3D printing is going to eventually (and by that I mean in the next 10 years) shake almost every industry to it’s core. It will decimate China, as well.
The End of Chinese Manufacturing and Rebirth of U.S. Industry
http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/07/23/the-end-of-chinese-manufacturing-and-rebirth-of-u-s-industry/
Even if the Chinese automate their factories with AI-powered robots and manufacture 3D printers, it will no longer make sense to ship raw materials all the way to China to have them assembled into finished products and shipped back to the U.S. Manufacturing will once again become a local industry with products being manufactured near raw materials or markets.
So China has many reasons to worry, and manufacturing will undoubtedly return to the U.S.—if not in this decade then early in the next. But the same jobs that left the U.S. won’t come back: they won’t exist. What will the new jobs be? We can only guess. Autodesk CEO Carl Bass says that just as we have created new, higher-paying jobs in every other industrial transition, we will create a new set of industries and professions in this one. Look at the new types of jobs and multi-billion dollar businesses that the Internet and mobile industries created—these came out of nowhere and changed our lives, Bass says.
So right 2ndDivisionVet.
And we have plenty of the main 3D printing materials of the future...silicon and petrochemicals.
15 years to the printing of a heart...30 years to print a new eye. Drug printing in 10-20 (depending on the drug). Routine printing of houses in 5 years.
The future of really, really inexpensive stuff is almost upon us.
It will actually be like money growing on trees...seriously.
I’d have to agree it’s going to be a paradigm shift. Lots of businesses/industries will likely go under or morph into something very different.
Kinda hard to predict how things will change, but it’s going to be fun seeing it unfold.
As a car nut, I’m hoping it adds a new dimension to automobiles. There’s a fledgling open source car movement, and kit cars have been around for years, along with quite a few small companies building unique, small-run vehicles. So there’s at least some market for vehicles that deviate from the mass-produced common offerings. Maybe you won’t be able to 3d print an engine block in the short term, but I’d bet there are a lot of replacement parts that will be available soon (also a boon for the vintage industry). Maybe we’ll collectively start building cars for longevity rather than disposability. It would be great to mass produce some of the large components to get the price down, and then 3d print the rest to the customer’s specifications. Being able to add technology rather than having to trade in, for example. Knowing parts will always be available even if the manufacturer goes under. Potentially exciting times ahead.
There are a lot of car hobbyists out there doing some incredible things modifying/improving/changing parts. That’s just going to explode as 3d printing becomes more widely available and accessible.
I think we’re going to see an explosion in creativity that rivals the Renaissance, assuming government doesn’t royally screw it up.