So says Nick Pinkston.
Did inkjet printers democratize printing? Does Amazon have a bunch of HPs printing off their books? No way – they have very specialized machines doing this, and the same is true for everything in engineering. Remember that old saying: “Good, Fast, Cheap – pick two” – this applies to all engineering problems. You optimize for “good” and “fast”, and this comes at the expense of “cheap” – which means it’s not democratized (few people can own it).
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you may democratize prototype-grade 3D printers, but then others will be make huge, fast printers that are able to beat your per-unit cost by an order of magnitude – but at high capital cost.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
His skepticism about 3D printing sounds right to me. But the claim that nothing is ever democratized sounds too strong. Computers became democratized. Internet access became democratized. In some sense, wealth has become democratized.
What I mean by democratized is that lots of people were able to use them to be productive. Not everyone, of course. And if people look at their well-being primarily in comparison to others around them, then a democratized increase in well-being is mathematically impossible.
While I agree with his skepticism of 3D printing and have made similar points in the past- people are hungry to find the “next internet” and overselling 3D printing as the next big democratization- I think his generalization about democratization isn’t true, as you say. Blogging can certainly be recognized as generally fast and cheap, though not usually good, democratizing the power of mass communication, which only used to be available through the printing press, to all through the internet. A lot more people have been able to become best-selling published authors through Amazon’s Kindle self-publishing program, who would not have gotten a chance from the previous gatekeepers of print publishing.
Looking at his manufacturing niche, I think the much bigger trend is going to be lots of fragmentation and customization. I regularly consider buying hardware from unknown Asian brands because they have good customer reviews online, on sites like Newegg. Google is rumored to be launching a new Moto X smartphone later this year through its Motorola subsidiary that you can customize for yourself, with various colors and engraving offered. This doesn’t imply the 3D printing extreme of everybody printing out objects for themselves, but it does lead to a lot more fragmentation and choice, ie the manufacturer being able to cut costs and crank out a million identical Model T’s becomes less important than offering variety and customization. You’ll still use the giant machines he’s talking about, but there will be hundreds of manufacturers, not a Big Three.
Perhaps we’ll get to everybody printing their own custom objects for themselves with a 3D printer someday, but there are a lot of breakthroughs yet to happen for that to be feasible. In the meantime, there’s a lot that is feasible today, in terms of variety and customization, that we aren’t really exploring, at least as much as we should be.
Centralized implies regulated. Decentralized fabrication units may never match the scale of cheap machines but since you’ll be able to go on the internet and pirate designs without paying royalties or obeying other local regulations, it will still be cheaper to fabricate your own products in many cases. Or said another way, you can’t print your own DVDs as cheaply as the studios can, but you can still save money pirating movies. And if you live in a place where the wrong sort of movies are banned, it may be impossible to buy them at all.
Interesting argument, regulatory escape. I wonder if that’s enough right now, but maybe it will lead to the threshold where it’s workable getting here faster.
I think reading it charitably, by democratization he means something like radical decentralization of mass production, not just decentralizing the capability to produce small amounts. Obviously inkjet printers have given individuals the capability to print a document or two, or some family photos and that’s valuable, which is why they’re so common. But what hasn’t happened is that you buy a book by paying the publisher and downloading the book then printing it out on your inkjet printer…economies of scale still mean that in most cases if you want a physical book, you buy one that’s been produced on a really expensive printer and physically shipped to you, even if the printer is on the other side of the world. The exception I can think of are books that are so specialized that “mass” production is still only a few thousand copies and printing it at home is an attractive alternative… and even then Print On Demand may mean you’re better off getting it printed in Australia and shipped to the US.
Supposedly the advent of desktop printing did lead to the rise of many newsletters and a collapse in newspaper ad revenue, at least according to a former newspaper reporter:
“I’d bet that the pre-Internet contraction reflected the 1980s rise in desktop publishing (an underappreciated yet crucial development that gave birth to the newsletter industry and all kinds of niche publishing)…”
Whether a couple hundred or thousand copies of a newsletter ever qualified as “mass production,” I’ll leave it up to you to decide. Those newsletters have now been replaced by blogs, which can and do reach millions of readers and can be started by almost anyone, which is why the newspaper business is on its death bed.