REPLICATORS from sci fi - for real! for the geeks among us

[zeligman]

who wants to loan me their bike to scan?

heheh

[ceemes]

Early days yet, but this technology could be a massive paradigm shift in manufacutering as we know it. It could well on the same earth shattering scale as James Watts' improvements on the Thomas Newcomen engine.

[Wrider]

I agree, if this goes large scale, can you just imagine how cheap manufacturing would become? And on the flip side, how many jobs it would displace???

[zeligman]

i'm not sure how durable the materials are - or how expensive they are to make - I'm still betting it's cheaper, and will be for a while, to make things as we do now...

[ceemes]

i'm not sure how durable the materials are - or how expensive they are to make - I'm still betting it's cheaper, and will be for a while, to make things as we do now...

Some polymers and their binders can extremely strong, durable and in some cases cheap as borsch.

As for the cost, like all new products and ideas, they will be rather prohibative at first. But once and if the technology gets prefected and accepted, cost will be driven down. One of the major cost of any product you buy today is transportation costs, or in the parlance of my industry, Total Landed Cost. Imagine you design a widget which you want to sell to the world. Right now you would need a major investment in building a manufacturing plant, then source and bring in your raw materials, make the silly thing, and then ship it to whereever you need it to be. All this cost both time and money, even if you go the 3rd party manufacturing route.

Now imagine if your widget could be custom made by one of these printers. Instead of investing heavily into capital assets, ie plants, warehouses, distribution centres, retail outlets, transportation services, you could give your buyer a onetime only use coded blueprint, and they could run it down to their local "printing" shop and bingo, its in their hands almost immediately. Basically, its the same model used by many software developers and sellers, where you can buy a programme from them and download it directly to your computer., only this would be an actual physical object.

Of course if this technology is prefected, it will have an earth shattering impact on the whole of human society on almost every conceivable level. For a good example of what sort of massive paradigm shift this technology could represent, one just has to look on the impact the improved Watts Steam Engine had on manufacturing, agriculture and human growth in wealth, mobility, birth rates, genetic diversity and who slue of other factors from the 1760's to today.