Chuang, Che-Kuang
In June 6, 2013 a
Texas based-company named Defense Distributed announced that they have made a
plastic gun with 3d printer which could successfully fire and harm people. It is
definitely shocking news that made the headlines of CNN and caused intense
discussion in the US congress.
So what is 3d
printing? Just like the normal printer which use ink to print, 3d printers use
materials like plastic to mold 3d objects. People only have to create a digital
image in some modeling software on computers and input these data into 3d
printers, then it would print the 3d objects out layer by layer. It sounds like
a future technology, but it actually have been applied into product design,
architecture design even tissue production for many years. Because of its’ high
cost, it has not become popular until now. Thanks to those architects and
product designers, those early adopters who has pushed and advanced these
technology forward, now anyone could get a 3d printer with around one thousand
Us dollars and use it to create any dreaming 3d objects.
However, the
popularity of 3d printers has its own disadvantages. The first disadvantage is
that if anyone could use 3d printers to create what they want, the intellectual
property becomes hard to protect. For example, if someone sees a branded earring
which he/she really likes, he/she could easily imitate this product with 3d
printer. It might encourage those anarchists to be self-sufficient and crash
the structure of human sociality. Another problem is about the 3d-printed gun.
If anyone could make guns or any other weapons with 3d printers, the gun
control act would become useless and seriously endangers the national public
security.
It also threatens
the benefits of some industries and designers. Although 3d printers still could
not be applied into mass production, but now many companies have already used
it to create some complexity objects. It certainly affects the traditional
manufacturing. And it is a problem for designers and architects, too. It sounds
like these early pioneers who popularized this technology have dug their own
graves. Because making prototypes is a specially skills of these creators, since
the 3d printers could help anyone’s imagined products come true, this specially
skills of these creators become worthless.
Now 3d printing
has become a very important issue in US congress. It is absolutely a valuable
industry which might create billions of dollars and millions of jobs, but in
the same time it brings enormous problems which are hard to solve in human society.
No comments:
Post a Comment