublic: "3D printers are still potentially hazardous, wasteful machines, and their societal, political, economic, and environmental impacts have not yet been studied extensively. To make sure you aren't thrown off guard by the conversations to come, Lyndsey Gilpen compiled a list of 10 things you need to know about the dangers and potentially negative impacts of 3D printers.
1. 3D printers are energy hogs
2. Unhealthy air emissions
3. Reliance on plastics
4. IP and licensing deals
5. Gun control loopholes
6. Responsibility of manufacturers
7. Bioprinting ethics and regulation
8. Possibility of 3D printed drugs
9. National security risks
10. Safety of items that come into contact with food
The Third Industrial Revolution
The old way of making things involved taking lots of parts and screwing or welding them together, writes The Economist in their Special Report.
Now a product can be designed on a computer and “printed” on a 3D printer, which creates a solid object by building up successive layers of material.
The digital design can be tweaked with a few mouseclicks.
The 3D printer can run unattended, and can make many things which are too complex for a traditional factory to handle.
The geography of supply chains will change.
"The days when projects ground to a halt for want of a piece of kit, or when customers complained that they could no longer find spare parts for things they had bought, will one day seem quaint."
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