While you are deciding between 3D printers and patents, I will be developing patents for my specialized 3D printers.

If you want to reduce the number of problems you have 3D printing, put your printer and your polymer spools inside a dessicator. It helps a LOT!

The next big scientific breakthrough will be the ability to transplant intelligence to our elected officials. This will occur at around the same time as the invention of a perpetual motion machine.

I have done modestly well by buying my current home and my previous house from the 'white elephant' discard heap. What I could bring to the table that other people could not is 'imagination'. I think that this applies to the future of 3D printers.

Having the capability to create things (let us assume the Star Trek 'replicator' level of capability of printers that Temaklos specifies) does not magically endow 95% of humanity with the imagination or inclination to create their own products. What you 'sell' is your ability to imagine a product that other people would like - like selling a book: The book contains letters and words that are in the common domain, but it has proprietary plots and characters that are copyrighted.

Anyone can stroll up to a replicator and say, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." but if you want the unit to reproduce a new gourmet dish, you buy the right to that recipe from the chef who created it. Similarly, you can order your shipsuit for free, but if you like the latest fashion that the actress wore on the Holovid, you buy the design from the studio.

What 3D printers add to physical society is what we are currently experiencing with information technology and news: the dissolution of gatekeepers. It used to be that the news you heard/saw/read was filtered through a few major 'gates' - now we have people posting their videos directly on the Net and there is nothing that social censors can do to stop them.

I am looking forward to an increase in the sophistication of 3D printers that allows me to be free from the fetters of 'what people in Paris tell me I am supposed to want'. I can do a much better job imagining my world than they can. And if other people like my ideas, I will be glad to sell them to those people.

Jan

There is a significant amount of time and energy to either find & obtain or create the exact specifications for parts to produce with a 3D printer, assuming of course you can make the part out of plastic. Metals fabrication in the similar approach would be CNC or water jet machines and cost $10s of thousands of dollars, and given the 'horsepower' to operate either, its not likely to be tiny or particularly common in the home, well, forever.

Most of the economy doesn't have anything to do with manufacturing, its probably 10% at best domestically, its not ever going to be more than 10 or 20% of the economy. Most of the population makes its living in the service sector.

So far, you need to have the item in order to copy it. But, as to looking into the future, it is always a toss up. Who knows what the next big scientific breakthrough will be? In the 50's, we predicted a Mars colony by 2016, flying cars, complete nutrition by just swallowing a pill. Computers? Well, maybe in the universities, but what use are they to most people? Hah!

i like your qualifier.."50 years...if we survive that long..."...that is the question...

The process of invention uses both higher-level concepts and lower-level concepts. At present it is the lower-level portion that lends itself to automation. For example, one can come up with a high-level idea and then, using a computer, build a virtual model of an invention implementing that idea. One can then test millions of variations of that model in a short period of time before constructing an actual physical model incorporating the best features of the virtual one..

That goes without saying. What I was addressing is the fiction so commonly promoted is that we "run out of stuff." For example, water "shortages" are local, and a matter of reclamation and distribution, since without large scale evaporation off planet, the amount of water on Earth is the same as it's been for eons.

Energy resources are abundant, and entropy as an existential concern will be unimportant for beyond the life of our sun.

I wonder if using frequencies to generate resources might be a possibility. If we could figure out the specific frequency of each element in the table of elements then we might be able to produce on demand.

They talk about printing Meat...well I am not so confident that they understand or even care about everything that is in a piece of meat including the good bacteria. That's where my idea of using frequencies comes in. Record the frequency of the best, most pure and natural piece of meat cooked to perfection.
Not even sure that is possible but it's interesting to think about.

It's the chicken or the egg conundrum all over again!

I disagree. People will still discover things and invent new ways of doing things. The inventor, said Rand, is the last profession to appear in civilization and the first to go when savagery gains the upper hand. And a society that disrespects its inventors, eventually stagnates. And then starts forgetting its discoveries. As the Romans did.

Actually Zarkov, one does consume energy, and have to deal with ever-increasing entropy. The resources one would still need, even with infinite transformative ability (base matter into any kind of matter you could ask for), would involve concentrations of energy.

While 3D printers are really cool, they are expensive - not just to build, but to operate. My son has one and they are finicky and the rolls of plastic aren't cheap. You can get the same thing down at the dollar store that costs 30x that much and nearly a day to 3D print.

I really don't see everything moving to individual printing because mass manufacturing is so efficient and there just isn't a huge need for customized everything in our lives. Right now, the printers inexpensive enough for anyone to own are limited to printing knick-knacks out of plastic. They're great for role-playing games and hobbies, but they don't have the strength needed for many applications. And it isn't like these things can design the circuits necessary for many appliances and such either.

I'm not really worried about this in the next 50 years barring a massive breakthrough in the affordability and availability of large-format printers which can accept a wide variety of input materials - including metals. That's still a long ways away.

The entertainment industry has already produced a dramatic "arc" illustrating just the kind of future Gary North is afraid of. And with good reason. And the name of the franchise involved? Star Trek. In the later period those shows covered, "replicators" were the thing. A "replicator" would be no larger than a microwave oven--or one of those additive factories we call "3D printers" today. You would walk up to one and say, "I want a ham sandwich," and more quickly than you could say the command, you'd get it. You could even ask for a glass of water and specify the temperature.

So what's an inventor to do? Well, I'll tell you what I found objectionable about Star Trek. Those people had no currency. And replicators--from the 3D printer size to the big industrial-sized replicators that produced building materials and such--could literally produce anything on command, even by rearranging matter, energy, and any and all pure substances and mixtures.

I concluded that all inventors worked for the state--be it the United Nations on Earth, its equivalent on another world, or the Federation as a whole. The best inventors worked for Star Fleet and got the best laboratories, the best staff, the best equipment, the best commissaries, the best everything. The inventor working out of his garage? Nothing. No one said a word.

How would you solve the basic problem? Only one way. The inventor would have to sell his idea outright to whatever authority, or whatever company, programmed replicators worldwide. A big, fat lump sum would place that invention into the public domain. Permanently.

And resources? Well, in that looked-for universe, very few things would be non-replicable. The form of platinum, or "latinum," that remained liquid at room temperature would be one. This formed the basis of the Ferengi economy. Which in fact was a travesty of capitalism.

But I have an idea that the end of the franchise left the Federation in bad shape. Just bad enough for a revolution to take place. After fighting the longest, costliest, and bloodiest war in its history, surely the Federation would stagger under a mountain of debt--hidden debt, given the lack of currency, but debt is still debt. Whereas frontier societies would be free and clear--and might even want to get away from replicators, for health reasons. Sooner or later the Federation would impose Townshend-like Acts on its colonies in some of the new frontier areas. And that would eventually provoke repeats of the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Lexington and Concord. And if the Federation still disrespected its inventors as I saw it doing (by watching literally every Star Trek episode of every show that aired), those inventors might join the rebel side. Then watch out!

It seems to be a hard concept for many to grasp, but in fact no resource is ever consumed in the sense of entirely vanishing. What we think of as consumption is an act of transformation, so nearly everything is recyclable, able to be transformed into its original state, or into another form for a different use.

When resources are considered scarce, it's a matter of inadequate transformative technology. In spite of all the worry about overpopulation, the planet still has resources more than adequate for billions more humans at a high standard of living, so long as we can continue to improve our ability to manage those resources.

It certainly makes sense to acquire more resources for expansion off planet, and there is no lack of resources to serve that purpose. Asteroids present trillions of tons of new material, and any inhabitable planetary surface (Moon, Mars, so far) has its own vast resource bounty.

It would seem that's exactly what the delite ruleless class wants to do.

Not to worry. The mind of man cannot be replaced by a machine. Nor can it be replaced by a machine that is a product of a machine, provided we are not stupid enough to put a machine in charge of our existence.

Yea, don't care for those words either but I understand it in an objectivist way. Machines are our helpers...a means to an end, they should never be made our keepers, our masters. We are the creators, the inventors, the dreamers.

If we are not careful...we might be "transhumanized" out of existence, machined into oblivion. Many a sciencefaction has been written about this danger.

It’s clearer, but I’m not comfortable with that formulation either. “Job” in this context sounds too much like “duty”. Invention and creation are only a part of what humans can do, and many people go productively through life without doing either.

No CBJ...I'm saying it's our job to invent, to create...we loose that to a machine...we loose ourselves. It's one thing to have help with that process, it's another to have something do it for us.

Is that clearer?

Not sure what you mean - are you saying that our worthiness to exist depends upon us being able to perform jobs building machines, and if these jobs are no longer needed we are worthless??

Not sure it would serve mankind very well for machines to invent machines...that's our job and a job we need to do otherwise we might become worthless and of no value to existence.

That would certainly take the wind right out of my sails...

Given a reasonable amount of freedom to produce and trade, people via the marketplace will find ways to meet their needs and even thrive. I doubt that patents in their current form will even exist thirty years from now, for reasons stated in the article and also because the process of invention itself will become increasingly automated.