By Mike Sutton.
In my article on hi-tech crime I point out the similarities between the ancient mythologies of fire theft with the realities of copyright theft: The owner’s status and earning capacity is undermined even though no physical object is taken away, diminished or even disturbed. The same problem that would have ‘robbed’ our imagined prehistoric “keeper of the sacred fire” by making the technology of fire available to all through the ‘horizontalization of knowledge’ has dogged other owners of intellectual property rights in great numbers since the widespread availability of photo-copying machines followed by digital reproduction and dissemination over the Internet.
Now, for the first time we have object copying machines, known as replicators.
What is being hailed as Industrial Revolution 2 – the ability of home manufacturing for all is here. This may well be what we have been looking for in the Western Industrialized world to re-boot the debt-based economies facilitated by Chinese capital lent to the West to buy on credit the products made cheaply in the East. Now individuals in the West can make products and product components – cleanly and efficiently – in their own homes. I’m talking about 3-D printing. This is an affordable ($1,200+) technology that allows us all make, in metal, ceramic or plastic, working equipment and component parts. At MIT, a working clockwork clock has been made entirely on a 3-D printer.
This could be the thing that changes our lives, changes our culture, changes our entire way of working and living. Because home centered 3-D printing has the ability to take individual creative imagination directly to invention, manufacturing, marketing and rapid innovation by others in ways that are currently unimaginable. Moore’s Law on speed might be one way of imagining how this might turn out. You can read a number of articles on Carrie Kirby’s excellently curated collection on the subject here.
Human imagination should have no bounds.
Our imaginations are now facilitated with home-based physical creation machines that will provide countless ways to improve lives. But beware. Because the history of humanity is that such technology will be exploited by deviant minds for nefarious purposes, often before there is a law in place to make such harmful exploitation of previously unimaginable technology illegal.
My youngest daughter (aged 3½ years) wants to know why her Disney Toy Story Woody doll does not have a six shooter in his empty holster. Whatever the reason for the absence of Woody’s pretend weapon in the movies and the merchandised toys (it’s even been debated at length on the Straight Dope boards ), armed with a $1,200 Makerbot replicator I could make one and have it fit Woody’s holster perfectly. Furthermore, I could then set up a website and start advertising and selling them. What would Disney and the anti-gun lobby make of that? Would it make me rich regardless? What would my students, colleagues and my university have to say about it?
Now let’s shift up a deviant gear
At home someone with a deviant imagination has made a working magazine for a firearm and even tweaked it to contain more ammunition than the standard part. In Germany, simply from a photograph a hobbyist made a working key to fit police handcuffs.
ATM bank card fraudsters are using 3D printing to make precision custom built skimmers to fit ATM machines .
Piracy Machines, Weapons Makers, Concealed Blade Creators (metal and ceramic), Counterfeit Coin Printers, Obscene Model Makers, Toxic Toy Machines, Precision Predator ATM Makers, call them what you will.
Our politicians, mayors, governors, police commissioners, chief constables and policy makers had better start using their foresight to gear up for the 3-D printer crime wave before it hits, or else we will all be back playing the age old game of catch-up with the criminals. Thereafter ‘expert’ criminologists will be uselessly lauded and rewarded by their peers, publishers and students for writing wise after the event post-hoc rhetorical explanations for why it is happening. How to move beyond that in the here and now without killing the goose that prints the golden egg is going to be difficult. But, if we can rationally and plausibly imagine what’s almost certainly going to happen next do we really have to sit back and let it happen before working out what to do simply because predicting the future in chaotic social systems is fraught with difficulty ?
They say that repeatedly performing the same action while always expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. But what about repeatedly doing nothing about new technologies while always hoping they will not be put to deviant use?
As with current ink printers, 3D printing technology will improve remarkably as will the quality of its output while its price falls to just a few hundred dollars or less. Why should we not expect then that in five or six or 10 years from now that everyone who owns an ink printer will own a 3D printer?
Who on Earth would not want an object replicator?
I’ve already imagined a long list of novel ways that home based 3-D printing technology is likely to be exploited for criminal purposes. Not wanting to put those ideas into other heads, that will likely-as-not get them elsewhere anyway, I’m keeping that stuff to myself. Meanwhile, somewhere in a home near you, I suspect the future of 3D deviance will exceed my criminological imagination. And I wish that wasn’t so, because some of the ways that I can see how this technology is going to be exploited are thoroughly dreadful.
