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Comment by ericson578 | Hacker News Reader

another area ripe for disruption. Imagine in 100 years when 3d printing is a mature technology, and most goods are produced locally and delivered by drone. Maybe only raw materials will be transported this way?

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Maybe.

It's extremely difficult to imagine a world in which distributed, unspecialized manufacturing is actually a reasonable way for most people to get their goods.

One argument many people have made is look at the personal computing revolution, shouldn't we see the same thing in physical manufacturing?

And the answer is: yes, we will the same thing. But look at what is actually happening: you have a brief 20-30 year period in which distributed personal computing actually happens, but then once the internet comes about things have slowly started migrating back to centralization and specialization (ie: Facebook instead of distributed social networking).

I expect the same will happen with 3d printing. Sure, 3d printing might be the best way to print that obscure part you need for an old car. But for every day items? Unlikely that the efficiency gain made by getting rid of shipping is actually offset by printing something in your house on demand.

In the case of manufacturing physical objects, there are also good reasons why the specialized factory can produce higher-quality products than a 3D printer can. For one, in an ocean of materials with various relative strengths and weaknesses 3D printers only work with a handful of polymers.

I think it'll work out like on-demand printing. That laser printer in your office is fine for printing out a one-off contract. But when the time comes to restock your company's collection of brochures, it's probably best to send out to have them printed on high-volume equipment that can do a better job of it.

I think the nature of everyday items would have to change for 3D printing to compete. For example, imagine a technology that scans your body in 3D and then makes that shirt you like, but with its dimensions customized to the dimensions of your body.

Clothing sizes today are a messy approximation of what people actually want. It's a compromise between the ROI possible in a mass-production, mass-transport world, and the perfect fit.

News and music used to be produced and distributed like clothes--centralized production of a limited number of product options, which are then shipped to lots of people. Today people can completely customize their news and music consumption through a wide variety of dynamically personalized channels.

Personal manufacturing can do the same thing for tangible goods. But the current "3D printing" technology, which is extremely limited in terms of materials, size, durability, etc.

The point is that it is unlikely that machine would exist in your house. You'll still get clothing from the same company, shipped or in store, they'll just manufacture it differently. This is a big deal, but again, it's unlikely that the means of production will distribute because of simple efficiency gains through specialization.

Even if you go full science fiction and have a machine that perfectly rearranges the atoms and you can buy specific atoms (a la Diamond Age), the guy who has a deal on bulk atoms needed to make a shirt will make it cheaper than you will make it in your kitchen on your maker.

Eh, I'm not sure. Even with completely local production (if that miracle ever happens), you still need raw materials, and moving a lot at once is very cost effective. Just like trains beat busses beat cars on total cost per unit moved.

Maersk's (and other similar companies') big idea was that if you put things in regularly sized containers, you can a) Calculate space very easily and use space efficiently b) Not worry about packing things at the dock and let the customer best pack the thing as opposed to you wasting time on it c) Use the same container to move the goods across ground too d)Reuse the container. So this was kinda IKEA flat packing before IKEA existed.

It really is hard to beat the economies of scale here - even the largest cargo planes move laughably small amounts compared to these things. Drones? No way.

Drone, I think, could disrupt something else, which is house delivery. Small weight, short distance. That's what it'd be good at.

3D printing isn't magic, it's just a technique. What will be more important is fully automated manufacturing and configurable manufacturing. 3D printing is just the easiest form of such technology. In, say, 50 years you'll be able to upload a design for something to a service and have a factory produce it with little human intervention and very little delay. But it won't be manufactured using solely 3D printing techniques, there'll be "traditional" machining, casting, assembly, soldering, etc. involved, it'll just all be automated.

Marine shipping in cargo containers is frighteningly efficient. In 2002, the cost was $0.001 per mile per ton[0] Good luck beating that price with a drone. It'll cost more in electricity to fly a drone-package across town than to move a cargo container across the ocean.

[0] http://richardtorian.blogspot.com/2012/01/cost-per-ton-mile-...

There are some strong indications that the boom in manufacturing in China is not permanent. With the decline in the importance of labor, the rise of robots, and the importance of protecting IP in manufacturing, Byrnjolfsson and McAfee suggest that much of manufacturing will be coming home over the next few decades.

http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-Machine-Accelerating-Prod...

So ripe for disruption... in a hundred years?

$210B industry per the article.

I was responding to the idea that disruption would occur by means of drones and 3D printing. (I agree that for small amounts of materials, this might someday be the case, but currently, this is obviously not a "ripe," disruptive alternative.) You simply cannot beat the efficiency of this mode of transport for large amounts of material.

If you want to disrupt this industry, a completely different mode of transport would have to be invented. Good luck building your teleporters or your ocean-length, frictionless rail lines, everyone!

over the next 100 years was my posit

I think the equivalent of replicators are still far-off. We'll have drone ships loading and unloading themselves far sooner than we'll have people getting whatever their hearts desire from a little machine in their home from pure carbon pellets.

That said, "Tea, earl gray, hot."....someday.

This is still the expansion phase of the previous disruption, shipping containers, that's not finished yet.

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