3D Printing

This newly developing technology was featured in this week's edition of The Economist, and I think it's absolutely fascinating. Essentially, you can take a blueprint or model of a 3D object on your computer and "print" it out. The printers use plastics, resins, and metals to build up an object (known as "additive" engineering because objects are built up, versus "subtractive" engineering, or bashing metal into shape, which is the most prevalent form of engineering today). This is either done by a nozzle spreading the material into shape or a sifter solidifying the material into shape one layer at a time. These printers can make anything, violins, airplane parts, clocks...

This form of production has the potential to make large-scale production obsolete because it is just as cheap per unit and wastes much less material. It also makes the issue of music piracy look like small-scale vandalism, what happens when blueprints for the latest Rolex or even smart phones are released online? The intellectual property ramifications are monstrous. It can also completely change the definition of art: does sculpture have to be hand-made, or just human-designed?

I, for one, think this is perhaps the largest step in the grand equalizing of mankind that has been occurring since the invention of the printing press and has been accelerating in the age of the modern computer and the Internet. This might not have been the revolution that Marx envisioned when he wrote his Communist Manifesto, but this technological revolution has more potential to bring the means of production to the hands of the working class than any other innovation or event in human history.