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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

[SalmonGod]

The whole point of the 3d printer thing is it's no longer necessary to mass-produce.  A person simply says "I need this", downloads some blueprints, and produces it for themselves quicker than it would take for them to go to the store.  At least, that's the inevitable point the technology will eventually reach, and when it will become the most attractive option to consumers.  It's what happened with file sharing and the near-extinction of music stores.  The same thing was happening with video games, but that's exactly why publishers have pushed so very hard for console development over PC.  If they didn't, they were going to go the same way as record labels.  Brick and mortar gaming stores hardly bother to carry a very limited selection of PC games anymore, when 10 years ago the PC game section would have been as large as any other.  The only reason for this is mass production for the platform has been rendered obsolete.  The same thing can happen in any other market where technology allows people to obtain something independently.

[LordBucket]

Robots could distribute it.

More to the point, if you have the ability to disassemble objects back to base materials for reconstruction, there's little need for robots or distribution at all.

If you can go to your backyard, gather up some plants and rocks, dump them into the back of your printer to break down into base materials, then download a recipe and print out whatever you want...why would anybody need stores or robots or centralized warehouses or distribution systems? For materials? No, because there's not particularly any shortage of "stuff" to disassemble. There's no need for "plants and rocks" to become some precious resource that needs stockpiling or distributing when you can simply recycle the things that you made, too. Your toilet and trashcan would both become sources of materials.

We already recycle things like water, cardboard, jars, etc. This would simply be a refinement of that process, and with a distributed rather than centralized model. You wouldn't pipe water miles away to a recycling plant to be purified and piped back, you'd do it yourself. All that production and distribution infrastructure would become unnecessary.

I think we would quickly find that rather than any materials shortage...there would be a vast surplus.

[andrea]

Not all dirt nor all rock are good for anything however. while printing stuff from rocks on your backyard would be revolutionary in many ( or most) ways, unequal distribution of resources does exist. if you need a titanium screw, or a neodymium magnet, you will have to dig quite a lot.

[Scoops Novel]

Eventually applicable, but shorter term utilization's may as well be are game here for now, given there degree of impact. First and one of the most important questions, what does the universal man on the street think?

[misko27]

Eventually applicable, but shorter term utilization's may as well be are game here for now, given there degree of impact. First and one of the most important questions, what does the universal man on the street think?

"3d Printing? What's that? Sounds cool."

[Lagslayer]

Not all dirt nor all rock are good for anything however. while printing stuff from rocks on your backyard would be revolutionary in many ( or most) ways, unequal distribution of resources does exist. if you need a titanium screw, or a neodymium magnet, you will have to dig quite a lot.

Titanium is actually very common, but it is also very difficult to process.

[Scoops Novel]

Eventually applicable, but shorter term utilization's may as well be are game here for now, given there degree of impact. First and one of the most important questions, what does the universal man on the street think?

"3d Printing? What's that? Sounds cool."

More on the lines of the day "luddite" is being used in the press.

[LordBucket]

Not all dirt nor all rock are good for anything however.

if you need a titanium screw, or a neodymium magnet, you will have to dig quite a lot.

1) There are very few genuinely "rare" materials and none of them are particularly important. If it really came down to it, I'm pretty sure we could both live out our entire lives very happily without titanium screws or neodymium magnets. Yes, they're used in a lot of things...every Toyota Prius has a little over two pounds of the stuff, for example, but we're using it because we have it. Modern society would still exist without these things.

2) These materials are not nearly as rare as you seem to be implying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium
"it is a fairly common element, no rarer than cobalt, nickel, and copper ore, and is widely distributed in the Earth's crust"

http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/titanium/overview.php
"... titanium ores such as ilmenite and rutile are very common. There is more titanium in the earth's crust than there is nickel, zinc, chromium, tin, lead, mercury, and manganese combined! The ores of these metals are concentrated in large, easily mined bodies"

[SalmonGod]

A consumer grade universal disassembler is far more complex technology than a 3d printer, and much farther off in the future.  Maybe someday, but that's getting really sci-fi.  There are still some difficult obstacles to printing out complex items involving multiple materials, but it's at least a development that's on the horizon.  We're still going to be dependent on material distribution for quite a while after we get there.

[Scoops Novel]

A consumer grade universal disassembler is far more complex technology than a 3d printer, and much farther off in the future.  Maybe someday, but that's getting really sci-fi.  There are still some difficult obstacles to printing out complex items involving multiple materials, but it's at least a development that's on the horizon.  We're still going to be dependent on material distribution for quite a while after we get there.

Seconded. Let's try and keep this imminently practical. Assuming a rough decade long period, how far along are these predicted to be, and for that matter what else is likely to have newly benefited it in the gap?

[SalmonGod]

It's really difficult to say.  There are so many factors.  One of the most relative trends in technology these days is engineering design efforts are focusing on easier manufacturing processes.  For instance, there are new display technologies that can be simply sprayed onto a surface with something similar to an inkjet printer.  Progress is being rapidly made on doing the same with semiconductors.  I think developments like that are going to synergize with the stuff we're talking about, speeding along developments that will enable ordinary people to produce whatever they want on their own.

[10ebbor10]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium
"it is a fairly common element, no rarer than cobalt, nickel, and copper ore, and is widely distributed in the Earth's crust"

http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/titanium/overview.php
"... titanium ores such as ilmenite and rutile are very common. There is more titanium in the earth's crust than there is nickel, zinc, chromium, tin, lead, mercury, and manganese combined! The ores of these metals are concentrated in large, easily mined bodies"

While they migth be very common, they are distributed throurough the crust, and extremely hard to process. You need a multistage dissassembling process, something which won't be commercially available before we get fully functional advanced nanotechnology.

Also, do note that 3D printing is limited in scale. It can't pring smaller than a particular size, and well, you need different printers to efficiently print a multititude of objects.

[Pnx]

Actually there are now printers that work on a scale so small you need an electron microscope to view it properly.
Link.

[10ebbor10]

Actually there are now printers that work on a scale so small you need an electron microscope to view it properly.
Link.

Yup, but that's not the type of printer you're going to use for large scale projects.

[SalmonGod]

Actually there are now printers that work on a scale so small you need an electron microscope to view it properly.
Link.

Yup, but that's not the type of printer you're going to use for large scale projects.

I'm not even sure what you mean by that.