Futurismic

The idea of printing replacement biological tissue and organs has been around for a while – we mentioned the development the pressure-assisted spinning system back in 2007, in fact – but it looks like it’s finally reached the point where people think they can make a profit from it on a commercial scale. Via io9, The Economist tells us about Organovo and their US$200,000-a-pop commercially-available bio-printer:

To start with, only simple tissues, such as skin, muscle and short stretches of blood vessels, will be made, says Keith Murphy, Organovo’s chief executive, and these will be for research purposes. Mr Murphy says, however, that the company expects that within five years, once clinical trials are complete, the printers will produce blood vessels for use as grafts in bypass surgery. With more research it should be possible to produce bigger, more complex body parts. Because the machines have the ability to make branched tubes, the technology could, for example, be used to create the networks of blood vessels needed to sustain larger printed organs, like kidneys, livers and hearts.

I can’t wait to see what uses the street will find for this technology once it gets cheaper…

… no, scratch that. I think maybe I can wait after all.

Watching the backyard fabrication and 3D printing scene is fascinating, not least because it’s developing so quickly – a mere pipedream just five years ago, but currently expanding its capabilities in leaps and bounds. One thing that will increase the versatility of these systems is a wider selection of materials with which to work… and while you can already print in sugar (with other foodstuffs remaining strictly hypothetical at this point), we’ve got people brewing up their own stove-top bioplastic blends [via BoingBoing] and tweaking their fabbers to work with clay [via Chairman Bruce; image clipped from linked article].

The former is promising because it gives hobby-level users the opportunity to work in cheap biodegradable plastics by using off-the-shelf ingredients that can be scored at the corner store (e.g. glycerin, vinegar); that recipe has a way to go before being usable, but you can bet your boots that other fab-fanatics will be working to refine it and sharing their results online… many eyes make bugs shallow, after all (though Microsoft’s Shawn Hernan would disagree). And being able to print in clay really opens up the arts & crafts market to the fabbers; consumer-level 3D design tools should lead to a minor renaissance in ceramics design.

I wonder if this will provide some counterbalance to the seemingly inevitable loss of jobs in the US due to the rise of robotic, computer-controlled and/or outsourced manufacturing? Short runs of custom designs (and those very simple products for which the current profit margins of Chinese made-for-export factories will not hold forever) would seem ideally suited to small local businesses based around a few fabbers, an oven or kiln and a finishing bench… and if someone can work out a way to scale down plastics recycling so it can be used to generate the necessary materials using locally-sourced waste, you’ve got a whole new economic sub-circuit operating at a local level.

Well, it was bound to happen – hell, Sven’s been writing columns that skirt around the idea for ages. Here’s the lowdown: 3D printing is maturing quickly, and 3D scanning isn’t far behind, meaning that material objects can be stored and transmitted as digital data. Digital data can be shared in many different ways, and – as the recording industry has learned the hard way – illicit filesharing is, for all intents and purposes, an unclosable Pandora’s box. So what’s to stop people trading, sharing and printing off copies of copyright-controlled objects – shoes, clothing, homeware, car parts, whatever?

The answer – nothing. Nothing at all. Welcome to The Product Bay:

RepRap and other 3D printers are the future. There’s no question about it. With the proud tradition from The Pirate Bay, we want to take all of this to the next level. TPB will be TPB, but for real life objects. For now, visit Thingiverse who already understands this.

We want you to download those new jeans.

We want you to share those new shoes.

It’s possible, let’s make it happen.

Granted, The Product Bay is just a one-page site with a provocative message, and I rather suspect it has been launched with the purpose of starting a conversation more than any real hope of kicking off the world’s first tracker site for digital files of real-world objects… but it’s also a harbinger of things to come, and the big-brand companies that aren’t scared by the idea should probably start planning for the worst. It’s not like there’s been no warning, after all. [via Fabbaloo]

Here’s another sf-nal thought experiment to keep your brain occupied. We frequently mention 3D printing and fabbing here at Futurismic, but usually in the context of its positive disruptive potential – a potential sea-change in capitalist economic systems, for example. But here’s a negative response from analyst Nick Jones of the Gartner corporation [via Fabbaloo]:

… do we really want an affordable domestic fabber? Fabbers will likely “print” objects using some form of plastic. So the inevitable consequence of mass market fabbing will be a huge increase in the amount of non-biodegradable plastic waste clogging up the planet for hundreds of years into the future. Should we maybe ban fabbers before the problem arises? Like most problems there are solutions, like biodegradable plastic. But if we wait until all the problems with a technology are solved before we permit it, then we will waste a decade or two of potential value; and in any case there’s no way we can predict all the social and environmental issues associated with a new technology before it arrives.

I’d agree with Jones’ last point – social disruption patterns, particularly, are very hard to predict accurately (which is probably part of the reason they’re perversely fun to discuss), and it’d be a shame to lose out on the potential power of fabbing to transform the life cycle of many of the things we use on a daily basis.

But there will be plenty of people who will see fabbing as a threat, environmental or otherwise, and who will push for legislation to control or suppress it. A victorious climate lobby would certainly flex its muscle against a technology that promised to democratise mass manufacture, as would those corporations whose bottom lines would vanish overnight – not just delivery firms like FedEx, but the factories in developing nations that churn out tchotchkes and basic hardware at low-low prices. It will be interesting to see how the traditional left-right political binary will fall across this issue; I suspect it might not be in the direction most easily assumed.

Via Michael Anissimov we hear that the second generation of the RepRap self-replication machine, codenamed “Mendel”, is nearly ready for public release. Meaning that you could buy one (if you found someone who’d sell you one), but you could also build your own from the free open-source plans found at the RepRap website; the parts will cost you around US$650. [image from the RepRap wiki]

While such homebrew 3d printers aren’t currently much use for high-detail work and commercial finishes (like reproductions of your favourite World of Warcraft critters, maybe), they can make functional devices without any major problems. If there really is an increase in demand, you could probably assemble a Mendel and set it up to simple print a copy of itself. Then set up the copy to do the same, get a few generations of fully-functioning clones built, and then start churning ‘em out and selling them to local buyers…

Integrating electrical and electronic circuits into physical parts is beyond these current home fabbers, but where big industry leads the homebrew crew will follow. Xerox has just invented a conductive silver ink that works without the need for a clean-room environment, meaning you can print off circuits onto a flexible substrate just like any other continuous-feed document. It wouldn’t take much for someone to buy some of that ink and find a way to use it in cheap and/or homebrew kit… hey presto, you’ve suddenly got the capability to replicate the electronic parts of a more complex self-replicating machine.

So go a bit further, integrate the two functions, have one machine that can print both inert blocks and electronics. Now we’re cooking! Now shrink ‘em down, maybe speciate them so that different versions are specialised toward specific types of printing or assembly. But you’ll need to train them to pass off tasks they can’t do onto a machine that can, so you give them some sort of rudimentary swarm intelligence that communicates over something like Bluetooth… and then all of a sudden you’ve got an anthill of mechanical critters that have learned to procreate, cooperate, and deceive. DOOM.

Yeah, I know, it’s not very likely – but allow a guy a flight of robo-dystopian fancy on a Thursday, why don’t you?