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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

[DWC]

I guess with infinite energy that'd be possible.
Problem is finding infinite energy

Why would it require infinite energy?

I don't think they can print that out yet.

No, but we can print solar panels.

You are not going to get a good return on investment processing dirt and sticks unless you have a lot of cheap energy although...

Hmm... solar-powered solar panel printers...

[SalmonGod]

I don't think they can print that out yet.

No, but we can print solar panels.

That was my first thought as well

[forsaken1111]

Yes. Electricity costs, raw material costs, and the fact that you will eventually run out of materials.

I said the entire process. Including raw material acquisition. All automated. No human involvement. Even the machine upkeep and maintenance.

Sure you will 'eventually run out of material' but that's true even if humans are doing it so that is completely irrelevant.

If we can automate every step of the production process, from raw material to finished product, is there any reason not to give the final product away for free? (Assuming its nothing dangerous)

The labor might be endless, but raw materials and energy are still finite, so there would have to be some way to distribute/ ration it.

Robots could distribute it. Why would you need to ration it? We don't ration things now. The only reason something costs money is that we have to pay all of the people who make that thing. If there are no people involved in the making at any point, there is no reason to pay for a thing. You're acting as if the instant robots get involved we will run out of material.

Hell, robots could also be recycling the unwanted products back into new things as well to make the cycle endless. Its not as if the matter is lost unless we shoot it into space.

[Dutchling]

You'd still have to pay the people who own and maintain the robots...

[forsaken1111]

You'd still have to pay the people who own and maintain the robots...

You didn't actually read my post.

[Dutchling]

Of course not. This is the internet.

[forsaken1111]

Of course not. This is the internet.

Touché

[Max White]

You have to understand that a post modern economy is dependent on people being willing to surrender their wealth. Right now there are people on earth that earn millions of dollars that they just don't use because they don't really need anything more. So instead they invest it into something to bring in more money, to invest more. If you approached these people and said "We could solve world hunger, and you would maintain your quality of life, but we need your land so we can farm and mine and what not." they would tell you to fuck off you communist scum.

[DWC]

The labor might be endless, but raw materials and energy are still finite, so there would have to be some way to distribute/ ration it.
Robots could distribute it. Why would you need to ration it? We don't ration things now. The only reason something costs money is that we have to pay all of the people who make that thing. If there are no people involved in the making at any point, there is no reason to pay for a thing. You're acting as if the instant robots get involved we will run out of material.

Hell, robots could also be recycling the unwanted products back into new things as well to make the cycle endless. Its not as if the matter is lost unless we shoot it into space.

You misunderstand. resources are finite which means there must be some mechanism for allocating them. So even with robots everywhere there has to be a limit to how many 200 story tall solid gold skyscrapers can be allocated per person. It's not really a matter of completely running out of resources, but a matter of how much is available at any given time and who gets what. Also how much to produce and where these products go, otherwise you'll have warehouse stocked to the brim with widgets nobody wants and robots still churning them out 24/7 which doesn't make much sense.

Capitalism works because people pay for what and you have supply and demand and I guess in the USSR they had bureaucrats that tried to guess how much to make and where they should go.

[mainiac]

Capitalism works because people pay for what and you have supply and demand and I guess in the USSR they had bureaucrats that tried to guess how much to make and where they should go.

Capitalism has bureaucrats planning production too...  they just (mostly) work for corporations and other private parties and have a tendency to overproduction and waste of consumer goods instead of overproduction and waste of heavy machinery and construction projects.

[10ebbor10]

Capitalism works because people pay for what and you have supply and demand and I guess in the USSR they had bureaucrats that tried to guess how much to make and where they should go.

Actually, the system didn't work like that. The USSR administration decided they wanted that, in 5 years time, and that the people would need x amounts of stuff to do it.
Some of it's problems were the result of unforeseen phenomena and ineffecient bureaucracy, but the primary problem was that the Sovjet union focused it's economy on heavy industry, reducing priority of civilian goods for 80 to 50%, with predictable results.

Planned economies could be succesfull with current technology, as it allows day to day, or even minute to minute planning.

It worked in the seventies

[mainiac]

Allende's government wasn't exactly a success.  It was better then what followed but that's only because Pinochet was so horrible.  You might argue that Allende's ideas might have worked given more time, but his record of runaway inflation and stagnant growth doesn't exactly give hope.

[10ebbor10]

Allende's government wasn't exactly a success.  It was better then what followed but that's only because Pinochet was so horrible.  You might argue that Allende's ideas might have worked given more time, but his record of runaway inflation and stagnant growth doesn't exactly give hope.

Not talking about the governement, just the underlying planning system, which worked quite admirably.

[Eagleon]

Another casual observation: most people who seem to say "oh we can get rid of the need for human labor in the manufacturing industry easy peasy" don't seem to work in the manufacturing industry...

Does janitorial count? Pretty sure it does. I've been pestering my boss to let me build him a robot that could replace me since I began

You have to understand that a post modern economy is dependent on people being willing to surrender their wealth. Right now there are people on earth that earn millions of dollars that they just don't use because they don't really need anything more. So instead they invest it into something to bring in more money, to invest more. If you approached these people and said "We could solve world hunger, and you would maintain your quality of life, but we need your land so we can farm and mine and what not." they would tell you to fuck off you communist scum.

If the land is useful for that it's probably already being used. I think the problem will swing around the other way, where they'll want automation technology to increase the yield and value of their investments, and we might get lots and lots of very efficient mines and farms everywhere as land-owners struggle to keep up with disproportionate shifts in their actual value. Might end up being worse, but hey, at least we'll have lots of carrots.

You misunderstand. resources are finite which means there must be some mechanism for allocating them. So even with robots everywhere there has to be a limit to how many 200 story tall solid gold skyscrapers can be allocated per person. It's not really a matter of completely running out of resources, but a matter of how much is available at any given time and who gets what. Also how much to produce and where these products go, otherwise you'll have warehouse stocked to the brim with widgets nobody wants and robots still churning them out 24/7 which doesn't make much sense.

That last bit is kind of the point of manufacture-on-demand. We already have warehouses stocked to the brim with widgets nobody wants, they're called Walmarts.

[forsaken1111]

The trend seems to be: Humans are only useful in a job until the robot that can do the job at the same skill level or better than the human is cheaper to use than paying the human.