3D printing that can manufacture an entire house with plumbing and electric systems in 20 hours

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**Aerethan**

By removing currency as an incentive, creativity as we know it will slow to a crawl. R&D is fueled by the idea that it will pay off. There just aren't that many people in this day and age who invent new technologies for the betterment of humanity.

Hell even the tech here in the thread has financial needs that will only be met by someone who expects a return on that investment.

The argument really is moot anyway, as this global system of equality won't ever happen. There are some people who wouldn't be happy with everyone else being happy. Plenty of nations hold endless grudges, and this utopian idea wouldn't change that. North Korea wouldn't be happy with their country being free of the shackles of modern society. They would still want South Korea to pay for whatever it is they did that made NK so mad(presumably they took all the wiener dogs away and sold them to Frazzled, and those were North Koreas favorite kinds of dogs).

So in this utopian world of instant production at a whim, can I tell my robots to craft me an arsenal to make that scumbag neighbor pay for his dog crapping on my yard all the time?
Can Canada whip up some nukes to make South Africa pay for stealing their Olympic gold medal? Can I nuke Scotland for creating curling?

The extrapolation of this idea of removal of scarcity is ridiculous. No one is content to be content. Except perhaps monks, and a few really laid back dogs.

Now perhaps if you created a society with a system like that, which is completely independent from the rest of the world, and whose members had no prior experience with the world as it stands, sure the idea might take off and end well. But we can't really reformat the world like a hard drive and just install a newer better humanity on it.

**Peregrine**

Aerethan wrote:
By removing currency as an incentive, creativity as we know it will slow to a crawl. R&D is fueled by the idea that it will pay off. There just aren't that many people in this day and age who invent new technologies for the betterment of humanity.

But you don't need very many. The whole point of a post-scarcity world is that you've already reached a point where everyone can life a comfortable life. R&D on top of that is just a nice side bonus. And of course it will still happen. There are plenty of scientists and engineers who do their job because they love to discover and build new things, so there will always be people willing to work on projects like curing diseases.

North Korea wouldn't be happy with their country being free of the shackles of modern society.

That's nice. Once North Korea's citizens gain self-replicating factories (perhaps dropped in by a generous donor) capable of producing modern weapons the government will have no means of controlling them. It's kind of hard to force everyone to live in poverty when the military has no reason to be loyal to you, and the citizens have a lot more guns than you and your friends.

The extrapolation of this idea of removal of scarcity is ridiculous. No one is content to be content. Except perhaps monks, and a few really laid back dogs.

What does hating people have to do with scarcity or whether or not you have a communist government? In fact, the one remaining purpose of government will be to maintain peace.

And of course if you look at history you'll find that most wars have a strong element of a desire to obtain resources. If there's no scarcity there's no need to have a war for oil or whatever, so that immediately cuts down on a lot of conflict.

**Aerethan**

But if we can overthrow governments with our garage kit arsenals, how can the government maintain peace? What happens when the ENTIRE country(or a large enough portion) decides that they really don't like Canada and that they have to go?

War isn't always fought over resources. Some are fought over women. Many have been fought just for perceived slights. How do you convince people to join militaries if they can just sit at home and make their own little invasion proof compounds?

Cutting down a lot of conflict isn't enough. For this idea to work, you'd essentially have to destroy conflict completely. 2 redneck American families slaughtered each other for generations because someone stole a single pig. Now sure, in this dream world they could just make their own pig, but the point remains that some people will start wars over some trivial things.

I maintain that it won't ever happen, most certainly not in the lifetime of anyone currently living.

**Peregrine**

Aerethan wrote:
But if we can overthrow governments with our garage kit arsenals, how can the government maintain peace? What happens when the ENTIRE country(or a large enough portion) decides that they really don't like Canada and that they have to go?

And really, what are the odds of a large enough portion of the country deciding to invade Canada? You might get a few insane extremists, but how are they going to convince anyone to help and risk losing their nice comfortable life? What's in it for the rest of their army? Previously "what's in it for me" has depended on having a lot of angry young men with nothing to lose, and suddenly that element of society is gone.

How do you convince people to join militaries if they can just sit at home and make their own little invasion proof compounds?

Exactly. How do you convince anyone to join a military and threaten another country when they have nothing to gain and everything to lose?

Cutting down a lot of conflict isn't enough. For this idea to work, you'd essentially have to destroy conflict completely. 2 redneck American families slaughtered each other for generations because someone stole a single pig. Now sure, in this dream world they could just make their own pig, but the point remains that some people will start wars over some trivial things.

Right, but that's one family, and everyone else around them has a strong incentive to stop the conflict and maintain a nice peaceful world. In a post-scarcity world it ends there, neither side can get anyone to follow them, so at most you have a case of murder for the police to deal with. And given that murder happens all the time right now, it's not like this is making things any worse.

**Frazzled**

youbedead wrote:
I wasn't suggesting that it was a bad thing merely that eventually you can't just move labor around, were going to have to face it eventually and I honestly have no idea what were going to do

Hunger Games!

**Melissia**

sebster wrote:
I've never understood this argument that we should keep doing things inefficiently so that someone has a job. Replacing old practices with more efficient ones is how we improve living standards.

Moving labour that used to be tied up in building houses, and into, say, building house making robots and other kinds of 3D printing would expand living standards immensely.

It would mean transition costs, but you deal with those. You reskill labour. You don't just refuse progress. That's just bizarre, quite frankly.

I don't disagree with the first part of this post . I just disagree that the latter part is ever going to happen until sanity comes back to the Republican party.

**kronk**

Peregrine wrote:
so once you completely automate production of all necessary goods

This person has never worked in manufacturing. That time will never* come, I'm afraid.

I watched the video in the original post when I got home. Interesting concept, but I don't see it being viable in the near or not-so-near future. Did you see the massive rails that "machine" was on? That gak ain't cheap. Also, this "machine" is building walls and potentially the plumbing, but you'll still need people to install the cabinets, fixtures, pull electrical lines and cable, pour the foundation, install windows and blinds and a bunch of other work. Don't any of you actually live in houses? Also, all that plastic isn't cheap. For it to hold up to the elements, that will have to be some stout walls as I didn't see them installing any additional bracing. And who would want to live in this plastic house? Can you hang gak on the walls?

While the discussion this has generated here has been interesting, this isn't something we'll see large scale in our children's children's lifetimes... Where's the flying cars that the 60s promised everyone!?!

*Never being a time between now and 500 years from now....

**ShumaGorath**

kronk wrote:
Peregrine wrote:
so once you completely automate production of all necessary goods

This person has never worked in manufacturing. That time will never* come, I'm afraid.

While the discussion this has generated here has been interesting, this isn't something we'll see large scale in our children's children's lifetimes... Where's the flying cars that the 60s promised everyone!?!

...

*Never being a time between now and 500 years from now....

You should look into lights out automation in factories. There are factory processes right now that are totally automated and require engineering upkeep occasionally, but which require nothing between feeding raw materials and transporting product for packaging. Amazons automated warehouses are another example, as are automated farms. I'd be surprised if we didn't see a dramatic uptick in total productive automation in quite a few fields by the end of this century. In the last 10 years robotics have experienced their biggest forward leap since their original inception. In 1912 we didn't even have computers, now we have flexible devices that communicate with satellites in space capable of answering obscure questions and finding you anywhere on earth while being powered by their radio antennae wire free. Don't underestimate the acceleration of technological advancement.

**Aerethan**

kronk wrote:
Peregrine wrote:
so once you completely automate production of all necessary goods

This person has never worked in manufacturing. That time will never* come, I'm afraid.

I watched the video in the original post when I got home. Interesting concept, but I don't see it being viable in the near or not-so-near future. Did you see the massive rails that "machine" was on? That gak ain't cheap. Also, this "machine" is building walls and potentially the plumbing, but you'll still need people to install the cabinets, fixtures, pull electrical lines and cable, pour the foundation, install windows and blinds and a bunch of other work. Don't any of you actually live in houses? Also, all that plastic isn't cheap. For it to hold up to the elements, that will have to be some stout walls as I didn't see them installing any additional bracing. And who would want to live in this plastic house? Can you hang gak on the walls?

While the discussion this has generated here has been interesting, this isn't something we'll see large scale in our children's children's lifetimes... Where's the flying cars that the 60s promised everyone!?!

*Never being a time between now and 500 years from now....

Clearly you didn't pay any attention to the video. The machine is able to install all plumbing and electrical networking as well as install windows. Also, it isn't plastic. It is extruded concrete with synthetic fibers and interlocked steel reinforcement. The presentation was a brief summary of the technology. If they took the time to build an actual working one, and have a contract with NASA, I'm pretty sure they at least conceptualized the abilities to perform every possible by the tech to build a house.

As to when we'll see the tech on the scale being proposed, since when do we research and develop tech that HAS to be mass marketed in the present? Why on earth do we research other planets for habitability if we'll never be able to reach those planets in our lifetime? Plenty of scientists are concerned with 500 years from now. The only people who can afford to live so intensely in the present are college students and artists, many of whom are likely on some sort of recreational drug or herb.

We do things for our children, and their children, and their children. We solve problems that exist now, so that they have the answers in the future, even if we don't/can't implement the answers.

**Peregrine**

kronk wrote:
This person has never worked in manufacturing. That time will never* come, I'm afraid.

Why not? Obviously 3d printing won't create everything, but it's not the only tool in automated manufacturing. Why have a human install the cabinets when you can have a robot do it? At most, you might have a single person supervising the process to ensure that nothing goes wrong, and as confidence in the technology improves that person might turn into a single supervisor watching over an entire city of construction through remote cameras.

Where's the flying cars that the 60s promised everyone!?!

Built in the 1960s. Unfortunately it turned out that even though the concept worked just fine there wasn't really a market for them, and the idea was pretty much abandoned. Of course now improvements in autopilot technology have the potential to remove the biggest problem with flying cars: learning to fly. Once fully automated cars on the road become accepted, it's a short step to having fully automated flying cars.

**ShumaGorath**

Peregrine wrote:
kronk wrote:
This person has never worked in manufacturing. That time will never* come, I'm afraid.

Why not? Obviously 3d printing won't create everything, but it's not the only tool in automated manufacturing. Why have a human install the cabinets when you can have a robot do it? At most, you might have a single person supervising the process to ensure that nothing goes wrong, and as confidence in the technology improves that person might turn into a single supervisor watching over an entire city of construction through remote cameras.

Where's the flying cars that the 60s promised everyone!?!

Built in the 1960s. Unfortunately it turned out that even though the concept worked just fine there wasn't really a market for them, and the idea was pretty much abandoned. Of course now improvements in autopilot technology have the potential to remove the biggest problem with flying cars: learning to fly. Once fully automated cars on the road become accepted, it's a short step to having fully automated flying cars.

Airlines are already almost fully automated, pilots don't do much during most of the flight. The issue with flying cars is infrastructure, fuel efficiency, and the inherent danger. A flying car is called a helicopter.

**Janthkin**

A flying car is called a missile. Even ignoring malicious intent, I don't want to see the headlines when the 101 year-old who refuse to give up driving confuses the gas and the brake with a flying vehicle.

**Peregrine**

ShumaGorath wrote:
Airlines are already almost fully automated, pilots don't do much during most of the flight. The issue with flying cars is infrastructure, fuel efficiency, and the inherent danger. A flying car is called a helicopter.

Speaking as a pilot, they really aren't. Airlines use the autopilot a lot, sure, but the human pilots have to be there to oversee it even when the autopilot is flying the plane. Whether or not the technology is ready, the government doesn't even come close to trusting it enough to fly the plane unsupervised. The point in automation I'm talking about is a lot more than anything we have now.

And the issue had nothing to do with technology. We built flying cars, they worked just fine. The only problem was that there weren't enough people willing to pay the extra cost for a flying car and invest the effort in getting a pilot's license. Instead, they just bought normal cars. It was a failure of marketing, not technology.

Janthkin wrote:
A flying car is called a missile. Even ignoring malicious intent, I don't want to see the headlines when the 101 year-old who refuse to give up driving confuses the gas and the brake with a flying vehicle.

Fortunately aviation is a lot stricter on medical limits, and you'll lose your pilot's license long before you lose your driver's license. So, until the point where flying cars become entirely automated, with no manual control beyond choosing a destination, accidents like that would be incredibly rare.

**Wolfstan**

Whether this type of 3d printing will have a real affect on the construction industry is still very much an unknown, but it does show the 3d printing is here to stay. It also means that the gaming industry needs to looking at this now, not in two years time when it's too late.

My experience of writable CD's was this:

First off the big bulky expensive recorders were purchased by companies and only one or two people had access for them. This meant copyright breaches were very low level. You then got the smaller and mid range priced burners. This was when organised crime came on board as the investment was worth it. You also saw them appear in company departments, which leads to looser control of them, so staff started burner copies of stuff. if you knew the right person. It then went to expensive drives, this again increased access to them. Finally dirt cheap, both the burners and the discs.

3d printers will go a similar way and quickly. As I understand it although not brilliant for tabletop models, it's more than suitable for scenery. This means the likes of Forge World should be worried. Point in case, I'm in the middle of replicating their corridor system using 3d Max, as a project for my portfolio, and I'm doing it just by using photos off their web site. It's that simple. I'm also working on a 3d model of the Imperial Bastion. Both of those could easily be used as templates for a 3d printer.

Gaming companies ignore this technology at their own peril.

**SOFDC**

By removing currency as an incentive, creativity as we know it will slow to a crawl.

I'd make robots that build stuff more betterer than your robots just to say that I am better than you. I'm also better looking.

Not everything is about money. Some of it is more petty than that.

**Wolfstan**

Interestingly the BBC news website has a 3d printing article as well: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19520446

Lights... camera... 3D colour printer. During the making of ParaNorman, a new stop-motion animation film released this week in the UK, four 3D printers were essential members of the crew.

Stop-motion is a traditional film-making technique that dates back to the 19th Century.

It involves using puppet models that are gently repositioned frame by frame to create the illusion of movement.

Traditionally, individual facial expressions would be sculpted by hand out of clay, but the producers of ParaNorman built up a library of 8,800 3D-printed faces for the main character alone, which could be used in various sequences, to give him about 1.5 million different expressions.

Production house Laika began experimenting with 3D printers in the production of its 2008 film Coraline, in which the lead character managed a comparatively feeble 200,000 expressions.

Time saving
British animation producers Aardman also used 3D printers in their recent series The Pirates!

"All shapes need to be modelled on the computer before they are printed, but there's a time saving to be made in terms of animation on set," said Stuart Missinger, award leader on the Stop Motion Animation and Puppet Making course at Staffordshire University.

"It means the animator can literally pick and mix from a library of faces. But there's a seam line that runs where a mouth replacement slots in - it goes under the eye, across the bridge of the nose, across the temple.

"If the character has a beard, then the seam line is masked - but if it's visible it needs painting out in post production."

Mr Missinger's colleague, Daryl Marsh is senior lecturer in stop motion at the same university.

He admits the technique isn't to the taste of every potential animator.

"We try to push the students to try it out," he said.

"A lot of stop-motion is craft-based so they prefer working with their hands but there is some cross-over. When you've done it once, it makes sense - the first time it's confusing."

Printer power
Brian McLean is creative supervisor of replacement animation and engineering at the Rapid-Prototype department of Laika.

Laika says 3.77 tonnes of printer powder were used by the four printers working on ParaNorman.

They worked a total of 572 days, churning out faces from the lower eyelids down to the chins of the main characters.

Extra work was still involved once the faces came off the printers.

"There are super-glue and powder elements as part of the process. But the resin is liquid and it's sprayed by multiple heads in a given printer onto a water-soluble powder-based support material, which is the foundation for the entire process," said Mr McLean.

"Though they look like sugar cookies from the oven when they emerge, there's no residue when the support material washes away."

Sometimes the printers made mistakes - one scene in which two characters fall into each other and their faces blend was the result of a printer malfunction.

"The solution of purposefully printing the two characters' faces together came to us after a mistake from one of the printers, where a bunch of faces were printed on top of one another. Whenever there's a mistake in the process, we look at it and wonder, 'Could we utilize that?' In this case, it made for a cool effect."

Mr McLean also has a response for any purists who may believe the new technology takes the skill of stop motion away from its roots.

"The 3D Printers are the connection between computers and stop-motion," he said.

"Cutting-edge computer-generated starts it, and hand-made practicality - the signature of the stop-motion art form - finishes it."

**ShumaGorath**

Peregrine wrote:
ShumaGorath wrote:
Airlines are already almost fully automated, pilots don't do much during most of the flight. The issue with flying cars is infrastructure, fuel efficiency, and the inherent danger. A flying car is called a helicopter.

Speaking as a pilot, they really aren't. Airlines use the autopilot a lot, sure, but the human pilots have to be there to oversee it even when the autopilot is flying the plane. Whether or not the technology is ready, the government doesn't even come close to trusting it enough to fly the plane unsupervised. The point in automation I'm talking about is a lot more than anything we have now.

And the issue had nothing to do with technology. We built flying cars, they worked just fine. The only problem was that there weren't enough people willing to pay the extra cost for a flying car and invest the effort in getting a pilot's license. Instead, they just bought normal cars. It was a failure of marketing, not technology.

I was mostly speaking to the act of turning on autopilot and then leaning back in the chair until you have to make a landing. Minor course corrections and maintaining altitude is something the autopilot should be good at. I know you don't leave the cockpit. As to the technology of flying cars, to this day they're still pretty poor. They're mostly just either ducted fan driven and crash prone or they're small passenger planes with a mode for wheels. None of them have ever been safe or efficient. The issue has never been cost because there have never been any that were widely commercially available. They have the same problem jetpacks did, the technology appears to be there, but it's rough, dangerous, and the concept is kinda stupid.

**Wolfstan**

And yet another appears about 3d printing: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19665625

Replicator maker talks up 3D printing tech

The gospel about 3D printing is being taken to the streets of New York.

MakerBot Industries, best known for its small 3D printers, has opened a shop in Manhattan through which it will aim to sell the joys of home fabrication to the general public.

The store opening comes as MakerBot releases the second incarnation of its Replicator 3D printer.

The Replicator 2.0 works to much finer resolutions than earlier versions and can fabricate much bigger objects.

Supply side

MakerBot said the store, the first of its kind, would act as a showcase for 3D printing and stage demonstrations and workshops for those who were curious about the technology.

3D printing involves building up objects layer by layer out of plastic that is melted and fed via a carefully controlled nozzle to form a shape. The printers were initially used in engineering and design firms to produce and refine prototypes.

Now many home hackers, makers and artists use 3D printers to turn out their own customised creations. Examples include model soldiers, cases for home electronic projects, and furniture for dolls' houses.

Bre Pettis said the Replicator 2.0 was aimed at the "prosumer" - either a design professional or a hardcore hobbyist. The device costs $2,199 (£1,360) and builds objects up in layers only 100 microns thick. In previous versions, each layer was about 270 microns thick.

Mat Fordy, founder and boss of coolcomponents.co.uk that sells 3D printers and other home hacking gear, said the technology was proving popular.

"We've really seen the affordable 3D printer market in the UK explode over the last couple of years," he told the BBC. "Many types of people use them, not just professionals, but people who have an idea that they need to touch and hold."

He said the new MakerBot was a great looking piece of kit but supply problems had made it hard to get hold of.

"They never seem to have enough to go around, and that puts a lot of people off," he said. "Other excellent printers are in ready supply, and many people just give up waiting and get one of those instead."

**sebster**

Melissia wrote:
I don't disagree with the first part of this post . I just disagree that the latter part is ever going to happen until sanity comes back to the Republican party.

I absolutely agree with you there. And I think a government that fails to offer reskilling to people in declining industries is a government that is simply failing to do its job.

And unfortunately right now you have Republican Party that refuses to even consider the idea that such a thing might be part of its job.