3D Printer Jam - When Tables Are Intellectual Property

D printing? What is that? Three D printing a k A. Additive manufacturing is a process by which much the same way that you would print a two D document with ink, instead uses a plastic or glass or metals to layer by layer print out a three dimensional object. Pretty awesome. So so really you're only limited by whatever three dimensional model you have. A digital model, So you could take a digital model and send that information to the printer

and the printer would replicate that correct. So um, well, where would you get stuff that you could print? I mean what where would where would the information come from from anywhere? From you know, from in your brain or you could you could I mean the really cool application of this hypothetically is that you can be designing your

own stuff and sharing it with the rest of the universe. Cool. So, like you could build what you think of as the perfect coffee table, and then share that file some way and let other people download it than they could print. It could turn into a creative Commons of things. You know, it a cree creative Commons of course, being the easy copyright licensing company that that helps people share stuff safely and easily on the interwebs. And and yeah, and if we if we turned that into a into a hey,

I made this really cool chair. I want everyone to have my chair, or I want everyone to have my chair, but not corporations to make money on it. Then it would hypothetically provide a really easy way to do that. That's kind of cool. So we could have like this, this amount of the kind of exchange for him, where not just things like like like stories or music or movies or whatever. We could actually share our physical objects. I could create, maybe like a prop I would want

for some sort of video that I'm shooting. And then people who thought the prop was cool could say, hey, you know, are you making replicas of that? I might say, well, you know, here's the digital file. You can make your own replica. That's the best PVC pipe sword I've ever seen. Hey, do not mock my PVC pipe sword or I shall smite you with it. But there there's another sign to this.

I mean that this this is really exciting, and it's a cool way for people who are creative and who can have this acumen to both build stuff in the physical realm and in the digital realm to share their work. But it also gives rise to the opportunity for people to pirate designs, which is kind of amazing you think about it. Suddenly, real physical objects that inhabit our world can become the the stuff that it gets exchanged over

the internet illegally. So a furniture store might have a very specific kind of piece of furniture that ends up being scanned in some way, and then next thing you know, people at home are printing them up instead of going to the furniture store. Right, you have the napster of furniture. That's kind of phenomenal. I mean, think about that, like illegal,

but phenomenal. I mean it's exciting inside from the part where all of a sudden the artist is sitting there going, hey, I I am an artist, and I spent my my time and money because my my time is my money creating this object. And you just took a picture of it with your fancy three D camera and are printing it out at home. It's not cool, yeah, especially if you're thinking about someone who's making stuff, even especially by hand. I mean people who are really crafting the Yah. Yeah,

they're using subtractive manufacturing. Most likely they're actually carving stuff away. But but they are creating these things that take a genuine level of effort and artistry to to create. And then someone ends up making a scan of it in some way and then distributes that freely across the internet. That person's work has been devalued. And that's it's kind of an interesting problem. It's something that you never would have thought of before. I mean that there's certain things

certain industries have had problems with counterfeiting before. So for example, like designer handbags, that's that's one I always or shoes that's another one. These are are things that often, you know, you might walk down a city street and a pretty popular city and see someone with a blanket laid out on the sidewalk with a whole bunch of what looks

like designer bags, but they're all knockoffs. And the idea is that you can have the glamor of owning that particular object, but for a fraction of what the real object would cost. And when we look close, we can usually tell, you know, what a knockoff is, you know, as a different brand name or something like that on it. But here we're talking about the full creation of an object from from nothing to egg Zach specifications, and that

gets a little tricky. You kind of have to wonder if in the future there will be people whose job it is to be an authenticator of real handcrafted stuff, right the same way that nowadays you can get a cubic zirconia that that is indistinguishable from a diamond uh to to the average person, and you have to take it to a jeweler, a geologist, somebody with a trained special expertise who can look at it with their tools and all that, and and he or she can tell

but you can't. Yeah, same thing, except now instead of it just being cubic zirconia, it could be the super fancy designer chair that would normally cost a significant chunk of my salary to purchase, and yet I ended up printing it at home. And this is kind of far off. I mean, we we can't currently print with biological objects like like wood or leather or something like that. It's

all plastic metal. And so if it's that supermodern style that you would see in a documentary like American Psycho, um uh yeah, something like that, where it's that that corporate look where everything's made out of glass and metal and that's that's it. Yeah, yeah, then then yeah you could do that. But if it was something like a leather chair, you would be a little it would be

a little harder to do. I mean, not not to say that we won't have the ability to print either in those materials or synthetic versions of them in the future, right, I mean, if we're printing organs like we talked about in another episode, it's very possible that we could have the ability to print in leather or in wood. I'm sure the cows would thank us printing leather. I mean, if the cows were capable of thanking us. Um, I'm

not sure what that would sound like. Probably move, but I imagine that's their primary calcular that's their fall back. But yeah, it's it's it's actually it's more of a low shriek. That's true. H We love our cow listeners. So anyway, the the yeah, this is this is something where we don't have to immediately worry about it. Obviously, we're not at a point where, uh, the average consumer can go out and buy a printer large enough to

even do this. A lot of the consumer level printers are printing parts that are, you know, around the size of like a softball or smaller. You can get larger ones, especially in industrial settings, that are able to print bigger materials, but most of the stuff you'd be printing at home would be replacement parts, which could be really useful. I mean imagine that. Imagine you go and you buy furniture at some some store that where you assemble the furniture

at home. I'm thinking of a store in particular where you buy things and you go home, and then you have lots of parts to deal with. While you're there, you can buy Spedish meatballs at the same time. Perhaps that might be something that's also available at this store. So many fun discussions with your spouse about how exactly

to put that together. Yeah, yeah, I have. I have bought a desk and uh and installed the drawer backwards before um, which is fine if you're sitting on the other side of the desk, but there was a wall there, so that made it somewhat problematic. We actually had to take the whole thing apart again. Uh yeah, of course with the three D printer, maybe you could just cleared the cash and and restart the print. Well, really, you would end up assembling stuff anyway. You would print out

the actual individual parts and assemble it. But that's that's my point, is that what happens if you get home and one of those brackets or whatever is broken. It might mean that you have to take a trip all the way back to the store to exchange one out. But if you have a three D printer and you have the the information you need, you could print out

the replacement part. In fact, we might see furniture stores include this information in future purchases, where when you buy something they go ahead and hand you the digital file for the replacement parts. Not necessarily for the whole piece of furniture, but for things like, well, if there's a if there's a bracket that's missing, or if there's if there's a screw that is that the that's not quite right. Here's here's what you need to print out a new one.

Use this code to redeem your bolt. Yeah, exactly. And that's the kind of thing where I could see that being a lot easier for for companies where they're saying, all right, well, we're not giving away the full design. It's not like you can print it from bottom to the top completely, but you can print the individual pieces that hold everything together. Then I think would be less problematic.

And even the same way that you have software upgrades on your on your OS that you can just download from the internet these days, rather than having to go out and buy an entirely new version quite so often. Yeah, if if something, if someone decides that this part was a little bit faultier, this, this corner could be done a little bit better, then you can just have have an upgrade. You could have a firmware upgrade to your furniture. Boy, I'm not sure so many people have fallen down in

this chair. It's really time we see a patch exactly. Or or this table. This table always ends up being wobbly, so here's the patch to repair it. Uh. Yeah. This this also brings to mind. I mean that other solutions that we might see in the future are variations on Digital Rights Management dr M. This is the protections that companies used to put on digital files so that they can't be freely distributed. Essentially, they cannot be stolen and

then distributed across networks. Not that it stops people from trying. But we've seen it on music, we've seen it in movies, we've seen it in video games, we've seen it in all sorts of digital files. I expect we'll see something similar to that to three D printing files, especially for those that belong to specific companies. I don't know that they will ever be able to get around the problem of someone getting hold of an object and then scanning it.

That might be another issue, although they could get around that depending upon what sort of materials they used. That maybe that becomes a way of specializing to use materials that are harder to replicate on a three D printing scale. Unfortunately, they've got some time to think about this, because while three D printing is a really exciting path to the future, it's a long ways off for us to have the ability to really have a machine in your garage that

does all this stuff right. But once we get there, it will be really exciting because if we get to a point where we can print an electric circuit. That means that we could actually print a three D printer with a three D printer, and then if I if I exactly so, so you get together with your buddies and you're like, Okay, this three D printer is ten grand, but if we all throw in money, then what we can do is with the first one will print out

enough for everybody. So for a small investment, we all get a three D printer because all we have to do is print another one and then put it together. I mean, all all we have to do is a little that's kind of glossing over as you feel comfortable assembling a three D printer. That's a that's a possibility. And uh, you know the thing I'm really excited about is this will allow us to really customize our our environments.

You know, we will be able to either perch us a plan from a company, or someone has uploaded something through creative commons that we can use, or we've designed something ourselves, and we can you know, put stuff in our homes that really kind of fits our personalities. So I have a question for both of you. Yes, Joe, are you well, I was just gonna say it fits

your personality or just fits your home. I mean, I don't know if you've ever had the trouble that that somebody in your house sees, Oh, I really really want this couch, but you go when you measure the wall and there's just not room for it. The couches six inches too long. It can't go there. Well, what if you could download a modified, you know, foot shorter couch. Yeah, yeah, I just I just assume that other people won't ever visit me, So I just get the Jonathan sized everything.

One one single dirty mattress on the floor. It's actually two. That's nice, that's sweet, clean ish. But yes, if you had the ability to print any one object, whether it's furniture or something else, what would it be, Joe, give me your answer. Well, I was just thinking about this, and I don't know if you've ever seen one of these, but try and picture it. Uh. It's from some time in the ancient world. I know, at least pre medieval Um. There are these Thracian battle helmets that they find I guess,

uh somewhere in Europe. Again, I don't know exactly the ancient Thracian battle helmets. I guess from the time of the Roman Empire, and they they look like insects. It is so crazy to imagine that a couple of thousand years ago, you could be standing in a field and you'd see somebody running at you with one of these on. And I want to be that guy. I want to put that helmet on and look like a crazy insect.

Can you answer my question? I wanted to know if you wanted to be the guy wearing the helmet or the guy seeing the guy running at them, and don't I mean, I wouldn't be carrying some you know, spear or anything, just like but the not necessarily believe it's a great It's a great, It would be great Halloween costume would be a great, great initial thing to see in one of those Harlem Shake videos that are making

the rounds right now on YouTube. Here's the thing though, again, without these authenticators, I mean, would it be that much easier to fabricate archaeological artifacts? Yeah? Interesting question. Water slides, water slides, giant fancy water slides, so you can design your own, you can design your Yeah, wow, no you thought big. I was thinking of an object that I

saw in a documentary once. It's from casual glance. It looks like a little silver ball, but actually this uh, this kind of drill thing comes out of it and then it flies around. I think I've seen that documentary, Yeah, phantasm, that's the one. I'm thinking, Yeah, that's that's I want one of those because you know, occasionally there's a knock at the door, right win super naturals on and I don't want to have to chase them off myself, so a little now, granted, making it fly and stuff that

would obviously be another problem. So just printing it would just be the first step. But that's okay, that's okay. I just need to make progress on this. That's what I'm looking for. Are we doing an episode on that ball?

You know, we've talked about it. I don't know that that's ever going to happen, but hey, you know, in the future, specifically the future of this show, we're hoping to have the audience start a conversation with us, to really talk with us about the future and what they're excited about and the sort of stuff they want to hear about in future episodes. So, guys, here's here's what

I suggest. Go to our website. It's forward thinking dot com, and that's f double thinking dot Com and there you're going to see the video series, you're going to have the audio podcast. There, there are the blog posts. They are there, and we're really trying to engage you in this conversation about the future. Find out what is it that you think is really exciting. What's the stuff that's right around the corner that has you just just waiting for the future to get here. And that's the kind

of stuff we want to talk about. We really are excited about it, and we hope you are too, So let us know, get in touch with us and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places,