self-replicating replicator machines

[miriam_e]

I should have posted this a few days ago after rpeate showed me a CNN article about it.

It is the RepRap Project.

Replicator technology is poised to change a lot of how we do things. It is based upon 3d printing technology, which has been around for some time now but has been too expensive to gain much of a toehold. RepRap will be cheap enough to make it into general, widespread use, but more importantly, will actually be able to replicate itself. Best if all the developer, Dr Adrian Bowyer, is going to give it away.

The project is a kind of opensource hardware project -- the hardware is created by the software

http://www.reprap.org/
http://reprap.blogspot.com/
http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000293.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7165
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/06/02/tech.reprap/index.html

Perhaps you are wondering what use is a machine that can make copies of itself? Simple. It will also make a lot of the items you would normally buy down at the corner store or supermarket.Such a device could make it possible for the poorest people on the planet to have many of the objects we in the rich nations take for granted.

As they say on the site, "Wealth without money..."

Now you see why this is revolutionary.

Comments

[sharpblonde.livejournal.com]

Yes, but the problem is will it work that way or will we find some way to screw this up too? Like we screwed up with microwaves and vacuum cleaners and such... Save time? Ha. Yeah, in a way, but it doesn't really leave us with any more free time on our hands.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I can see a great temptation for this to worsen the throwaway society. :( Things would be made in one piece and repair will be virtually impossible. The upside is that there are efforts to make the material recyclable, so that a broken or old, unfashionable object could be disintegrated to be the raw material for the new one. I hope this is the way it goes. The fact that Bowyer is trying to use the opensource community to develop this stuff is promising because it makes it much more likely that such things will be built into it. If we rely solely upon the almighty dollar to push this forward we would likely just repeat all the old mistakes.

One of the things that is likely to come out of replicator technology is the robotics revolution. If every kid and hobbyist is able to tinker with creating their own robots (the way tinkering with computers began the computer revolution) then we will have the greatest labor saving devices you could imagine. In the past societies became rich by parasitising other people -- making them slaves. Robotics makes it possible to have slaves morally (though I recently wrote a play about the dangers of this (http://werple.net.au/~miriam/LoveHonourObey.html)). We already have a some robots (Automatic Teller Machines, CD and DVD players, cars are rapidly becoming robots, robots have worked in manufacturing for decades) but cheap, general-purpose robots will wreak enormous changes upon society.