How 3D Printing has been Enhancing the Housing Industry

Take away the property bubbles for a moment. 

The use of 3D technology has been spreading. Today, with 3D Printer technology, housing will not only become more affordable, they can be built fast and according to one’s taste or 'custom fitted' housing.

In China a Chinese company has introduced mass housing via 3D printer technology. The said company “3D printed” 10 houses in 24 hours using recycled construction materials for $4,800 (Php 214,000). The houses were printed offsite and assembled at the site location. 

The Chinese company hasn’t been the first to join the race to build 3D printed houses in 24 hours, a researcher from a US based university has been working on such goals too. I believe there are more but have been undisclosed.

In Amsterdam, the world’s first onsite 3D printed house—which is actually intended as a museum and a research facility—is being built. House materials consist of layers of molten plastic which function like LEGO materials.

Three insights. Technology brings about “deflation”—something which authorities and the mainstream—have been deeply averse to. Yet "deflation", for consumers, means more affordability or more goods or services one can buy with a given currency unit—such signifies as an increase in real purchasing power (What money can buy). 

What the mainstream doesn't tell you is that the "deflation" they all so rabidly dread is credit deflation (bubble bust). So they all promote sustained debasement of the real purchasing power of money via bubble blowing or credit inflation policies  

The second lesson is competition. The quest for profits has not just led to the discovery of new technologies, but has also been impelling companies to innovate or to introduce new or improvised uses (applications) for a specific technology in order to satisfy consumers. 

Lastly the potentials of 3D Printing technology remains vast. 3D printing technology is yet in the early phase of expansion in terms of diffusion of applications to commerce and to households. So for me, this an industry worth monitoring.

[Disclosure: As of this writing, I have no equity holdings in 3D technology stocks]

How a 3D Printer Helped Save a Dying Baby

3D Printing makes another leap towards revolutionizing medicine

From CNN (hat tip AEI's Mark Perry) 

When he was 6 weeks old, Kaiba Gionfriddo lay flat on a restaurant table, his skin turning blue. He had stopped breathing.

His father, Bryan, was furiously pumping his chest, trying to get air into his son's lungs.

Within 30 minutes, Kaiba was admitted to a local hospital. Doctors concluded that he had probably breathed food or liquid into his lungs and eventually released him.

But two days later, it happened again. It was the beginning of an ordeal for the Youngstown, Ohio, family that continued day after agonizing day.

"They had to do CPR on him every day," said April Gionfriddo, Kaiba's mother, who later found out her son had a rare obstruction in his lungs called bronchial malacia. "I didn't think he was going to leave the hospital alive."

With hopes dimming that Kaiba would survive, doctors tried the medical equivalent of a "Hail Mary" pass. Using an experimental technique never before tried on a human, they created a splint made out of biological material that effectively carved a path through Kaiba's blocked airway.

What makes this a medical feat straight out of science fiction: The splint was created on a three-dimensional printer.

Read the rest here

Chart of the Day: 12 technologies will drive our economic future

The Washington Post cites a chart from a study by McKinsey Quarterly:

Most of the aforementioned technologies can be summed as the entwined functionalites of the ongoing revolutions of big data, communications and smart manufacturing. Such technologies are bound to decentralize the global economy that would intensify frictions with the current state of centralized political systems. 

Yet if central bankers and power insatiable politicians have not been pushing the economic system to Hades, I would dwell heavily on the above technologies.

Video: Designing Confidence: How 3D Printing Improves on Prosthetic design

The following video features the the innovative work of Scott Summit in using 3D Printing and digital scanning technology to greatly improve Prosthetic design. (hat tip Professor Mark Perry)

War on 3D Printed Guns: US Government Censors 3D Blueprints

Here is what I earlier wrote

With the proliferation of 3D printed guns, the next step governments will likely take is to regulate 3D.

As predicted, the US government forced a takedown of 3D gun blueprints

From the Forbes:

The battle for control of dangerous digital shapes may have just begun.

On Thursday, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson received a letter from the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanding that he take down the online blueprints for the 3D-printable “Liberator” handgun that his group released Monday, along with nine other 3D-printable firearms components hosted on the group’s website Defcad.org. The government says it wants to review the files for compliance with arms export control laws known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.

“Until the Department provides Defense Distributed with final [commodity jurisdiction] determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled,” reads the letter, referring to a list of ten CAD files hosted on Defcad that include the 3D-printable gun, silencers, sights and other pieces. “This means that all data should be removed from public acces immediately. Defense Distributed should review the remainder of the data made public on its website to determine whether any other data may be similarly controlled and proceed according to ITAR requirements.”

Unfortunately for the US government, the markets have already anticipated such a move. There has been more than 100,000 downloads of the blueprint prior to the takedown.

Again from the same article:

Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas in Austin, says that Defense Distributed will in fact take down its files until the State Department has completed its review. “We have to comply,” he says. “All such data should be removed from public access, the letter says. That might be an impossible standard. But we’ll do our part to remove it from our servers.”

As Wilson hints, that doesn’t mean the government has successfully censored the 3D-printable gun. While Defense Distributed says it will take down the gun’s printable file from Defcad.org, its downloads–100,000 in just the first two days the file was online–were actually being served by Mega, the New Zealand-based storage service created by ex-hacker entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, an outspoken U.S. government critic. It’s not clear whether the file will be taken off Mega’s servers, where it may remain available for download. The blueprint for the gun and other Defense Distributed firearm components have also been uploaded several times to the Pirate Bay, the censorship-resistant filesharing site.

So the US government will have to extend its censorship to cover New Zealand based Mega and Pirate Bay.

But since the technology is already out, this will find various ways to spread. Thus the US government will have their hands full in instituting controls.

The cat and mouse chase between marketplace and regulators on the 3D technology has began.

The World’s First Fully 3D Printed Gun: The Liberator

The advent of 3D printing technology are one of the many major manifestations of the deepening information age or the digital economy.

Meet the world’s first entirely 3D Printed Gun: the Liberator

Writes Andy Greenberg at the Forbes

Eight months ago, Cody Wilson set out to create the world’s first entirely 3D-printable handgun.

Now he has.

Early next week, Wilson, a 25-year-old University of Texas law student and founder of the non-profit group Defense Distributed, plans to release the 3D-printable CAD files for a gun he calls “the Liberator,” pictured in its initial form above. He’s agreed to let me document the process of the gun’s creation, so long as I don’t publish details of its mechanics or its testing until it’s been proven to work reliably and the file has been uploaded to Defense Distributed’s online collection of printable gun blueprints at Defcad.org.

Update: Here’s my full account of Defense Distributed’s first test-firings of the Liberator, including firing it by hand.

All sixteen pieces of the Liberator prototype were printed in ABS plastic with a Dimension SST printer from 3D printing company Stratasys, with the exception of a single nail that’s used as a firing pin. The gun is designed to fire standard handgun rounds, using interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition.

Technically, Defense Distributed’s gun has one other non-printed component: the group added a six ounce chunk of steel into the body to make it detectable by metal detectors in order to comply with the Undetectable Firearms Act. In March, the group also obtained a federal firearms license, making it a legal gun manufacturer.

The 3D printing technology continues to evolve. From simple tools, 3D printers have now covered complex products such as guns, guitars or even cars. 3D will increasingly make many tools “homemade”. Even healthcare trends will be influenced by 3D, I pointed to jawbone replacement and lately 3D technology has enabled printed lab grown human livers. 

The widening diffusion of 3D printers will reconfigure today’s economic system.

Notice that the current trend of technological innovation leads to decentralization, or bottom-up or niche markets. Such trend basically represents a diametrical opposite of the industrial age platform based on centralization, or top down or mass markets. Yet policymakers have been forcing upon the public, centralized policies that contradicts the direction of markets. So naturally, the struggle for domination will mean social frictions from these antipodal forces.

Take 3D printed guns; 3D will enable the public to autonomously design and manufacture their own guns even at home. So many if not all of the gun control regulations may be rendered “obsolete” by sheer technicalities. This comes even as the media passionately debates on them. 

With the proliferation of 3D printed guns, the next step governments will likely take is to regulate 3D. Such applies also to various vested interest groups, particularly manufacturing and other sectors that will be threatened by the 3D technology.

But since 3D printing or additive manufacturing, as the Wikipedia.org explains represents “a process of making a three-dimensional solid object of virtually any shape from a digital model” implementing social controls on a non-specific module would make such controls ambiguous and or ineffective. So technology will run rings around old industrial era statutes.

In short, the trend of technology advancements and politics have been in a collision course. There will be a winner and a loser.

CNN: 3D Printed Assault Weapons Available by End of April

The technology is there and continues to improve, so applications will also continue to expand to cover wide ranges of products, including controversial guns.

Assault weapons from 3-D Printing will be available by the end of April according to this report from CNN (hat tip lewrockwell.com)

Firearms 3D printer Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed and the Wiki Weapon project has been making wave after wave with every one of his statements, updates, videos and blog posts. He’s been making the circles, with an interview with Vice Magazine and now CNN.

His most recent proclamation is will alarm many, bring hope to a few, but leaves us with our heads scratching. Wilson has said that they will have the technology to 3D print a firearm by “the end of April.”

“Well to have a printable gun — it’s my intention to have that done by the end of this month and we’re at the end of March now so it’s my intention to have it done by April,” he said. This would, in theory, prompt a new era in personal firearm manufacturing and a new paradigm for gun control.

“The assumption is one day the technology will become more ubiquitous and widespread,” Wilson said on “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”

“It will fall in price, and materials will be developed in a better place than they are now, so yes, if you were to have one in your home and you have the gun file, you can just click print and have the gun.”

The rate of advance of 3D technology will only render prohibition and other regulatory statutes obsolete. Of course, we expect government eventually to attempt to "regulate" 3D. But again such measures are bound to lag and thus fail.

3D technology in combination with others (mobile computing, nanotech and etc...) will change the way we do things and force us to specialize. A wider adaption of the 3D technology also means the path towards social decentralization.

Here Comes 3D Printed Cars

As part of the deepening of the information age, the 3D Printing revolution will affect large parts of today’s economy.

From Wired.com

Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.

If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo.

Urbee’s approach to maximum miles per gallon starts with lightweight construction – something that 3-D printing is particularly well suited for. The designers were able to focus more on the optimal automobile physics, rather than working to install a hyper efficient motor in a heavy steel-body automobile. As the Urbee shows, making a car with this technology has a slew of beneficial side effects.

Jim Kor is the engineering brains behind the Urbee. He’s designed tractors, buses, even commercial swimming pools. Between teaching classes, he heads Kor Ecologic, the firm responsible for the 3-D printed creation.

“We thought long and hard about doing a second one,” he says of the Urbee. “It’s been the right move.”

Kor and his team built the three-wheel, two-passenger vehicle at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing facility. The printers he uses create ABS plastic via Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). The printer sprays molten polymer to build the chassis layer by microscopic layer until it arrives at the complete object. The machines are so automated that the building process they perform is known as “lights out” construction, meaning Kor uploads the design for a bumper, walk away, shut off the lights and leaves. A few hundred hours later, he’s got a bumper. The whole car – which is about 10 feet long – takes about 2,500 hours.

Pls. read the rest here.

The problem I see with the competition poised by 3D Printing could be that incumbent companies may lobby to impose regulatory obstacles (e.g. safety and energy standards, etc…) on them.

Nevertheless, 3D Printing seems yet at the fringe of the technology adaption cycle. (chart from evocator.org)

Reasons for US Insourcing

Mercantilists previously argued that in order for the US to regain competitiveness expressed via investments outsourced to China, the US needs to devalue. How misguided this perspective had been.  

While the US has indeed by inflating (devaluing) everyone else has been doing the same including China’s PBoC.

From Mao Money, Mao Problems

The net effect has been to negate each other inflationist policies and instead such seemingly collaborative actions has spawned a global asset boom.

Recently, reports suggest that the US has now been experiencing greater degree of reverse outsourcing, or insourcing. In a verbose report, the Atlantic suggests the following reasons:

-Oil prices are three times what they were in 2000, making cargo-ship fuel much more expensive now than it was then.

-The natural-gas boom in the U.S. has dramatically lowered the cost for running something as energy-intensive as a factory here at home. (Natural gas now costs four times as much in Asia as it does in the U.S.)

-In dollars, wages in China are some five times what they were in 2000—and they are expected to keep rising 18 percent a year.

-American unions are changing their priorities. Appliance Park’s union was so fractious in the ’70s and ’80s that the place was known as “Strike City.” That same union agreed to a two-tier wage scale in 2005—and today, 70 percent of the jobs there are on the lower tier, which starts at just over $13.50 an hour, almost $8 less than what the starting wage used to be.

-U.S. labor productivity has continued its long march upward, meaning that labor costs have become a smaller and smaller proportion of the total cost of finished goods. You simply can’t save much money chasing wages anymore.

While the above may be true, this seems insufficient.

I may add that numerous wealthy Chinese have likewise been seemingly anxious about China’s political economic conditions, such that they have been looking elsewhere to shelter their capital.

From Reuters

In short, US insourcing relative to China may not have been entirely about economic issues but also about politics. 

The risk of an economic bust from China’s assimilation of Western Keynesian policies, that has ballooned a huge shadow banking industry and skyhigh debts, which have intensely increased the risks of a financial and economic bust. This implies that concerns over political instability may have been prompting China’s wealthy and capitalist class (along with cronies) to consider safehaven alternatives abroad. The increasing political risks may serve as a major reason for the US insourcing.

And political risks has also been manifested in China’s gunboat  diplomacy with Japan and Southeast Asia over territorial issues, which has been most likely a diversion from her brewing economic woes.

I might add advances in technology may be a factor too. For instance, advances in 3-D printing may eventually bring manufacturing to the household, which may reduce cross border FDIs relative to manufacturing.

The bottom line is looking at US insourcing relative to China may not signify as an accurate picture of global investment flows. That’s because there is a whole world of other options via many other capable emerging markets than China alone.

Make Way for 3D Printed Guitars

3D Printing has indeed been revolutionary. Many products today are being 3D "printed" such as guns and jaw replacements

Add to that list acoustic and electric guitars

Image from Businessweek/Bloomberg

From Businessweek/Bloomberg,

Scott Summit does unusual things on his vacations. For instance, he just spent a week up in the mountains, taking in the majestic scenery and all that, but also sitting at his laptop creating a 3D model of his ideal guitar. Then he sent the computer design to 3D Systems (DDD), which used its massive 3D printers to transform the graphic model into an actual acoustic instrument that Summit can play.

As far as anyone seems to know, this is the first 3D-printed acoustic guitar on the planet, and it raises all kinds musical possibilities. (As several readers noted, people have already made 3D printed electric guitars.)

As a kid, Summit pined after fancy guitars. “I wanted a $3,000 one like Jerry Garcia would play,” he says. At the time, Summit didn’t have the money, so he spent around $100 on wood and other parts and fashioned his own guitar. “It sounded like crap,” he says.

These days, Summit spends most of his time designing custom body parts and stylish prosthetics that get built from 3D printers. He is, in fact, one of the world’s leading 3D printing and design experts, and he decided to put those skills to use over a holiday, refining his childhood vision.

Yet the difference in quality seems to be negligible…

Since the acoustic guitar would be made from fused plastic, Summit figured it would have some serious shortcomings. If it actually worked, it would probably sound worse than his old $100 model. But chances were the guitar would break under the 200 pounds of string pressure that comes with tightening the strings via a tuning machine. Summit set up a video camera to record what would happen when the stringing process started. “I thought it would at least be cool if the guitar exploded,” he says.

But, no. It worked, and it sounds pretty good. “It’s rich and full and has a great tonal range,” says Summit, who’s been known to play at friends’ weddings and at dive bars.

3D made guitars signifies as a breakthrough with more innovations and product transformations ahead

Summit describes this version as a rough draft. He wants to start experimenting with more radical designs to see how they change the sound. Somewhere down the road he figures people will be able to use software to pick out what sort of treble, bass, or sustain they desire and then print a guitar to match those qualities. “It will arrive in the mail and sound just the way you wanted,” he says.

3D printing will alter the division of labor, production process, investment flows, increase specialization and will likely become a household necessity. Eventually too, 3D printing will become object of politicization from mostly the neo-luddites or even from socialists clothed with environmentalist rhetoric.

3D Printer Milestone: World’s First 3D-Printed Gun

The 3-D printing technology has been advancing at an incredibly swift pace.

Now it seems that parts of the gun can be 3-D printed

The Nextweb.com writes

Gun enthusiast “HaveBlue” has documented in a blog post (via the AR15 forums) the process of what appears to be the first test firing of a firearm made with a 3D printer.

Credit: HaveBlue.org

Before you go about locking yourself in your closet, you should know that the only printed part of the gun was the lower receiver. But, according to the American Gun Control Act, the receiver is what counts as the firearm.

HaveBlue reportedly used a Stratasys 3D printer to craft the part, assembled it as a .22 pistol and fired more than 200 rounds with it.

The tester then attempted to assemble a rifle with the part and a .223 upper receiver but had “feed and extraction issues.” The problem may not in fact be with the 3D-printed part, though, as the issues remained when a standard aluminum lower was used.

3D printer gun designs have been floating around the Internet for some time now, but HaveBlue seems to be the first to take it to the next level.

Click here for a nice infographic of 3-D Printing also from Nextweb.com.

Spotting Technology Winners is a Judgment Call

Forbes’ brilliant technology analyst and venture cap investor Josh Wolfe gives as a clue on how to identify winning technology innovation, (bold caps original)

And the stakes are always highest when the forces of technological disruption, oft too weak to be detected, catalyze massive industry change and become too strong to be resisted.

Common conception holds that brilliant inventions burst straight from research labs to take over markets. But in studying and investing in change, it becomes apparent that the enabling technologies have often been in existence for some time, developing quietly in the background in ancillary markets or other incarnations. It’s only at the confluence of parallel technological developments and shifting market forces that, often unexpectedly, “Aha!” – a new application takes hold. The combinatorial chemistry of industry and invention yields an explosive reaction, and then: everything changes. Thus we’re always hunting for two things: cutting-edge technologies and rapidly changing markets.

In short, the success of identifying winning disruptive technology innovators comes with the ‘right timing’. Technology may have been "in existence for some time", but markets may not be ripe for it.

This gives merit to Professor Peter Klein’s definition of entrepreneurship as one of speculative judgment.

At the Mises Blog Professor Salerno writes,

So, Klein maintained, the profit opportunity was not an ex ante fact waiting to be discovered; rather the profit opportunity was only realized , ex post, as the successful outcome of an action based on a speculative judgment. Whether or not the plans of economic agents are better coordinated and the economy is closer to equilibrium than before is “irrelevant,” Klein explained; the important point is that ex post profits indicate that resources have been reallocated from less valuable to more valuable uses from the point of view of consumers.

Anyway, Mr. Wolfe’s present candidate is the 3D printer.

I talked about the potentials of 3D printers at an earlier post.

I also share the view that 3D printers will function as one of the three major forces of the information age.

Video: Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future

Peter Diamandis, Founder and Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation, an educational non-profit prize institute whose mission is to create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity, in a talk at the TED explains why he thinks the world is headed for abundance.



Essentially Mr.Diamandis is banking on the explosive growth of human capital facilitated by technology (information age) through the following media

Technologies riding Moore’s Laws:
1. Infinite Computing
2. Sensor and Networks
3. Robotics
4. 3D Printing
5. Synthethic Biology
6. Digital Medicine
7. Nanomaterials
8. Artificial intelligence

Here are some noteworthy quotes

When I think about creating abundance, it is not about creating a life of luxury…it is about creating a life of possibilities. It is about taking that which was scarce and making it abundant. You see scarcity is contextual and technology is a resource liberating force. 6:34

It is not about being scarce it’s about accessibility. 8:17

By the way the biggest protection against population explosion is making the world educated and healthy 12:26

3 billion new minds would never been heard before are connecting to global conversation. What do these people want? What would they consume? What do they desire? Rather than having an economic shutdown we are about to have is the biggest economic injection ever. These people represent tens of trillions of dollars injected in the global economy 12:47

In spite of the restrictive role of governments, I share his optimism that people will find ways and means to circumvent them mostly through technological innovations.

(hat tip Professor Mark Perry)

Revolutionary 3D Printing Technology: Jawbone Replacement

The speed of technological advances is just amazing and 3D printing technology seems to be showing the way.

From Discoverynews.com (hat tip Mark Perry; bold emphasis mine)

When surgeons replaced the infected lower jawbone of an 83-year-old woman, they needed a fast replacement tailored to fit the patient's existing bone structure, nerves and muscles. That medical dilemma inspired a world-first achievement -- creating a customized jawbone from scratch with 3D printing technology.

The "printing" process used a laser to heat and melt metal powder in the shape of the jawbone. That process, carried out by Belgian manufacturer LayerWise, allowed the 3D printer to sculpt and build up the patient's medical implant layer by layer. A bioceramic coating ensured that the patient's body would not reject the implant.

"The new treatment method is a world premiere because it concerns the first patient-specific implant in replacement of the entire lower jaw," said Jules Poukens, a surgeon at the University Hasselt in Belgium

Poukens led the team of surgeons that implanted the new jawbone during a four-hour operation at a hospital in Sittard-Geleen in the Netherlands last June, according to the Dutch newspaper De Pers. The elderly patient made a rapid recovery.

"Shortly after waking up from the anesthetics, the patient spoke a few words, and the day after, the patient was able to speak and swallow normally again," Poukens said.

3D printing has already helped many DIY innovators create everything from robots to household items on demand based upon digital designs. But the combination of precise designs and rapid manufacturing could have even greater potential for creating customized body parts for medical patients -- especially when transplanted bone structures and organs suffer from short supply.

The revolutionary 3D printing technology reinforces the secular trend towards decentralization. But this won’t come smoothly as many politically entrenched groups or interests will figure out ways (from environmentalism to health regulations and others) to forestall 3D technology’s fabulous advances.

Also the political battlefield will shift from nations (with no more China or Japan to blame on) to technology. In short expect anti-free market politics to shift from mercantilism to neo-Luddism.

The illustrious Julian Simon once remarked about the growth of human capital

The essence of wealth is the capacity to control the forces of nature, and the extent of wealth depends upon the level of technology and the ability to create new knowledge

Information Age: The Rise of 3D Printers

Casey Research’s Chris Wood writes of the prospects of 3D which is “already a $1 billion+ business”,

3D printing is simply too useful across a wide spectrum of applications to be compared to VR. It is here to stay. Going forward, the technology will displace conventional manufacturing techniques in some instances and complement them in others. Consumers will increasingly adopt it. The technology will continually be refined, while the range of usable materials will broaden. These advancements should allow us to start printing electronics in a few years… and perhaps even body parts someday down the road.

This is an industry barely into its infancy. It's a situation not unlike that with the personal computer thirty years ago, when only Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and a few other visionaries foresaw that the PC could become an essential household appliance.

I earlier posted a video of 3D Printing here

As part of the “smart manufacturing” or one of the 3 forces that will underpin the information age, I’d conjecture that 3D printing will herald the evolving trend of mass customization or the emergence of Prosumers where 3D printing will likely bring some, if not many, aspects of (personalized or custom based) manufacturing to the households. In short, some things will be produced at home, when or as needed. [possibly even body parts as pointed out, e.g. printing of kidney]

Again forces of decentralization driving structural changes in the way we live at work.