The question is what happens to the Macro-Value-Chain (MVC)? From an economic research and impact-wise on the MVC there is so very little out there.

What happens to factory jobs when $999 3D desktop factories make most house hold items? What happens when in your Kitchen or Den you simply synthesize a new Tap Washer and eventually the likes of TV Remote Controllers?

Then c.2025 you get your robot to take out the trash; and then down load dinner from the web into your Nanoreplicator? What happens to work-a-day jobs. Manual labor’s – right! A billion micro-cottage-industries. Design, Technology and Service Innovation become not just the lynch-pin of wealth creation and domestic income; but ‘THIS IS IT!’

Desktop fabricators aren’t a matter of policy, they are a matter of technology, ideas and so on. It would be closer to filesharing vs the movie/music/tv industry. Now there is policy surrounding filesharing, but in the end of the day policy doesn’t really effect anything since no amount of legislation would be able to shutdown something like Freenet (an anonymous encrypted onion routed distributed hash table), or some kind of Open Source network layered on Tor for mp3 downloading.

With that said I don’t see any kind of industrial revolution.

I think desktop fabrication will make some awesome changes to they way industries work, and will allow for many unique products to start appearing that wouldn’t be possible using older technologies. But I don’t see a future where every house has a fabricator and people just print of what they want.

Fabricators are not going to be able to print an iPod, all a fabricator could possibly do is print the case and then the end user slaps some off the shelf hardware (effectively a generic all purpose computer with the outputs desired and a touchscreen or whatever) into it, and add some opensource software. But if you are going to do that, it’s not much more to just buy a device manufactured in bulk. Also doing all that is much more than a huge majority of people will be willing to bother with. Maybe we could start to fab some basic PCBs ourselfs but it would still be missing all the fiddly bits.

Fabs are great for hobbyists and designers, but just about anything you can fab would produce probably be better of turned into a mold which makes much more sense for bulk since its cheaper and faster (unless you are trying to design something where each individual one is %100 unique. you can design a spoon with an elaborate pattern on it, or you can write a computer program to design the spoon for you).

Of course molecular assembler/nano fabs could make basically whatever you want, but they are a whole different story and the traditional economy would basically collapse at that time anyway since people can print gold, oil and diamonds. Not to mention guns, nukes and grey goo.