[Interview] What does the future hold for 3D printing?

Posted on : 2016-07-04 17:30 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Adrian Bowyer’s RepRap was the thing that started the low-cost 3D printer revolution, an industry now worth billions
Adrian Bowyer
Adrian Bowyer

The software and designs for 3D printing - which are indeed cutting-edge - have already gotten into the hands of countless people, as tends to happen in this digital world in which nothing distinguishes copies from the original.
This was made possible by the RepRap project, which Adrian Bowyer, an academic from the UK, has been running since 2004. Bowyer recently conducted an interview by email with a Hankyoreh reporter.

Hankyoreh (Hani): You’ve released every source code of 3D printer through RepRap project. What is the reason opening source code? I heard that open source is the most successful way to copy itself in your youtube interview. But I want to hear again in order to introduce your idea to Korean readers. Do you wish simply for the advancement of the technology? Or do you intend to break monopoly of large companies, and do you wish to democratize the technology by spreading it to ordinary people?

Adrian Bowyer (Bowyer): The answer is really all of the points you make. But remember that RepRap’s goal was to create a useful _self-replicating_ manufacturing machine. 3D printing was almost incidental to that. I chose 3D printing because it was (and is) the most versatile manufacturing technology, and so was most likely to be able to copy itself. But if it had been easier to make, say, a self-replicating milling machine then that is what I would have done.

Given that RepRap is self-replicating I had a choice: I could try to protect it with patents and the like, or I could open-source it and give it all away free. If you patent something that is self-replicating you are effectively trying to stop people from doing with it the one thing that it is intended to do, which is just silly. So I open-sourced it.

Hani: There have been a lot of replications since the advent of the ’Mendel‘ in 2009. How do you evaluate the performance of this situation?

Bowyer: It seems to be going pretty well, although no one (not even I) knows how many RepRaps there are in the world. I would guess there are between 100,000 and 200,000. RepRap was also the thing that started the low-cost 3D printer revolution. Lots of people used the technology we developed to make non-self-replicating 3D printers (the first was MakerBot). Because of RepRap you can now get a 3D printer for $400. Before RepRap they cost $40,000.

Hani: Making 3D printer using RepRap is not well known in South Korea. As a result, some people have produced 3D printer using ReRap and obtained Korean patents for the source code which originated from RepRap. I think that they want to establish a company like Makerbot. What do you think about that? Can we overcome this?

Bowyer: Such patents are invalid and can be ignored by everyone. The source code that such people derive from RepRap can be legitimately copied, whatever the patent holders say. If RepRap (or anything else) is prior art to the patent that makes the patent worth nothing.

Hani: The process of making 3D printer gives us a lot of inspiration. For example I could consider Fordism and post-Fordism when I make the products like pen with 3D printer. Also it serves to extract the making-ability from people who do not know anything about the machine. I wonder what’s your inspiration from reproducing 3D printer?

Bowyer: I want to give all people the ability to make anything that can be made.

Karl Marx was correct when he said that the rich can get richer by using their money to acquire the means of production, but that the poor stay poor because they can only sell their labour. He then went on to make the great mistake of saying that the way to correct this situation is for the poor to seize the means of production by revolution. This is a good candidate for the all-time worst idea in human history, and has led to millions of deaths and great misery.

But if you have a self-replicating means of production, you can produce another one and give it to your friend. Nobody dies; everybody gets richer...

Hani: Can you recommend projects in RepRap wiki? First, the most easy-to-follow project, second, the most recommended project in terms of how it works, third, the project that you want to replicate.

Bowyer: As the originator of the RepRap Project I’d rather not make recommendations about the designs created by other RepRap people, especially not in the press.

Hani: People think the RepRap was a significant turning point in the history of development of 3D printer and Rapid Prototyping. I wonder if you agree, and what that might mean.

Bowyer: Well, it would be a bit immodest of me to say that I thought my own project was significant. But it is a fact, as I said above, that RepRap was the thing that started the low-cost 3D printer revolution. That is now an industry worth billions.

Hani: When viewed from the industrial angle (when the conveyor belt system is replaced by 3D printer production system), 3D printing technology will lead small-custom production rather than mass production. In that case, are job losses inevitable? What effects might there be on the lives of ordinary people?

Bowyer: Improved technology never leads to a loss of employment. But it does move it about (look at the number of people employed by the computer industry compared to the number employed by the steel industry, and compare the same industries fifty years ago.) And remember how the computer was going to give us an age of leisure where no one had to work? Well...

Employment does not create wealth. Wealth creates employment. This is especially true if the wealth is distributed through most people in society, rather than concentrated with a few. Also wealth is not money. Wealth is stuff.

If everyone can make more of the stuff they need themselves, they will have more of that stuff and so be more wealthy. This is independent of their financial situation.

We have been here before, 12,000 years ago. Then we stopped wandering about and picking up the stuff we needed, and instead stayed in one place and got self-replicating machines to make the stuff we needed. We call that farming, and it is still the world’s biggest and most important economic activity.

But in addition now we need (or sometimes would just like) the products of engineering as well as the products of the land. Engineering products are not made by self-replicating machines, so industry is not organised like farming.

RepRap - and other self-replicating manufacturing machines - will change engineering and make it more like growing your own vegetables in your garden...

Hani: What should we do in this situation?

Bowyer: We can steer things a bit. But not much. Suppose at the start of the motor car or the mobile phone we had decided that these items were dangerous and that therefore we would deny ourselves them.

Well - in fact that was the case. At the beginning of these technologies many people were vociferous in condemning them as dangerous. But humanity wanted them, so they happened anyway.

You can’t stop that process. As soon as it becomes technically straightforward to achieve something that people like, it will happen. And governments, democracy, dictators, policemen and armies are powerless in the face of mass desire.

That is especially true if the thing that is wanted can be done privately by one individual. In every country on Earth it is against the law to make and to distribute digital copies of music. And yet every teenager on the planet has twenty gigabytes of illegal downloads on their flash drives...

As my colleague Neil Gershenfeld of MIT once said, “You can’t sue the human race.”

Hani: Conversely, if ordinary people easily are able to own a personal 3D printer, it seems that many manufacturers may suffer and individuals may be independent from capital. Can it be the alternative in a post-Fordist world?

Bowyer: Possibly, as I have outlined above. We already have other examples. My grandparents sent their dirty clothes to the town laundry (which was a Fordism solution to cleaning clothes). Now we all have a rectangular white robot in our kitchens to do our laundry. A most interesting fact about that robot is that it is so cheap that we are happy for it to sit there idle for 95% of its time...

My parents had headed notepaper printed at the Fordism town print-works. Now I have a print-works attached to my computer.

When I was young I had to send away my photographs to be developed and printed by a Fordism photo factory. Now my computer does all that for me.

People used to buy music CDs made in Fordism CD-pressing plants. Now those teenagers I mentioned own no CDs, yet they have far more music than I have ever had.

Hani: Time Magazine selected the personal computer as ‘the machine of the year’ in 1982. The appearance of personal 3D printers originated from RepRap is comparable to the personal computer. What do you think about this? Will 3D printers make change like personal computers?

Bowyer: I think that a way to look at this is: the computer is an individual‘s information processor; the 3D printer is an individual’s matter processor.

Hani: Some people think that 3D printer is not necessary for people‘s life unlike a personal computer or a personal printer. What do you think about this?

Bowyer:I don’t think that personal computers or printers are necessary either - people managed for 200,000 years without them. Indeed people managed for 200,000 years without all the products of the industrial revolution.

But what starts as impossible becomes, through developing technology, a luxury; then it becomes common, then it becomes cheap, then it becomes free.

Something doesn’t have to be a necessity to be worth having. It just has to be worth more to possess than it costs to obtain.

Hani: The World Economic Forum has put together a 3D printing technology, with AI, genetic editing, quantum computing will lead to the 4th industrial revolution. What do you think about its idea?

Bowyer: I don’t really believe in repeated industrial revolutions. One can chop the history of technical innovation up into bands if one likes. But they are like the bands of colour in a rainbow - it is convenient to call them yellow, or red or blue. But underneath they are a smooth continuum of changing light frequencies with no gaps nor bands.

Engineering is the same. Sure - there are significant sudden developments: the steam engine, electricity, the transistor. And those are significant because everything changes after them. As it happens 3D printing, AI, genetic editing (especially CRISPR/Cas9) and quantum computing are all happening at about the same time. But this is just because more of everything is happening at about the same time, because there are more people doing things...

Hani: What kind of future do you see for 3D printing, ten years from now?

Bowyer: Psychologists have done experiments on people’s ability to predict the future (which is easy to experiment on - you just ask people to predict, then wait and see what actually happens). The results are most interesting: with specific exceptions that I shall mention in a moment, experts are no better at predicting the future of their area of expertise than random people plucked off the street. Bankers have no special idea what will happen in finance; politicians have no special idea what will happen in government; scientists have no special idea what will happen in science.

(The exception to poor ability at predicting is people who predict repeatedly and get quick feedback on their accuracy. That is people like weather forecasters looking today at the weather that they predicted yesterday, or anaesthetists looking at patients’ blood oxygen levels a few minutes after they adjust the gas mixture - those sorts of people are better than others at predicting.)

I suppose I am an expert in 3D printing, so - given what I have just said - you should ignore what I think about the world that 3D printers will make in ten years.

Nonetheless I will answer your question: we could live in a world where an increasing majority of people are making at least small items for themselves rather than buying them. Going online to buy a comb or maybe even a mobile phone will seem as old-fashioned then as going to a shop to get those items seems to us now. And it may even be that, for example, a group of ten families in a village could put together their individual 3D printing resources to make one of the families a new electric car over the space of a few weeks…

By Eum Sung-won, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

 

button that move to original korean article (클릭시 원문으로 이동하는 버튼)

Related stories

Most viewed articles