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Wednesday, September 20, 2017

3D Printer Filament Is Reinventing Everything

By Dorothy Miller


Very few of the best minds on Earth could have conceived of the radical direction technology has taken in recent years. Fewer still could have imagined that the invention which is set to change everything about our lives would start as a toy for artsy-craftsy technology chasers. Truth is that a revamped copy machine along with a few spools of 3D printer filament is the new recipe for anything.

The initial introduction of this technology did not seem to raise very many glasses at first. In fact, not many average people really had any notion of exactly where the tech was most easily applied to their lives. It is doubtful that anyone, including technical gurus, really understood how this technology would create the potential to completely rewrite manufacturing as it is done today.

Some of the first things the world saw coming from these machines were Holiday ornaments. Some of them had lights that charged up from sunlight during the day, and many of them had minute, mechanical, moving parts that chimed as they wound their way through a universe of perpetual motion. Those ornaments were very likely the fire lit in many minds, and the technology took an amazing leap none could have foreseen.

Parents were probably the first and most unexpected wave of buyers for this new tech. Specifically, parents of children with missing limbs. These parents learned to use this tool to make moving hands, arms, and fingers for their children so that they could grasp their world with something more elegant than a claw.

As with any new toys that yuppies take a shine to, the variations on materials will expand as long as their credit limits last. One of the next items the world came to behold, printed right in some gamer geeks living room, were musical instruments. Many of them are basic electric and bass guitars, but there are some unique one-of-a-kind gems out there which even their creator was hard-pressed to find a name for.

Not even fashion will be safe from the flood of brilliant creation being independently generated by average people. With so few limits to what can be done, even the clothing itself has expanded outside of the second dimension. The mind of genius with the hands of technology can now exist in every single home, everywhere on the planet, limited only by the availability of the filaments they use.

Now, here is where the story takes the strangest and most unbelievable twist yet. Some lab geek thought to themselves, what if we reproduced synthesized stem cells in much the same way, through programmed repetition of a design. Now we are looking at a future where we can be as alcoholic as we desire so long as we sober up long enough to print ourselves a new liver.

The truth of the matter is that all manufacturing, of all products we use in our daily lives, may one day be designed by us and printed in our own homes. This means warehouse districts are over, along with all the jobs that they represent. This technology will force us to rethink everything we know about how and why people work, and we must recreate ourselves as fully as we might recreate our aging bodies someday sooner than we knew.




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