December 4, 2012, Churchill Club, Menlo Park, CA—Chris Anderson from 3D Robotics and former editor at Wired talked with Carl Bass from AutoDesk about 3-D printing and the new industrial revolution. This exchange was obviously a continuation of a long-standing and ongoing conversation between kindred souls.
The first industrial revolution made it possible to manufacture a large quantity of goods and the volume drive quality and standardization higher. Costs dropped with the scale of manufacturing and greater mechanization. Quality goods no longer needed to be produced by a craftsman. Over time, improvements and innovations occurred as people took some aspect of the technology and changed something to get new products.
Over time, technologies move from obtuse and distant, to the hands of the many. This democratization of technology and the ability to build things is driving great changes in the world and in peoples' lives. The rate of change in technology is growing. Things that were not possible 10 years ago are now available to anyone. For example, the PC and other software tools make it possible for anyone to have a personal manufacturing system on their desktop. The software is getting much cheaper, down to free, and easy to use. You no longer need to be a programming expert to make the files for a 3-D object. And there are now a websites that takes your files and delivers the finished item to you.
Now we are able to move away from the hobbyists and crafts to make a high quality product in small unit quantities. The new tools enable innovation and reduce costs as big factories are not needed for the small volumes. Kids can learn new sets of skills and talents by working with parts of the technologies. Open source and free-to-use software moves the starting line up the chain to provide more hands-on experiences.
New tools can also reduce the need for higher programming skills. Reality capture software can take a few photos of an object and convert them into a set of drawing objects that can be modified and used to print objects. One scenario is to have the digital files for a part in your warehouse, and when you need that part for a repair, you just print it. This concept is ideal for emerging and underdeveloped countries and for those obscure items that you need to restore an old relic. The ability to make one of something is much easier than the capability to make millions.
These capabilities start by standing on the shoulders of previous pioneers. Now we can tap into the power of the computer to make almost anything. This is just like the changes in publishing, which used to be hard. You had to take an article and do the typesetting, add the graphics, and get everything ready to go to the printer. Then desktop publishing started and anyone could setup the pages for printing. Now, publishing is a button on a browser.
The democratization of technology captures people's imagination. 3-D printing took 25 years to become an overnight success. The technology has evolved from the conceptually easy cutting process to higher technologies such as additive layers. The investments in research and development have made the printers more capable and faster, making it easier for everyone to use their imagination for more items. The Star Trek replicator is almost here.
The tools and printers enable design for the other 9B by those 9B people who will inhabit the earth in the next decade. The accompanying knowledge bases in mechanical, industrial, and electronic engineering will have to be embedded in the tools and machines. Inventors who don't know the limits can invent more things than someone who tries to stay within the box. New manufacturers will have to invent new products and create new markets.
Inventors will tend to invent new technologies that mostly mimic the existing items: Radio led into TV, magazines moved to the Web,... It's not going to be the best technology, but it will be useful. The PC was the worst computer built, but it was personal and cheap. Dot matrix printers held the market for a long time until digital cameras made people want to print their own pictures. Then the laser and inkjet printers took over. In the same vein, however, 3-D printers will not get into every house, but are more likely to be a 3rd party service, because the level of expertise to operate the machine is higher than most people desire to learn.
Building objects by accessing information and design files, allows people to validate their concepts, converse with like-minded users, share ideas, and produce the item. Autodesk spent 30 years selling software to get to 30 million seats. In 2 years, they got over 100M users on their tools when they moved the tools to the Web.
Information availability also makes the efforts much easier. You can get instructions and even videos for almost anything. The maker community is now creating “Instructables”, documentation for the various objects they build. Often, the documentation takes longer to write than the object took to build, but the makers are sharing their passions and get high satisfaction from their efforts. This mix of videos, pictures, and text drives sharing and creates an innovation model.
This ability to share with knowledgeable people increases the richness of the interactions. The smart phone is another change agent. Smart phones have more computer power than the Space Shuttle and can access more computer power than existed ten years ago. This vast amount of computer power enables demonstrations of technology, reduces silos and allows one to build on the work of others. The challenge is to make a $1B company that has many employees.
Kickstarter and other crowd sourcing organizations are changing the access to money. They also provide access to market information and force the inventor to build better designs. The access to funding is important, but it is easier to find like-minded communities online. Anyone can get to manufacturing capabilities, and software is usually available for very little. The computer power to analyze all facets of the design encourages virtual prototypes and more detailed analysis.
China and other areas are just a part of a complex supply chain. It is possible to compete with China in manufacturing, but the low skill jobs are never coming back to the US. China uses a mixture of high technology and people to get to the lowest costs. People and machines are interchangeable. In comparison, the US has the capacity to put things together to reach the rest of the world and leads in design, manufacturing, and export for the more complex devices. China wants to get ore of this high-value work, but it is moving back to the US for many reasons.
We can extract more value here and as a reversal of globalization, we can arbitrage labor for lowest costs. Now, time, distance, and long supply chains are causing manufacturers to lose touch with their customers and markets. A short supply chain needs more automation to be competitive. The benefits of local and sustainable production are better environments and society.
While the technology for desktop manufacturing is becoming more available, there is still a need and place for other people. Photographers, painters, musicians, etc. are all still valuable since their creativity and problem solving skills complement the hard technology people. The movement of expertise into software means that inventors don't need to single track, but can just experiment.
Some of the other issues associated with makers and all of technology are in preventing people from doing bad things with the technology. Education has to evolve to more hands-on work to make more things, while clearly differentiating downloading an object from the web and printing from understanding the basics. The schools need to get tools that allow iterations and develop a sense of expertise in different tool sets to help crate understandings of object and potential uses of those objects.
At the same time, users don't need to understand everything about a technology to use the tools, to abstract to the basic functions and expand to new uses. Some smart criminal will take advantage of the technologies, so we have to be aware of this aspect of the technology and be careful. Although the denizens of Silicon Valley tend not to think of the outcomes, someone else will, and has to. For example the areas of synthesized biology could enable better flu vaccines that match the strain of the year, or could be used to create some new variant that is extremely dangerous. With the proper printer, you could send the virus template to the printer and print the vaccine. Here are some obvious digital rights management and protection issues.
One issue in all of this is intellectual property. If you scan a number of photos of the Willie Mays statue outside of the Giant's ballpark, and print a scaled down version, is this legal? The laws and ethics haven't been defined yet. So, you can capture any object on any scale and print a version of it with minimal effort. The bits versus atoms argument is becoming moot as more of these capabilities become available. Everything can be digitized, to the distinction gets smaller. The issues for the legal areas include IP, liability—Google's robotic car will absolutely be safer than a human, but what happens when the autonomous car runs over a pregnant woman with a baby carriage? At some time, there is a non-zero probability that someone will use an open-source device for bad, and a provider will be in court as an example. Laws don't exist for many areas, so makers need to do what the do, minimize risks, and deal with the consequences. Behave responsibly and keep the appropriate people informed. The alternative is to not make anything.
The 3-D printing is in its early days, about the equivalent to the PC in '83. So far, it is used for low volume and high value applications like orthopedic devices, dental retainers, etc. The mass markets for replication or creation will probably never be there, since not everyone wants to be a designer. Mods will be more popular as an expression of something custom. If this area is like documents, 90 percent of paper from a printer is created work.
The whole area still needs more standards and greater ease of use. It is easy to put objects into the cloud, but hard to get the files to the printer. A "print" button would be nice. Open formats are evolving and printer drivers are coming. Although the innovator's dilemma of destroying a business by making a totally disruptive product exists, the greater issue is entrenched manufacturing inertia. The inability to respond to change is damaging in any case. The ideal markets for 3-D printing are those 10k-100k unit volumes of small objects that are too small for large companies and too big for the very small companies.