What is the future of 3D printing going to look like and how will it change society?

[Reece Arnott]

Just in case anyone is interested in joining in the public discussion of
3D printing, the following is a comment thread I started on Linked-In
for the 3D Printing group (join the group at
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=792077). Please forgive the
various spellings of exponential as I didn't spell-check it :-)

--------

I made a couple of throw away comments about 3D printing powering change
on the scale of the Industrial revolution over the course of a couple of
decades in the copyright infringement thread and started a bit of
off-topic discussion. So here is where I'm coming from, a couple of
justifications, and a large dollop of WAG (Wild Ass Guesses)...

Background
==========
My background is computing where the self-fulfilling prophecy of Moores
Law (the number of transistors on a certain size chip will double every
18-24 months) has lead to enormous changes in the last 50 or so years.
In the real world this has lead to a price/performance doubling time of
one year. Now these trends are not something you can easily extrapolate
as they are expontential and we will normally think in terms of linear
extrapolation so the consequences of these trends continuing are not
obvious to the people who are living with them.

Ray Kurzweil, inventor/futurist and all round media-whore is someone who
has made a bit of a career of analysing these sorts of big picture
exponential trends and has come up with an overarching idea: The Law of
Accelerating Returns. When a technology is/becomes primarily information
based, the next generation is made better and faster by exploiting the
current generation. The obvious one here is computer chip/board design
which used to be done with pencil and paper, then went on to the
computer where more and more of the design process was automated (you
can now design a chip or board and tell the computer which pieces need
to be logically connected and it will give a good first attempt at
laying everything out physically and connecting it all up).

Of course, in a finite universe, exponential trends will always hit a
limit and so will individual technologies. Typically this will end up
with exponentential curves turning into S curves in the end. That is why
we are concerntrating on information based technologies. There is a
fundamental limit given by the laws of physics about how much energy is
needed to answer a yes/no question i.e. set a bit, but we won't come
near it this century.

Main Point
=========
3D design/scanning/printing is all about taking the real-world and
turning it into information so it should be subject to a similar
accelerating returns function as computing has been. This is
particularly so in the case of the Reprap project that I have been
involved in where the goal is to design and build a 3D printer that can
be printed on a 3D printer.

If you could identify a meaningful number for a price/performance
doubling time then you could make educated guesses about what the
capabilities of 3D printing would be like in the future. I don't know of
a good way of measuring performance for 3D printing (in computers it is
MIPS "millions of instructions per second") so I am taking a few Wild
Ass Guesses and coming up with transformative change in a couple of
decades from price/performance doubling time on the order of 3-5 years
(this makes what is a $100,000 machine today affordable for the average
person).

I don't mind if you argue with the actual price/performance doubling
time number (give me some concrete figures please!) but if you don't
accept the premise of the underlying expontential trend then you'll have
to argue quite a bit harder to convince me.

Does this make sense to people?

--
-------------------------
Reece Arnott
Dunedin
New Zealand
-------------------------

[drllau]

Moore's Law related to the density of transistors on a chip. However, your argument relates to the cost per printed widget is harder to justify. If you used say solid gold as printing substrate, the cost will be dominated by the material. Sure you could do things in parallel (multiple rep-rap) but that only improves throughput, not necessarily resolution or cost. Where is the exponential accelerating return coming from?

[Reece Arnott]

On 16/08/12 20:58, drllau wrote:
> Moore's Law related to the density of transistors on a chip. However,
> your argument relates to the cost per printed widget is harder to
> justify. If you used say solid gold as printing substrate, the cost
> will be dominated by the material. Sure you could do things in
> parallel (multiple rep-rap) but that only improves throughput, not
> necessarily resolution or cost. Where is the exponential accelerating
> return coming from?
>
>

We are expanding the knock-on effects of Moore's Law to anything that is
primarily about information processing (I'll make a bigger post with
some links and justifications tonight).

[Reece Arnott]

On 16/08/12 20:58, drllau wrote:
> Moore's Law related to the density of transistors on a chip. However,
> your argument relates to the cost per printed widget is harder to
> justify. If you used say solid gold as printing substrate, the cost
> will be dominated by the material. Sure you could do things in
> parallel (multiple rep-rap) but that only improves throughput, not
> necessarily resolution or cost. Where is the exponential accelerating
> return coming from?
>

Re-reading this after writing quite a bit I see the answer is that this
is actually quite a simple misunderstanding (but I'll leave the rest of
this anyway): I'm not talking about cost per printed widget, I am
primarily talking about cost of the printer for a certain performance
metric (resolution, speed, number of materials etc.)

----------------------------------------
If you don't want to read the entire thing, a repeat of the summary at
the end is: what I am doing is categorising 3D printers as a
"successful" but currently "immature" technology and specifically the
Reprap variants as "primarily information based".

This is primarily a reworking/rewording of Ray Kurzweil's ideas that I
agree with (most people don't have a problem with his ideas, its his
extrapolations that are the problem).

First off, this is something in the tradition of "psycho-history" where
it is easier to predict what happens to a lot of people rather than a
small number because their behaviour averages out so I'll be talking
about laws and rules in the sense of observed social trends of large
groups over time so I could be wrong in a particular instance of 3D
printing that I'm actually talking about.

Something that has been observed is that adoption of a (successful)
technology follows an S-curve. This could be divided into an exponential
part at the start and a logarithmic part at the end - to give them
labels we can call the two halves "immature" and "maturing". One of the
interesting things to come out of the long term case study of the
r/evolution driven by the self-fulfilling prophecy of Moore's Law is the
idea that the broader computer industry is made up of a series of
overlapping S-curves for the adoption of various technologies used, or
"paradigms" as Ray Kurzweil calls them. As one technology tops out in
the "maturing" part of the curve there is an incentive for companies to
search for a better way of doing things. When one is found, it starts at
the "immature" part of the curve and then people jump on the bandwagon
and away it goes again.

So lets unpack the consequences of this a bit, starting with the simple
example of a open source project where the number of people using it
gives a direct correspondence to the rate of change of the project.
There are complications added by the complexities of communication
and/or the synergistic "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts"
but this just squashes or stretches a rate of change S-curve (compared
to the number of people S curve) but it is still an S curve.

We can get a similar rate of change S curve from a number of people S
curve for general technologies as well but it is a bit more indirect as
we have two kinds of people: developers and consumers. As you get more
of one you are likely to get more of the other due to the forces of
profit and competition on the supply/demand equilibrium point (its a bit
complicated and not my main point so think about it for a while).

So what does an S-curve for rate of change mean? This rate of change is
the first derivative of some other function which people want to
maximise for a "mature" or "perfect" technology. Lets make this some
single number called consumer price/performance (for zero-price projects
we treat free as constant cost and so maximise performance by itself).
Integrating or differentiating an exponential function gives another
exponential function so for the first part of the S-curve of adoption
for an "immature" technology we therefore have an exponential increase
in price/performance as well.

This answers one part of the question "Where is the exponential
accelerating return coming from?" as this is all based on a generally
observed phenomena in the adoption rate of immature but ultimately
successful technologies. There is still a bit of wiggle room as if this
doesn't happen with a particular technology then it just means it isn't
successful (there is no demand for it generally). I don't think this is
the case with 3D printing but the outstanding question is where the S
curve goes from exponential to logarithmic which is in turn related to
the maximum number of people who will every have a use for one and
reference adoption rate at a certain point in time.

The other part that I talked about in my response yesterday was
something that I've been thinking about a lot lately(in part because it
is something that Ray Kurzweil talks a lot about) is the extra
advantages you get from piggy-backing on Moore's Law when your
technology is not primarily physical but is all about data/information
processing.

This in turn can lead to a super-exponential price/performance curve
which is easiest expressed by a shortening of the price/performance
doubling time going from the past on into the future. For example "The
power of computers for the same price doubled every 3 years in around
1900, every 2 years around 1950, it was 12 months in the year 2000, it's
now down to 11 months" - Ray Kurzweil 21 June 2012
http://gf2045.com/read/181/ (you can scroll to the bottom of the page
for the 50 minute video)

The more information processing is needed in the evolution of the next
generation of your technology, the greater this extra kick will be. In
the same talk Ray Kurzweil also said "Today with a three-dimensional
printer you can print out 70% of the parts you need to build another
three-dimensional printer. And that will be a hundred percent within 10
years." I have no idea where he is getting his numbers from (common
Reprap figures are 50-60% replication) so I don't know if his timeline
means anything. What is obvious though is that if the Reprap project
reaches it goal, the continued evolution of an immature 100% printable
3D printer (being by definition only manipulation of design files) is
only going to be sped up by faster/cheaper computers and additional
tools to automate what is now done ala the board design tools Paul and
Brian have demonstrated. It doesn't take too much effort to also see
that the evolution of 70% printable printer would probably also go
faster than a 50% printable one for similar reasons.

While this is specifically about the Reprap project and the lower end of
the market, due to competition this also affects any current 3D printer
manufacturer who doesn't want to go out of business as they will have to
compete with this.

In summary, what I am doing is categorising 3D printers as a
"successful" but currently "immature" technology and specifically the
Reprap variants as "primarily information based".

In the case of the Reprap project a study in 2010 showed that the number
of people involved had been doubling every 6 months over the time since
the start of the project so if I'm right then a lot of maturing is
coming very fast.

[drllau]

OK ... I accept that I jumped the wrong strawman. Since my bread and butter is technology licensing, I understand the technology trajectories you describe. What I'm quibbling about is not the trend, but the impact. I'll give you an analogy, in the days when Xerox ruled supreme, they had a business model where they leased machines on a cents per page and you had centralised photocopy rooms in major corporations. The Japanese came along with their desktop machines and a $$/recycleable cartridge. It was essentially a new business model rather than a fundamentally new technology. Rep-rap printers fall into similar territory. The main benefit is not the mass production of widgets but the fact that the universe of things is available from NY to outback Australia. This enables different types of communities to evolve provided you are plugged into the network of people. Xerox stills exists but severely diminished ... (sigh PARC) and what we have today is diverse copyshops with different machines producing everything from booklets to plastic logos ... so whilst the cost per page might have shifted due to inflation, the real expansion has been in diversity and complexity. Complexity is something that automation can handle (within limits of system integration tools). So I agree with your premise that the 3D printer market is evolving, just not convinced it will lead to a StarTrek replicator world. The bottleneck then becomes energy and connectivity. So all you need is
a) FuelCell http://www.ultracellpower.com/rugged.php with solar power to convert biomass to methanol
b) satellite connection to costellan of LEO microsats
c) perhaps some decent ContentDistributionNetwork to archive every single part

then you can go anywhere and provided you have the raw inputs, recreate a lot of stuff (abeit low resolution).
 
Now the transformative change I can debate. Putting a compiler into everyone's hand doesn't make them a programmer, and putting a rep-rap machine in every corner store doesn't make SnowCrash scenario. The limits

a) cost of energy ... Dunedin will always be disadvantaged compared with Dubai
b) supply-chain ... as per Amdahl's Law, the more that can be replicated from plastic, the more relative cost goes onto the components which cannot
c) a functioning market which matches rewards to risk. At moment, maybe crowd-funding or just cottage industry but this is not the same as a efficient market clearing mechanism (see the soft core licensing model).

Lawrence

[Reece Arnott]

On 24/08/12 11:17, drllau wrote:
> OK ... I accept that I jumped the wrong strawman. Since my bread and
> butter is technology licensing, I understand the technology
> trajectories you describe. What I'm quibbling about is not the trend,
> but the impact.

Agreed. That's the reason I started the LinkedIn thread. I've been
sipping the Ray Kurzweil "Singularity" kool-aide and wanted to get a
reality check. Our problem isn't with the exponential trend, its what
does it imply and when will it stop?

I would like to think that we'll see Star Trek replicators in the
relatively near future, especially as Neil Gershenfield, head of of the
MIT FabLab project (which has grown into a big thing and is the
conference I'm heading to), has gone the record as saying "we're 20
years away from the Star Trek Replicator". Of course he has said this at
least twice, four years apart, once in 2006 and once in 2010, so he may
be backing away from that particular vision of the future.

I think my point is that it is likely that the trends will continue long
enough so that what is today a $100,000 3D printer is within the price
range of just about any developed world individual (probably in a
microwave sized case) and I would like a simple reality check to know
how many people would make use of this and how this may change the day
to day world. Obviously if everyone can/will use it to dial up stuff
from a menu of items then the people mass producing those items today
may be marginalised (and if they aren't I want to know what are the
advantages mass production has over such one off production and can they
be overcome?), especially if they are the type of item that it makes
sense to customise/personalise. If less people use these devices (the S
curve of adoption has gone past the "immature" exponential phase into
the "mature" logarithmic growth phase) then the impact will be less.

My long-term vision would be to see 3D printing in the hands of everyone
and to have it be transformative.

So, I am trying to figure out what the barriers are going to be in
future, both for getting 3D printers into all/most homes, and also what
barriers there are as to why it wouldn't be transformative if this did
happen. Once the barriers are identified I and/or like minded people can
work on removing those barriers.

[Reece Arnott]

On 24/08/12 11:17, drllau wrote:

> So I agree with your premise that the 3D printer market is evolving,
> just not convinced it will lead to a StarTrek replicator world. The
> bottleneck then becomes energy and connectivity. So all you need is
> a) FuelCell http://www.ultracellpower.com/rugged.php with solar power
> to convert biomass to methanol
> b) satellite connection to costellan of LEO microsats
> c) perhaps some decent ContentDistributionNetwork to archive every
> single part
>
> then you can go anywhere and provided you have the raw inputs,
> recreate a lot of stuff (abeit low resolution).

Thats a cool vision but mine is slightly more futuristic in that most
biomass is just dirt and atmosphere so why not use those as your feedstock.

>
> Now the transformative change I can debate. Putting a compiler into
> everyone's hand doesn't make them a programmer, and putting a rep-rap
> machine in every corner store doesn't make SnowCrash scenario. The limits
>
> a) cost of energy ... Dunedin will always be disadvantaged compared
> with Dubai

Whether you're talking about fossil-fuel or solar based energy I would
have to say I agree. The problem has always been storage and
transmission costs for when you can't produce enough "instant energy" on
site.

> b) supply-chain ... as per Amdahl's Law, the more that can be
> replicated from plastic, the more relative cost goes onto the
> components which cannot

I'm thinking a bit further ahead, maybe 15-20 years, where your primary
raw materials may be able to come directly from the atmosphere (H2O and
CO2 gives you enormous possibilities if you can chemically recombine the
atoms anyway you want at or near print time + there are other gasses as
well as the major component of air, nitrogen) and then you can have
various components substitute for traditional components such as diamond
can substitute for metals used for strength, carbon nanotubes for
electrical connectivity etc. Then you're not limited to plastic (which
is just long chains of hydrocarbons so can also be made on-site). So,
for most materials you can substitute energy and add to the above
problem instead. There would still be geographical advantages if you
could not substitute particular elements but it would be less in my
vision of the ultimate 3D printer than in yours :-)

> c) a functioning market which matches rewards to risk. At moment,
> maybe crowd-funding or just cottage industry but this is not the same
> as a efficient market clearing mechanism (see the soft core licensing
> model).
>

On balance I agree. It could be argued that part of the reason for the
significant price decreases seen in low-end commercial 3D printers in
the last few years is because of the competition and interest in the
individual/hobbyist market kicked up by the Reprap project etc. There
has never been a functioning market in 3D printers for individuals but
there is now a race by the big companies and the new startups to
establish themselves as number one in this market. Give it five years
for the dust to settle and I think we'll have the beginnings of such a
functioning market.

[Danyl Strype]

Kia ora koutou

On 24 August 2012 11:17, drllau <drlawr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Now the transformative change I can debate. Putting a compiler into everyone's hand doesn't make them a programmer, and putting a rep-rap machine in every corner store doesn't make SnowCrash scenario. <<

I don't think this is the relevant comparison. Putting a transistor
radio into everyone's hand doesn't make them a musician, but it vastly
increases their ability to produce music in diverse locations, as does
putting a CD burner in their hand. Similarly, putting a rep-rap in
every home may only allow them to reproduce commonly available
designs, the same way someone with a CD burner can reproduce commonly
available albums of music, but you can see by the comparison how some
economics interests are threatened, even without a "Star Trek
replicator" scenario.

BTW why would there be a rep-rap in a shop? Their interests are just
as threatened by mainstream adoption of rep-rap as were the interests
of live music venues threatened by recorded music, and the interests
of record stores by CD burners - (in reality, of course, all three
were/art threatened in some ways but not others, although it's easy to
understand why they would be susceptible to exaggerating the threat.)

>> The limits a) cost of energy ... <<

True, but this is factor which forces us to question the viability of
every fossil-fuel based technology our industrial society is based on,
especially the organisational technology that relies on mass-producing
things in a small number of massive facilities, and then trucking them
off to distant places. The fact that this model has even assimilated
most of our food production (and food seed production) is most
concerning, and it's encouraging to see the Organics and Slow Food
movements start to address this, and the emergence of farmers markets
where we can buy local produce.

>> Dunedin will always be disadvantaged compared with Dubai <<

Oh no, no. As the middle east oil reserves peak and decline, one by
one, people will come to question the wisdom of wasting cheap, but
temporary, energy resources building Disneylands like Dubai.
Meanwhile, Ōtepoti is a fairly short distance from some major
hydro-electric resources, and is rapidly developing its wind
resources:
http://www.odt.co.nz/regions/south-otago/213484/otago-wind-power-eating-your-own-veges
http://www.blueskinpower.co.nz/

We are surrounded by farming country, whose wastes could be turned
into biofuels for some applications:
http://permaculture.com/

We can be relied on to continue producing sewage, which can also used
to grow algae, to be turned into biocrude. NIWA were well underway
with a trial scheme in Ōtautahi, although I imagine it's been
disrupted by the earthquake:
http://www.niwa.co.nz/publications/wa/water-atmosphere-1-july-2010/solutions

It may already be more energy-efficient to print off simple utility
items in the home using some of that energy, than to have them
mass-produced in a factory overseas (energy footprint?), shipped to
Port Chalmers (using non-renewable deisel), and trucked to a shop
(more deisel), to which you drive to buy it (non-renewably petrol).

>> b) supply-chain ... as per Amdahl's Law, the more that can be replicated from plastic, the more relative cost goes onto the components which cannot
c) a functioning market which matches rewards to risk. At moment,
maybe crowd-funding or just cottage industry but this is not the same
as a efficient market clearing mechanism (see the soft core licensing
model). <<

I'm tempted to start ranting about past and future economics here.
Instead I'll a recommend 2 books by people whose rants on economic
history and future prospects are much better informed than mine:
past: Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
http://books.google.co.nz/books/about/Debt.html?id=GYhajCQU8XIC&redir_esc=y

future: The Ecotechnic Future by John Michael Greer:
http://www.le.org.nz/index2.php?page=shop.product_details&product_id=47&flypage=flypage-ask.tpl&pop=1&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=28

You forgot to mention
d) the cost and sustainability of the plastics which feed into the rep-rap

I was encouraged to see this TED Talk recently about using mycelium to
turn agricultural waste into biodegradable packaging in 5 days:
http://www.ted.com/talks/eben_bayer_are_mushrooms_the_new_plastic.html

Ma te wā
Strypey

--
Danyl Strype
Community Developer
Disintermedia.net.nz/strype

"Geeks are those who partake in our culture."
- .ISOcrates

"Uncomfortable alliances are not just necessary; they reflect and
speak to the tremendous possibility of our political moment."
- Harmony Goldberg and Joshua Kahn Russell
http://www.nationofchange.org/new-radical-alliances-new-era-1337004193

"Both Marxists and Chicago-school libertarian economists can agree
that free software is the best model."
- Keith C Curtis
http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=407