Introduction to 3D Printing

Your Future Will Be Manufactured on a 3-D Printer

Would you like to build your own gun? There are plenty of ways to do so, legal and otherwise. Last week, a group called Defense Distributed offered you a new one: It published instructions for creating a plastic firearm using a 3-D printer. One guy even fired a real bullet with it.

Not long afterward, the U.S. State Department demanded that the group take the blueprints down, alleging that they may violate export-control laws. Defense Distributed complied, but not before at least 100,000 people had downloaded the plans.
Fears of teenagers now printing a plastic arsenal are overblown, but the episode is emblematic. Three-dimensional printing, also called additive manufacturing, can be a powerful force for economic and social progress. But it also holds potential for abuse: Weapons, counterfeits and designer drugs are just a few of the products an unscrupulous user might someday produce.

The questions -- which Bloomberg View will be exploring in a series this week -- are not just how this technology may disrupt our lives, for better and worse, but how to prepare for this manufacturing revolution in the making.

Printing Objects

Three-D printing a gun, like printing most other things, is pretty simple. You download a digital file for a design you like. The printer reads the file, then shoots out layer upon layer of specialized plastic -- or another raw material -- through a heated nozzle in the specified shape. Not long afterward, your gun parts materialize.

The technology is roughly 30 years old, but has only recently become cheaply available and widespread. Global sales and services related to 3-D printing reached $2.2 billion in 2012, according to Wohlers Associates Inc., an increase of 28.6 percent over the previous year. The company expects that figure to increase to about $6.5 billion in 2019.

And no wonder. Consider the Urbee 2, a car being produced by Kor Ecologic using a 3-D printer. When completed, it will weigh some 1,200 pounds. Made with about 40 pieces of thermoplastic, it will be resilient, aerodynamic and mind-bogglingly efficient. Its production will require far less material than a traditional car. It will need almost no labor and take little time to assemble. Its designers can employ unorthodox shapes and materials to maximize efficiency, mold the lightweight plastic with precision to strengthen vulnerable areas, and fit most pieces together without joints or welding (although the engine and chassis will still be made of metal). In effect, they’re compressing much of an automobile assembly line into a printing device.
The economic potential is stunning. Across a range of industries, R&D costs are already declining and product-development cycles are accelerating as more inventors experiment with cheap 3-D printed prototypes. The question is whether the technology will transform manufacturing more broadly.

At the moment, 3-D printing is a very small part of the economy. The printers are typically slow, and the material they use is expensive and inconsistent. As the industry advances, however, printing on demand could reduce assembly lines, shorten supply chains and largely erase the need for warehouses for many companies. Reducing shipping and eliminating the waste and pollution of traditional subtractive manufacturing could be an environmental boon.

In a few decades, things could get really interesting. Engineers should be able to blend raw materials in new ways, endow products with nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, and create objects that interact with their physical environment. Imagine military armor embedded with sensors that track wear and tear, or a turbine blade that monitors its own temperature.

The technology is already liberating entrepreneurs. As consumer-grade printers improve, a basement enthusiast will be able to make replacement parts for products he owns, invent and sell customized objects online, and potentially create new industries. As Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman write in “Fabricated: the New World of 3D Printing,” the technology will be “the platypus of the manufacturing world, combining the digital precision and repeatability of a factory floor with an artisan’s design freedom.” In other words, the era of mass customization is quickly approaching.
Some Challenges

But if 3-D printing promises expansive opportunities, it will also present new problems -- as the plastic gun suggests.

The intellectual-property system will face plenty of new challenges. Whole categories of products will be newly subject to counterfeiting. Amateur printers are already appropriating pop-culture artifacts to create clever new objects, copyrights be damned. And businesses threatened by this new technology will be tempted to drive newcomers out of existence -- or underground -- through lawsuits and lobbying.

Or consider product safety. Millions of new physical objects might be unleashed on the world -- from strollers and action figures to junk food and prosthetics -- the quality and safety of which will be highly variable. When those products malfunction or injure someone, possibly in another country, who’s liable?

The medical uses of 3-D printing are also thrilling and terrifying. Already, printers are being used to make hearing aids, dental implants and prosthetics. Hospitals are printing precise replicas of patients’ organs to plan surgeries. Researchers are using 3-D printers to arrange human cells to create bone and blood-vessel tissue. Before long, we may be printing replacement organs. This holds great promise -- but what happens when the power to create body parts on demand becomes routine? We lack even a moral vocabulary for this brave new world.

Finally, 3-D printing seems likely to throw a lot of people out of work in the medium term, especially in industries that depend on assembly-line labor. Eventually, as with most technological breakthroughs, it will probably create new jobs in new industries. But that transition period will be hazardous, and displaced workers will need help to navigate it.

A recent report from the Atlantic Council predicts that 3-D printing “has the potential to be as disruptive as the personal computer and the Internet.” The comparison is apt. Three-D printing will make the world a very different place -- and, with the right policies, a better one too.

That 3-D Printed Gun? It’s Just the Start

It sounds like a Bond villain’s idle fantasy. An enchanted machine that can produce any instrument of criminality you can think of: weapons, money, illicit keys, magical pills.

Three-dimensional printers, as it happens, may soon be able to produce all this -- if they aren’t doing so already. We’ve argued that these machines could have significant economic and social benefits. But as with all human creations, they will also have a dark side. The critical thing for government, as it contemplates the dangers of this new era, is to avoid overreacting in ways that end up impeding innovation and unleashing unintended consequences.

Firearms, naturally, are among the first problematic 3-D printed devices Americans have turned to. A group called Defense Distributed last week published the schematics for a printable plastic gun. As such technology improves, it could render many of the gun-control measures Congress has been debating moot -- not to mention metal detectors. (A 3-D printed drone, inevitably, materialized last year; imagine the possibilities of combining these lively inventions.)
Cash, Keys

Then there’s money. Authorities suspect that thieves are already using 3-D printed “skimmers” to steal information from ATM cards. Although the U.S. Secret Service says it isn’t aware of currency counterfeiters making widespread use of 3-D technology yet, the concept doesn’t seem far-fetched: These machines can print with great precision, will be able to mix materials, and typically aren’t equipped with the anti-counterfeiting technology used in some consumer scanning products.
Printing simple keys has already created havoc. In 2009, a German hacker going by the name Ray used a 3-D printer to fabricate a plastic key to the handcuffs used by Dutch police. He created the copy using only a photograph of an actual key. Last year, Ray demonstrated how to open even high-security handcuffs. The ability to copy keys isn’t new but, as with many of these dangers, 3-D printing will make it a lot easier. Just think of all the things -- houses, cars, offices -- we still use keys to open.

It gets a bit scarier. Professor Lee Cronin, at the University of Glasgow, has been experimenting with something he calls “reactionware,” which he hopes will allow people to print their own medication at home. A 3-D printer shoots a sequence of chemical agents into special gel chambers that create a controlled reaction. Cronin says that before long, consumers should be able to download a “recipe” from a drug company -- for, say, ibuprofen -- that they could then print out at home. This holds great promise for patients, drug researchers and developing countries in need of medicines. It could also lead to a parade of horribles unless carefully monitored.
We don’t mean to be alarmist: Some of the problems identified here may never materialize. Others will, and have no obvious remedy. So how do we prepare ourselves?

Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University offers one compelling suggestion: Require that all 3-D printers be connected to the Internet to function, then make them check with a list of prohibited items online before printing a new object. This sounds promising, and in theory could be used to prevent intellectual-property infringements as well. But Zittrain admits it might not be a good idea. The brief, troubled history of digital-rights management suggests that for every problem such an innovation may solve, three more are created. And 3-D printing technology is spreading so rapidly that enforcing such a system seems unrealistic.

Getting Clever

A better solution might be to respond to each challenge as it arises -- recognizing that 3-D printing technology, in itself, isn’t the problem, and that most legislation will probably fail to keep pace with innovation.

Take that plastic gun, for instance. The U.S. State Department has demanded that Defense Distributed take down its 3-D gun files because they were possibly in violation of export-control laws. The group complied, but good luck stopping the 100,000 people around the world who have already downloaded the file from posting it elsewhere. An alternative, as professor Hod Lipson of Cornell University suggests, would be to move away from a security regime of trying to detect firearms and toward one that monitors gunpowder. As chemical-sensing technologies improve, and as guns are increasingly constructed in esoteric shapes and new materials, detecting gunpowder may prove to be a more realistic security measure than hoping to outlaw endless permutations of gun designs.

A prudent response to the key hacker, meanwhile, might be to hasten the adoption of biometric and other high-tech security features, a beneficial evolution in its own right, rather than trying to outlaw mischievous inventions such as Ray’s as they pop up.

Likewise when it comes to drugs. Pharmaceutical companies could be prevailed upon to make their “recipes” harder to abuse, for instance by offering medication that can relieve pain but block opioid effects when taken in larger-than-prescribed quantities. And as specialized printers for medication become more widespread, programming them to self-regulate against misuse will have to be a priority.

In short, we suspect the best response to the challenges 3-D printing poses will be increased creativity and flexibility: Rather than attempting to legislate a solution to every danger, we should work to out-innovate the malefactors. Will people still find ways to abuse this technology? Undoubtedly. But if there’s a pertinent lesson from James Bond’s long career, it’s that cleverness is typically more effective than brute force in fighting evil.

How 3-D Printing Could Disrupt the Economy of the Future

In its next generation of jet engines, General Electric Co (GE). plans to use a new, and possibly revolutionary, technology.

In each engine, 19 nozzles will shoot fuel into a combustion chamber, where it mixes with compressed air. Because the fuel must be distributed precisely, the interior of a nozzle is very sophisticated: Elaborate chambers and passageways help curtail emissions, control nitrous-oxide levels and prevent temperature surges. Previously, making each nozzle required welding 20 disparate pieces together. Now, GE is employing 3-D printing to build each nozzle as a single piece, using laser sintering on a metal alloy called cobalt chromium.

The new nozzle is faster to make, five times more durable and a full pound lighter -- on a two-engine plane, that saves almost 40 pounds. And it radically reduces scrap. By 2020, the company expects that 100,000 of its engine parts will be made using this process.

All around you, 3-D printing technology is making useful things in novel ways. Align Technology Inc. uses it to make clear orthodontics. Nike Inc. uses it to make soccer cleats. Bespoke Innovations makes customized (and quite stylish) prosthetics. And DUS Architects, a Dutch company, plans to print a whole house.

As the sheer variety of these examples suggests, 3-D printing is already having a demonstrable effect on the economy. Traditionally, it has been most useful in creating prototypes. But as GE and others are showing, printers will increasingly be able to produce critical parts and final products. In 2012, 28.3 percent of the $2.2 billion global 3-D printing market was tied to the production of parts for final products rather than prototypes, according to the Wohlers Report 2013. That shift could have profound implications for the economy and for public policy.
Silent Factories

Today, 3-D printing remains a small part of manufacturing. For mass-produced consumer products, injection molding is typically faster and cheaper. Increasingly, though, businesses will use 3-D printers to complement their old-fashioned equipment to make specialized goods. In a few decades, an aerospace company like GE could be manufacturing jets in silent factories, with rows and rows of 3-D printers churning out cutting-edge parts in proficient solitude, and not a human laborer in sight.

For many companies, the logic of this technology is already clear. The first advantage is efficiency. Because 3-D printers build an object by layering plastic or other material guided by a design file, they eliminate the waste of traditional manufacturing, in which up to 90 percent of raw materials can be discarded. The printers can work all day and night unattended. They can print interlocking parts, reducing or eliminating the need for assembly. They will enable companies to shorten supply chains, instantly distribute goods to any printer and quickly make replacement parts. And they can create objects with geometries and internal complexities that traditional factory machines can’t match.

Second, for rapid prototyping, 3-D printing is already quite useful in fields as diverse as automotive, medical, aerospace and consumer electronics. Designers don’t need to wait for parts to be shipped, they don’t need advanced skills to tinker, and they can adjust specifications and create new iterations quickly. As a result, they can try out zany ideas at a relatively low cost.

Free Complexity

This ability to easily experiment, combined with a technology that creates shapes that can’t be made any other way, may become increasingly powerful. From an engineering perspective, complexity is free: The cost, time and skill necessary for 3-D printing a complicated object is roughly the same as for a simple one made of the same amount of material. As a result, inventors will be freed to dream up products in shapes and material combinations never attempted before, unburdened by the design logic of traditional manufacturing. They’ve already made progress integrating electronics into 3-D printed goods; down the line, they’ll be able to embed sensors, smart technology and artificial intelligence.

Finally, as personal printers get better and cheaper, they’re reducing the expense and risk for individual inventors to become manufacturers. The cost of customization is almost eliminated, because the printers don’t require retooling to make new shapes, and entrepreneurs don’t need to sell big batches of identical items; they can print to order. For a small business, a 3-D printer can eliminate excess production and the need for warehousing, and diminish the costs of distribution. Enthusiasts like to imagine a future in which a 3-D printer in every home will produce all you need, customized and on demand. A more likely scenario is that people will use a print shop to produce designs they’ve purchased from entrepreneurs or created themselves. In Europe, Staples Inc. is collaborating with Mcor Technologies Ltd. on just such a strategy: Customers can upload design files to a website, and have the product printed at their local Staples.

All of which is to say that we shouldn’t underestimate the potential for this technology to disrupt economies. Because 3-D printing is in its infancy, government should tread carefully with new laws or regulations intended to limit this upheaval. But there are a few steps it can take to ease the transition.

The first is to ensure the U.S. -- where roughly 40 percent of the world’s 3-D printers are located -- remains a leader in the field. The White House took an important step last year, when it created the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, a public-private partnership dedicated to advancing 3-D printing. The goal is to help train the workforce in this technology, build curriculums at technical schools, offer sites and equipment where businesses can validate ideas, and support research that will let domestic suppliers produce the advanced machinery the industry will need. This is a smart and inexpensive way to support a promising but underdeveloped technology.

Tomorrow’s Economy

Next, regulators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and elsewhere should start thinking through better certification processes. In many specialized fields, minor changes to a product can require a full recertification. As customized mass production becomes more common, a more flexible approach would focus on processes instead of products -- that is, approve any product made with certified equipment according to transparent manufacturing guidelines.
Finally, we’ll need to prepare the workforce for an era in which more and more tasks are automated. As we’ve argued before, that means making it easier for workers to develop new skills and start new businesses by investing in education, promoting labor-market flexibility and encouraging innovation. We suspect that 3-D printing will eventually create many jobs, much as transformative technologies in the past have done. But there’s no guarantee that it will, and the transition could be a painful one for workers. In any case, the jobs it creates will almost certainly look very different from the ones we know today.

Disruption can be dangerous and scary. It can also lead to wondrous new businesses and ways of life. Perhaps more importantly, it’s inevitable -- so get in front of it while you can.

BarrileteCosmico wrote:Almost bought into Stratassys 5 months ago at around 70, got scared of the overhype and high PE ratio, now in the 90s

Pretty hardcore believer in 3d printing.

3-D Printing: the Ultimate Intellectual-Property Threat?

Spend a few minutes on Shapeways.com, an online marketplace, and you get a glimpse of a very odd future. You can buy mustache cuff links, a pencil topper shaped like a Roman halberd, a pixelated bust of a glowering Steve Jobs, or a set of dice modeled on the Deathly Hallows of “Harry Potter” fame. All the items are designed by the site’s users and can be manufactured by Shapeways using 3-D printing technology. And they’re all for sale.

The Internet is now alive with creative physical objects like these. Although most may seem whimsical to the casual browser, they reveal some serious intellectual-property quandaries that will only deepen as the era of 3-D printing unfolds.
One is copying. Using 3-D scanners, it won’t be difficult to translate the exact dimensions of an existing object into a digital file and upload it for sale. That means you could replicate all kinds of physical things that others have created -- many of them unpatented and not subject to copyright -- and profit from them. You might be able to counterfeit expensive designer sunglasses and sell them at a steep discount to the originals. Or, as the Harry Potter dice indicate, you could appropriate your favorite pop-culture artifacts and apply them to new products.
Such repurposing may soon be routine. And it will be difficult, maybe impossible, to stop. In response, established companies attempting to curtail such practices -- or simply leveraging flaws in the intellectual-property system -- might overreact, suing a promising new industry with such vigor that they forestall legitimate innovation.
So how should we prepare?

Stopping Meddlers

First, for established companies worried that digital meddlers might copy their products for profit, it’s possible that new technology could help. A team at Virginia Tech University, for instance, is experimenting with embedding quantum dots into 3-D printed material. Companies could tag products with identifying markers to help prevent counterfeiting. It may be decades before such technology is in common use, however, and the history of digital-rights management in other fields suggests that plenty of challenges will arise along the way. For example: It might not work.

Lawsuits, of course, offer another strategy, and they may often be justified. But most industrial designs aren’t patented, and large companies that do have IP protection for their merchandise would be wise to consider the lessons of the music industry before rampantly suing. The analogy is inexact but instructive: Record companies spent years and millions of dollars alienating customers while failing to prevent pirated use of their work. Belatedly, iTunes, Spotify and other services made paying for music easy. Although the industry’s revenue hasn’t recovered, music companies have found a way to adapt to disruption.

Which brings us back to the Harry Potter dice. Let’s say the dice are a hit on Shapeways, and Warner Bros. -- which manages the Harry Potter brand -- thinks they represent an infringement. The company could demand that Shapeways take the dice down. It could sue. Or it could find a mutually beneficial way to profit -- say, by negotiating a license.

Even better, argues Michael Weinberg, a vice president at the digital-advocacy group Public Knowledge, Warner Bros. could simply publish a general license that would allow any inventor to make Harry Potter products, provided they notify Warner Bros., give it a percentage of the revenue and adhere to certain parameters. That won’t sit comfortably with companies that want to maintain tight creative control over their products. But given that 3-D printing may lead to an explosion in copied goods, such an agreement could offer a competitive advantage over companies that prefer expensive (and possibly ineffectual) litigation.

New Model

One of the big differences with the music business, however, is that 3-D printing won’t just pit huge corporations against small-time users; it may pit everyone against everyone. If you’re a small manufacturer of 3-D printed gadgets, you may not have the resources or time to apply for IP protection while the whole Web is copying your ideas and profiting from them. And you may not have the money to start suing.



Here’s where more flexible intellectual-property laws may help. One option to consider is a utility model. Like patents, utility models, which exist in Germany and many other countries, grant the holders the exclusive right to produce, use and market their inventions. But there are a few crucial differences. They’re cheaper to obtain and their term is shorter (usually seven to 10 years, as opposed to 20 years for most utility patents). They’re also nonrenewable. The patent office doesn’t examine the invention in detail to see if it complies with the requirement of being “new, nonobvious and useful,” so the registration process is much faster. But anyone can challenge, for a fee, whether your invention actually does meet those standards -- and the losing party pays for the proceedings. The utility model is weaker than a patent, but would offer small companies a fast and low-cost way to shield their inventions and start seeking investment.

Innovators would also benefit from legislation that discourages companies from amassing broad patents on inventions that they don’t intend to bring to market but nevertheless hope to profit from via lawsuits and threats. The Shield Act -- a bipartisan bill introduced in the House that would force such “non-practicing entities” (more commonly called trolls) to pay defendants’ legal costs if they lose a lawsuit -- isn’t perfect, but it’s on the right track toward curtailing abuse.

As Shapeways makes clear, 3-D printing is already revolutionizing product design and customization. It seems certain to disrupt a lot of entrenched businesses, and to present our intellectual-property system with novel and complicated challenges. We’ll need to confront those challenges with flexibility and innovation.

Yuri Yukuv wrote:I made good money on DDD, with stocks like these (TSLA, GOOG previously, SSYS, XONE etc) it should be out of portfolios profit and not capital. You just buy and forget.