Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001
Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
Sven Johnson’s Future Imperfect returns with more news from our very near future. You’ve heard of fabbing or 3D printing, right? Won’t it be amazing when anyone and everyone can become a designer – a web-based brave new world of commerce?
Well, not necessarily. Sven looks at the disconnect between the old model of pre-corporate capitalism and the new model that a Fabrication-on-Demand industry will produce. In a nutshell: it’s the consumers who’ll run the greatest risks, without any of the safety nets provided by an up-to-date suite of intellectual property laws.
Continue reading “Caveat emptor: news reports from the Age of Direct Digital Manufacturing”
Flash forward 20 years. Everyone has access to an open-source personal rapid prototyper (notwithstanding a fabber equivalent of Bill Gates…) and can rustle up one of these homebrew UAVs: at the drop of a futuristic ambient computer thing:
Combined with a RC plane, this makes it easy to build a complete UAV for less than $500, which is really kind of amazing. As exciting as that it is, it’s also sobering to know that a technology that was just a few years ago the sole domain of the military is now within the reach of amateurs…
As Charles Stross points out, ready-to print Saturday night specials could be only a decade away, and along with the UAVs and the fabbers it makes the next few years an interesting time to be alive.
The latest instalment of Sven Johnson’s Future Imperfect is part of the Superstruct project.
Within it, a future iteration of Sven takes a moment on a cruise-gone-wrong to reflect on the history of 3D spam – the flipside of the fabrication revolution. Continue reading “When 3D spam got old”
Devotees of rapid prototyping technologies like the RepRap Project will be pleased to hear that construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar is funding research into scaling the technology up so that it can be used to produce concrete structures:
Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, says the system is a scale-up of the rapid prototyping machines now widely used in industry to “print out” three-dimensional objects designed with CAD/CAM software, usually by building up successive layers of plastic.
…
Instead of plastic, Contour Crafting will use concrete,” said Khoshnevis.
I suppose that rapid prototyping technologies are going to be a change of web/Internet/genetic engineering proportions over the next couple of decades, affecting everything and leading to unpredictable social changes.
