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Comment by EncomLab | Hacker News Reader

Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody?

AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.

Great analogy. 3d printing is awesome and incredibly useful tech. Truly world changing. But injection molding is here to stay.

Even the phrase "world-changing" might be a bit too strong.

It's enabled some acceleration of product prototyping and it has democratized hardware design a little bit. Some little companies are building some buildings using 3D printing techniques.

Speaking as someone who owns and uses a 3D printer daily, I think the biggest impact it's had is that it's a fun hobby, which doesn't strike me as "world-changing."

That's fair, but don't sell them short. A 3d printed gun just killed a CEO. Ukrainian drones are using 3d printed parts to drop bombs.

Between that and the changed game for hobbyists, the world is meaningfully different.

Most world-changing inventions do so subtly. Atom bombs are the exception, not the rule.

I think the phrase "world-changing" implies a lot less subtlety than that.

That's fair. My definition is probably broader than most.

Though we did figure out how to do injection molding with a 3d printer. In a printed mold.

It might not lead to singularity but for people who work in academia, in terms of setting and marking assignments and lecture notes, for good or bad AI has had an enormous impact.

You might argue that LLMs have simply exposed some systematic defects instead of improving anything, but the impact is there. Dozens of lecturing workflows that were pretty standard 2 years ago are no longer viable. This includes the entirety of online and remote education which ironically dozens of universities started investing in after Covid, right around when chatgpt launched. To put this impact in context, we are talking about the tertiary and secondary sector globally.

> This includes the entirety of online and remote education

I don't get this. Either you do graded home assignments which the person takes without any examiner, which you could always cheat on, or you do live exams and then people can't rely on AI . LLMs make it easier to cheat, but it's not a categorical difference.

I feel like my experience of university (90% of the classes had in-person exams, some had home projects for a portion of the final marks) is fundamentally different from what other people experienced and this is very confusing for me.

I fully agree, in academia it truly is a revolution - for good and for bad.

There will be the before and after AI eras in academia.

This is an easy quip to make, but it's also pretty wrong. 3D printing has been a massive breakthrough in many industries and fundamentally changed the status quo. Aerospace is a good example, much of what SpaceX and other younger upstarts in the space are doing would not be feasible without 3D printed parts. Nozzles, combustion chambers, turbopumps etc are all parts that are often printed.

Unless you believe that 3D printing is "going to replace all manufacturing" then the OP is not "pretty wrong" and you don't even disagree with them.

FWIW I think OP came up with an excellent analogy.

OP's comment and your response could both be true at same time

I actually think the response makes the point. LLMs are useful, and will provide certain innovations, but they aren't a panacea. At the top of its height, proponents talked like 3D printing was going to make parcel delivery obsolete, and that's the same hype you see with language models "threatening" all knowledge workers

I'd give up my 3D printer long before letting go of my Bridgeport...

That's less than 1% of all manufacturing done on the planet. Stupid comment for the sake of commenting.

or bitcoin going to replace banks? We ended up with banks selling financial tools based on bitcoin.

I honestly don’t, although maybe that hype cycle was before my time.

But this seems an unfair comparison. For one, I think 3D printing made me better, not worse, at engineering (back when mechanical engineering was my jam), as it allowed me to prototype and make mistakes faster and cheaper. While it hasn’t replaced all manufacturing (or even come close), it plays an important role in design without atrophying the skills of the user.

Honestly, both are pretty good for prototyping. I haven't found AI helpful with big picture stuff (design) or nuts and bolts stuff (large refactorings), but it's good at some tedium that I definitely know how to do but guess that AI can type it in faster than I can. Similarly, given enough time I could probably manufacture my designs on a mill/lathe but there is something to be said for just letting the printer do it when plastic is good enough (100% of my projects; but obviously I select projects where 3D printing is going to work). Very similar technologies and there are productivity gains to be had. Did the world change because of either? Not really.

I find AI has the potential to do that (in my software development job): But so far I'm only using it occasionally, probably not as often as you used 3D printing.

Well yeah, the singularity isn't close by any measure.

But 3D printing and AI are on totally different trajectories.

I haven't heard of Mattel saying, "we're going to see in what places we can replace standard molding with 3d printing". It's never been considered a real replacement, but rather potentially a useful way to make PoCs, prototypes and mockups.

I have a 3d printer and cadded me some parts, I don't have an injection molding plant.

Yep, I think this further illustrates OP's point—hobbyists building low-stakes projects get enormous benefits from LLM tooling even while professionals working on high-stakes projects find that there are lots of places where they still need something else.

Because you dont have a need to mass produce.

3d printing will slowly edge its way into more manufacturing. The humble stepping motor really is eating the world. 3dp is one manifestation of it!

Back to AI though.

I just checked the customer support page of a hyped AI app generator and its what you expect: "doesn't work on complex project" "wastes all my tokens" and "how to get a refund"

These things are over promising and a future miracle is required to justify valuations. Maybe the miracle will come maybe not.

> 3d printing will slowly

I'm not sure why you continued using words when you summed up 3D printing with those four words. In the time it takes to print 1 object, you could have molded thousands of them. 3D printing has done a lot for manufacturing in terms of prototyping and making the first thing while improving flexibility for iterations. Using them for mass production is just not a sane concept.

Yes for sure. 3d printing isn't going to replace everything because 3d printing is a type of manufacturing method with pros and cons.

But in the time it took me to convert a picture of my cat to a 3d model using AI and print it, I could have ... got on the phone to the injection molding lab, and asked about availability to produce the mold for that cat.

3d printing fits the niche where either you need to model or make something bespoke that it isn't worth setting up custom machinery.

The point is 3d printing is useful and the tech is improving and it will get more and more useful. It won't take over manufacturing of course (just like Rust won't take over all programming).

> Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody?

Sure, but I'd argue the AIs are the new injection molding (as mentioned downthread) with the current batch being the equivalent of Bakelite.

Plus, who seriously said 3d printers were going to churn out Barbies by the millions? What I remember is people claiming they would be a viable source of one-off home production for whatever.

Not saying that it’s not true but hardware and software have different trajectories.

for small run manufacturing, 3d printing is absolutely killing it. the major limitation of 3d printing is that it will never be able to crank out thousands of parts per hour the way injection molding can and thats ok. creating an injection molded part requires a huge up front investment. if you're doing small runs of a part, 3d printing more than makes up for the slow marginal time with skipping the up front costs alltogether.

Or 3d cinema. Or vr. All just hype bs

No, because 3D printing was never going to replace all manufacturing. Anyone who said that didn't even have a basic understanding of manufacturing, and I don't recall any serious claims like that.

3D printing has definitely replaced some manufacturing, and it has had a huge effect on product design.

These anti-AI articles are getting more tedious than the vibe coding articles.

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