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Worthless: 3D printing is nothing but a nerd fad that won't leave hobbyist workshops.

6 (3%)

Unimportant: 3D printing will become common but won't be useful for much other than tiny full plastic objects.

8 (4%)

Minor Importance: 3D printing will function as a light industry that will coexist with existing manufacturing methodologies.

43 (21.4%)

Moderate Importance: 3D printing will challenge and slowly replace a large number of existing manufacturing businesses.

104 (51.7%)

Major Importance: 3D printing will completely flip the table on conventional manufacturing and quickly destroy existing business for anything you can make with them.

20 (10%)

Critical: 3D printing will disrupt conventional ideals of work and money so much that they collapse and are replaced in a paradigm shift.

20 (10%)

Total Members Voted: 199

[forsaken1111]

We are at f*****g war! soldiers fight and die, how is that not war?

We're not at war. The 'war on terror' is a very handy slogan for politics but war is a state of armed conflict between two nations.

I also realize we've strayed very very far from the topic.

So... about those drone printers... pretty crazy. What if you could mount a drone printer on a drone? Which could print more printers?

Like.. von neumann style.

[Loud Whispers]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So we should sacrifice people to war because you feel like we might lose perspective?

Its silly wrongheaded thinking. War costs us a lot now, it always has, and that has never once stopped us from going to war.

I don't think war should be necessary, but I also don't think I should have to pay tolls to use state roads when I already pay state taxes and taxes on gas to upkeep those roads. What I think matters very little in the long run, but if there is any way at all to save the lives of my fellow service members and allow a robot to 'die' in their place, I am 100% for it.

It's not just the cost of war. Wars are not fought between armies anymore, not in the sense of two opposing forces clashing. It won't be drones against drones, it'll be drones hovering over cities full of civilians and possible combatants.
The psychological impact differing between seeing a soldier you can relate to, to this omnipresent drone - with which you could never tell if it were about to kill you, or even so much as care, is extremely clear in some regions already.

You'd think a future where wars are fought with tiny unmanned robots in space would be wonderful, right? It just seems to me that the right wing conspiracy theorists and left wing conspiracy theorists are just drinking each other's Koolaid too often.

1. Disregarding someone's arguments for their political beliefs is rather, well, moronic. From an outsider's perspective it is incredibly strange to see people name themselves after political movements and divide themselves on the smallest of issues, not capable of seeing just how similar they are.
2. Wars will never be fought simply between drones. They were designed first and foremost to kill the people opposing them, by searching for them and executing them.

I also realize we've strayed very very far from the topic.

Called it! It's a game changer!

[Yoink]

Anger, violence and by extension war are very much naturally-occurring  parts of human nature.
War is no more unhealthy than love, fear, joy or defecation. It is also something ingrained in the very fabric of humankind, you can no more remove it than remove things like lust, or fear of aging, or the excitement little kids feel on Christmas Eve.
Honestly, I really think 'world peace' is a complete and utter pipe dream, somewhat like the idea of true communism in any large civilization. Not trying to be inflammatory here or anything, just stating the facts- or rather, what I see as the facts. Who knows, maybe one day we will live in a society where tiny flying machines of death mete out justice to those deemed as 'evil' with poison and/or lasers, but would that really be a better society?

[SalmonGod]

I have a lot of trouble believing that war is natural.  I just don't see any evidence of it.  Small-scale group conflict, maybe, where the individual members of the group have a clear, personal idea of why the opposing group is deserving of violence and/or what they have to gain from it.  War is very different from that.  War takes sophisticated social engineering efforts (demonization and fear-mongering information campaigns) and mechanisms unique to civilization (which only makes up about 2% of human history) to motivate and perpetuate, strict conditioning of participants to act with disregard to themselves their personal moralities, and deliberate distribution of roles allowing participants to feel distanced from moral consequences (the most basic example as just one of many:  people don't feel responsibility when they're following orders and the people giving orders are very far removed from the real situation).  And I doubt many veterans would agree with you that war is healthy.

[Sheb]

While I think war (as in "conflicts between groups") is natural, I also think we're on the way to get rid of it. We don't do war between big powers anymore, and war between state is on the way out. Next we'll need a way to get rid of civil wars (which will be easier as poverty keeps falling).

sure, there will always be violence, but it'll be rarer and less in scope.

[SalmonGod]

I think war is something more than conflict between groups.  There's a specific social structure to war that goes beyond that.  It's large groups of people with complex chains of command and specialization carried out by people who are conditioned to be prepared for that violence as their way of life, and those who motivate the conflict and in position to benefit from it don't even participate.  Yeah, it's conflict between groups, but there are specific features that also set it very far apart from any other kind of group conflict I can think of, from indigenous tribe skirmishes to gang violence to cliqueish high school fistfights.  Those all have more in common with each other than they do with capital W Warfare.

[Yoink]

Well, I'm not exactly talking about this "capital W" Warfare you're describing, but just war in general, the kind we've been doing for millennia.  (Opera is telling me I spelled that wrong. Pretty sure I didn't, though...)

Also Sheb, you say that as though it is a good thing. ...Actually, I was going to counter that argument with some of my own views, but that's kinda off-topic. Oh well. One of the basic points I was going to make is: Less war=more development, industrialization, pollution, all those bad things.
War is only really-- Goddamnit, I just said I wasn't going to derail this further.
Stupid opinions, trying to force their way out of my mouth from my fingers onto the keyboard.

[Sheb]

Well, if you define war in that way SalmonGod, it of course cannot be natural as the natural state of humanity (small bands of hunter-gatherers) just doesn't support enough people for complex chains of command.

However, as people form larger and larger units, from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states, inter-units violence never goes away and just become more and more complex. There is no sharp difference between two gangs fighting for their turfs and WWII, they're just to sides of a gradient.

Yoink, I'd say development and industrialization are good things, by and large. However, war is a really inefficient way to control their negative aspects.

[kaian-a-coel]

I also think that war is natural. But I don't equate natural with good. Mainly because good and evil aren't natural.
We got rid of several natural things on our way toward civilization, for the best and the worst. We can get rid of war, too.

Relevant to the war thing (that should get a thread):
Monkeys' art of war has lessons for human conflict
What Is War Good for? Ask a Chimpanzee.

[SalmonGod]

I'm talking about something more than complexity, though.  When people are convinced to throw their lives away for the sake of someone else's agenda that they have no personal stake in as a profession, that's a bizarre behavior that would not occur without a bunch of sociological factors, most of which are deliberately arranged by those who stand to benefit.  This has to do with the nature of the social relationships involved, not the complexity of them.  It's something necessarily rooted in misinformation, psychological conditioning, and economics (without under-educated poor, not enough people would be willing to fight for war to happen).  People will fight for all kinds of reasons when it's direct and personal to them.  To participate in warfare and, for example, kill a total stranger without even being told why other than it's an order; that takes a wide arrangements of manipulations because it is not something that a person would naturally do.

[Sheb]

Except in a lot of primitive society, male identify themselves as warrior first, and consider fighting and killing something to be proud of. Furthermore, many of those small-scale inter-group fights bring no immediate benefits to most of the combatants (beyond the opportunity to earn fame as a warrior), the causes often being cycles of vendetta or ritual in some ways.

[DWC]

I'm talking about something more than complexity, though.  When people are convinced to throw their lives away for the sake of someone else's agenda that they have no personal stake in as a profession, that's a bizarre behavior that would not occur without a bunch of sociological factors, most of which are deliberately arranged by those who stand to benefit.  This has to do with the nature of the social relationships involved, not the complexity of them.  It's something necessarily rooted in misinformation, psychological conditioning, and economics (without under-educated poor, not enough people would be willing to fight for war to happen).  People will fight for all kinds of reasons when it's direct and personal to them.  To participate in warfare and, for example, kill a total stranger without even being told why other than it's an order; that takes a wide arrangements of manipulations because it is not something that a person would naturally do.

Dude, societies have always had soldiers, the profession is older then civilization. In modern times soldiers have a higher average of education then the general population anyways.

[kaian-a-coel]

Dude, societies have always had soldiers, the profession is older then civilization. In modern times soldiers have a higher average of education then the general population anyways.

Yes, societies always had soldiers, but no, it isn't older than civilization. Civilization, from the latin Cives, the city, the town. Soldiers appeared with the first cities or a little after. As old as civilization, but not older.
...
Please thread?

[misko27]

Actually the thread title is now Philosophy of war, so not only should we continue, we must. Thread title is a absolutely binding contract. It's why if the happy thread demanded we sell our souls and worship Satan, we would need to do so.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

He's right. The circle has been drawn, it's out of my hands now.

Note that any philosophizing is still required to be three dimensional, upon pain of death.