Review: Everything you wanted to know about 3D printing.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 22, 2014
Nike football shoes, Nokia cellphone design, customized prosthetic jaws, Ashton Martin cars, robotic air-crafts - all of these and many more have been made or will be made soon using 3D printing technology. We have all heard of this newfangled technology - it's quite the "in" thing today and is the subject of many online discussions, blogs and magazine articles. But what is it really ? How does it work ? Where is it used ? How does it help you or impact you personally ? What about its ethics and legality ? And how does it impact business and the larger economy ?All of these questions are sought to be answered at length by the writers Aaron Council and Michael Petch , in what is a comprehensive book on 3D printing. They start off by placing 3D printing in its right historical context, comparing it to the technologies of the first and second industrial revolutions. They predict how 3D printing heralds the beginning of the third industrial revolution, and its huge impact on how businesses are conducted and manufacturing is done.This is because, 3D printing by its very nature nullifies 2 of the most important factors in manufacturing - geographic location and ownership of production. With this technology, you may be one of the several million people producing the latest model of a watch or a smartphone (not done yet, but very much feasible in the future) in your garage, make as many as you like, without any worry about its price or any other conventional economic yardstick of demand and supply.The writers discuss at length the ethics of 3D printing and whether it violates any laws. There are individual chapters on the specific uses of 3D printing in fashion, automotive, aerospace and transportation industries, construction business, medicine and food production. Some fantastic scenarios are debated. What if 3D printing eliminates world hunger by producing food for nothing? And what about manufacture of guns ? What if this technology is used by terrorists around the world to produce their own weapons ?And finally, what about 3D printing's impact on our society and our chosen economic system - capitalism ? Indeed, this technology makes the most ambitious dreams of Karl Marx come true - money and hence power may actually shift to the proletariat, as they become the owners of the means of production. The writers take this in a positive way and say 3D printing only affects adversely the most oppressive regimes. They mention the visionary thinker Andre Gorz, saying, 3D printing might make his dreams of "freedom from the tyranny of work" come true, by creating a society based on "communal self-production workshops".Will 3D printing really create such a world, of what can only be described as Utopian proportions ? Time will tell.