2020

Adrian Bowyer: Adrian Bowyer

Adrian Bowyer: I'm Adrian Bowyer, I'm a senior electric mechanical engineer at Bath University in the UK. I'm the inventor of the Reprap machine which is a self-replicating 3D printer. Alright, let's start down at this end. This is the very first Reprap machine that we made and of course we didn't have a Reprap machine to make it. So this machine had to be made in a commercial 3D printer. This machine made almost all but not quite all of the other machines that now exist. I got the idea by looking at the way in which natural organisms reproduce. So I looked at stable relationships between things that reproduce in nature which of course are called symbiosis. The one that I looked at was the stable relationship between the flowers and the insects. So Adrian Bowyer wanted to make a machine which would make useful goods for people like coat hooks and bits of clocks and door handles and so on. Then people would have an incentive to help the machine to copy itself. And the machine, in addition to making those useful goods makes a kit of parts so you can make another reprap machine. A little wine glass, that's a door handle, a pair of child shoes here. This is actually a gear wheel that's a part of the machine itself. It's a machine that copies itself and that seemed to me to be a very powerful idea when I first thought of it. If you got a powerful idea, a good way to make bad things happen is to have the world divided into people who have the technology and people who don't and have to pay for it or maybe can't afford it. The only way to avoid that is to give it to everybody. So Adrian Bowyer decided to make it an open source project. But about two minutes after I'd thought that rather noble idea I thought, we got to make it open source and give it away anyway because it copies itself. If you try to sell it you will only sell one. So because it copies itself we have to give it away. It will start with the small things but small things are not insignificant. I mentioned coat hook which is an entirely trivial object. But an economist once told me that the world market for coat hooks is bigger than the world market for jet engines. And so, it becomes a less trivial object when you think about it in those terms. At the moment, the economics of manufacturing are that people pay for goods. And a fraction of that money goes to the shop keeper and some money goes to the factory and so on, all the way out the supply chain. If you short circuit that and people can download designs of the web and print them for themselves, you've suddenly removed an entire section of human economic activity. What happens if we destroy the whole of manufacturing industry, that's an interesting question. Of course, what it doesn't necessarily mean is mass unemployment. In the same way as you remember thirty years ago people were saying computers were going make everybody out of work because they were going to do so many jobs that people did. It isn't employment that makes wealth, it's wealth that makes employment. And if you give people a new way of making wealth that actually generates employment in other areas and related areas. So the fact that we change the way that objects are manufactured doesn't necessarily mean it will be reducing employment opportunities for people. I suspect it will actually be the reverse.

Adrian Bowyer: Adrian Bowyer