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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

[10ebbor10]

Wait, we can print organic tissue now?

I really wonder how close we are to star trek replicators. Except our replicated stuff will have to be pulled out of a powder, but hey.

We could do this for a few years already. The old technologies just took hours to print a small part, which isn't that usefull when you're trying to print something living. I believe we already got implantations with living biological tissue.

Got these already(If you mean food replicators). There were even some commericial prototypes. They were scrapped because they clogged up to easily and there was no customer interest.

[kaijyuu]

Damn.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Wait, we can print organic tissue now?

Yes, but not here. These blood vessels are printed from biocompatible hydrogels. The idea is that the actual tissue printing will come later. The important part is that we have printers that are capable of making these very small and very complex pathways. You probably couldn't completely heal someone with the hydrogel, but it might be good for patching damaged vessels or replacing sections of existing ones.

Here's the paper, if anyone is interested.

[RedKing]

We can print blood vessels now!

For example, in the future, doctors may repair the damage caused by heart attack by replacing it with tissue that rolled off of a printer.

 

And yes, it appears they print it from a biologically compatible organic gel. In the future, we'll all be 99% printed goo after a while.

[lemon10]

We will never be post scarcity without fundamentally altering human nature.
If an AI singularity happened and a dyson sphere was put around the sun and the seeds of humanity had spread to a hundred thousand stars, then there would still be scarcity, it might not be material but it would still exist (in the form of limited processing power mainly).

Even if there is a radical redefinition of what can be produced and what you need to buy, there will still be scarcity. Raw materials, electricity, land and processing power will never become unlimited, yes they can get to a point where they become so hugely available that anyone could own a mansion and a hyper-intelligent AI and run their own power plant, but they would still be limited.

For instance, I don't think that current computers (and probably not even most computer parts) will ever really be printed by non-industrial 3D printers, because A) They are crazy complicated, and by the time non-industrial printing catches up to where they are now, they will be much farther ahead, although if you want to print a few decades out of date tech you would probably be able to do it and B) usually the cost for them isn't much higher then the cost it took to make them (compared to other things at least where brand and market power make them many many times more expensive). Printing them yourself would probably (if at all possible) cost more then twice as much and take more then 10 times as long, when you can just drive to the store and get it better, cheaper and faster I don't see anyone but huge nerds making computer parts

[Scelly9]

There's a TED talk on printing organs, I highly recommend it.

[Pnx]

There's a TED talk on printing organs, I highly recommend it.

Yeah, it's kind of brought my hopes up on the synthetic organ front. I honestly kind of thought it was looking like we'd never be able to do efficient synthetic organ production any time soon. Now it's looking like we might do it by the end of the decade.

[kaijyuu]

* kaijyuu still wants synthetic steaks

[MetalSlimeHunt]

* kaijyuu still wants synthetic steaks

I'm waiting for Mammoth steaks.

[Andrew425]

Can someone explain the difference between a 3d printer and a "normal" piece of manufacturing equipment at a factory save for the fact that it can change between objects easier?

[kaijyuu]

It's roughly the same difference as a printing press and your modern day printer. "Normal" manufacturing equipment can only build set things; 3d printers can build pretty much any 3d object.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yes. Conventional manufacturing puts parts together, 3D printing, well, prints the finished product directly from the raw materials.

[Rose]

Can someone explain the difference between a 3d printer and a "normal" piece of manufacturing equipment at a factory save for the fact that it can change between objects easier?

Pretty much, yeah, you change between objects by sending it a different file.

[Grek]

Prediction: 3d Printing will only become popular in industries which storage is a significant factor in the cost of selling the product in question. Examples include clothing (having to stock 3-5 different sizes of the same thing sucks), furniture(furniture is big, bulky and takes a long time to sell)and home improvement(much like furniture, there is a long turnover time). It will also see a small market for vanity items (the future equivilent of custom t-shirts), crime (disposible guns with no record? Yes please) and in prototyping. Agriculture, automobile manufacture, entertainment (except possibly toys) and most other industries will remain unchanged.

[forsaken1111]

Prediction: 3d Printing will only become popular in industries which storage is a significant factor in the cost of selling the product in question. Examples include clothing (having to stock 3-5 different sizes of the same thing sucks), furniture(furniture is big, bulky and takes a long time to sell)and home improvement(much like furniture, there is a long turnover time). It will also see a small market for vanity items (the future equivilent of custom t-shirts), crime (disposible guns with no record? Yes please) and in prototyping. Agriculture, automobile manufacture, entertainment (except possibly toys) and most other industries will remain unchanged.

Eh, I dunno. If I could print my own plastic dinnerware as needed that would be pretty awesome. Especially if the plastic was recyclable so I could essentially print disposable plates/cups as needed and then toss them in a recycling bin when done with them rather than buying 100 non-recyclable plastic cups for a gathering/party and generating a lot of unrecoverable trash.

Buy a few pounds of feedstock plastic, set printer to print 6 cups, return in 3-5 minutes to remove those cups and start printing the next batch. When done, toss all in recycling bin. Would be handy.