This housing tech can rapidly "print" its own interior environments with an invisible 3D-printing swarm. Why isn't this tech everywhere?

Question

Think kind of like the holodeck in Star Trek, but it's not simulated or hard-light, it's the real, physical thing. (Though because of that, it can't reset itself once you've printed something.) Once an interior layout is loaded into the blank room, it seems to change before your very eyes, with flooring being laid down in a spread across the floor, furniture being built or "printed" from the nearest surface outward, even organic tissue being bioprinted for the purposes of plant decoration and such.

How is this done? A sort of advanced, multi-material 3D-printing assembler technology--but instead of one big printer, it's a huge swarm of little ones, spreading out across the space together. Not nanite-scale (as wouldn't building a room size interior on that molecular level take forever?), probably not microscopic at all, but still small enough to be as precise as described and yet numerous enough to work collaboratively and in a distributive way so that the "printing" can be done quickly. Like, within under a minute for a small-medium room. Perhaps this swarm is also cloaked to appear invisible, to give this technology a more seamless and impressive appearance as it works. You know, for the investors.

Just one thing: if this civilization has the ability to build interiors like this in seconds, and by extension to be able to "print" just about any object or furniture they want or even living tissues, plants, etc., why isn't this technology everywhere in architecture and construction, agriculture, etc., even just other buildings in general? What limitations prevent the spread of tech like this to other places, and other fields; or else, what sort of impact and other uses would this technology naturally imply?

(Side note: is this concept as described plausible, or rather could its explanation be more plausible for a futuristic setting?)

Answer 1

Because of Construction Industry Inertia.

I am an architect and can say that although there are plenty of innovations and scientific advancement in many fields in the world today, unfortunately the building industry is notoriously slow to take up any innovation at all, if any.

We can actually build better, faster, and using the latest materials and techniques today with composite insulated walls, computerised windows and doors, construction machines, yet we are still just putting simple clay bricks on top of each other by hand, and some pine timbers on that, as our standard way of building - same as we have had done so for thousands of years.

This is because there is so much inertia in the construction industry, with some varied reasons:

• Risk. Building cost a lot - more than almost any other industry. There are also a lot of people involved in it (from authorities to contractors, tradesmen to professionals, owners to renters etc). This means the risks for everyone involved deadlocks the way we build as it is heightened. I've proposed many times simple modular construction, only for it to be knocked back due to old council regulations, reluctant clients, reticent builders or fearful banks or investors, due to anything being innovative also being 'risky'. Even in your situation, a builder's licence / council approval / surveyors certificate is still required and if any feel fearful, they won't give it and you end up building using standard techniques anyway.
• Cost and Market pricing. If someone asks you to do something unusual, you're going to charge much more for it aren't you? As a business, you'd take the naturally well-trodden course - or you charge as much as you can for it. For instance, if I invent a revolutionary new way to build a house that is half the cost of normal construction - would this pass to the consumer? No - the Builder would charge market for it. Because they can. This means benefits of a new system don't actually get to the end-user due to prevalence of market forces.
• Industry Stratification and Regulatory Standards The supply chains, contractor and subcontractor arrangements, and their respective lobby groups - all conspire to add inertia to change. For instance, the reason why so many outcomes seem convoluted is due to ISO and other standards requiring things done in a certain way, or council regulations. For instance I recently encountered a council rule that says "You must build in bricks." It became law in the year 1901. And hasn't been changed since because of council voting deadlocks.
• Banks. Like it or not, but most building funding comes from Banks. They are actually the holder of assets (or at least security) so they want the product, and even the way it is built, to comply with their aggregate categories of risk bundling. For instance, I recently encountered a bank criteria for funding a project that "Plumbing and electrical connections to rooms within buildings must not be completed in less than 24 hours". I asked why this was the case, they simply said it was a rule to prevent substandard connections. Can't argue against that.

This is mainly why our construction industry is much the same as it was 150 years ago since the start of the age of industrialisation, and we still build the same way we have had for thousands of years. Your system sounds great - and wondrous. However that does not stop the cacophony of vested interests, the morass of regulations, the risk-adverse funding industry nor the reluctance of market-acceptability from all parties to prevent its mainstream adoption, or even for it to get off the ground at all.

Answer 2

They are expensive

Just because nanites can make things quickly and effortlessly does not mean that nanites can be made quickly and effortlessly. Nanites are basically tiny robots; so, creating enough of them to be able to manufacture a table in a time critical sort of way could easily cost 10s of millions of dollars. In contrast, the cost of an assembly line that can do the same thing might only be a few hundred thousand dollars; so, as a factory owner, it is cheaper to build an assembly line than it is to buy a similarly efficient nanite swarm.

Yes, they are cool enough to be worth the cost if you are an eccentric billionaire or a dictator trying to flaunt your wealth... but using them on premise is even less cost efficient than in a factory. In a factory, you spread the cost of investments across millions of units of the thing you are making. But in you own home, just how many tables do you need? So, the choice comes down to a multi-million dollar nanite swarm that can summon your table out of thin air or summoning that same swarm from Amazon for no more than a couple thousand dollars. This means that nanites used as you've described is just a way for billionaires to flaunt their wealth.

If you want them to have a place in your society without taking production over completely, I'd suggest using them to replace mill shops. Mill shops are places you order hand crafted, high precision parts that you need in volumes too low to justify a factory for. Some of the components used in factories, refineries, aircraft, etc. are the sort of things the world may only need a few dozen of each year. So, if you focus on using the nanites to make your factories and other one-off things, you can still let your factories do all the heavy lifting of mass production.

Answer 3

3d printing has an inherent weakness. You're layering whatever you're printing. so they have horizontal planes adhering to horizontal planes. From experience these are weakpoints in the structure.

If your tech can get past that AND get certified for construction use, then it can build sky scrapers and anything else. There are quite a few things these days that could be done differently and cheaper but are not allowed due to regulations of some sort.

Answer 4

Power requirements, and expenses of course.

You have two options:
You are converting energy into mass.
You are depositing mass VERY quickly.

Both of those are going to use a tremendous amount of power and require highly specialized equipment to operate, let alone operate safely.

Neither option is particularly realistic, but rest assured anything capable of rapidly constructing a high accuracy, complex combination of molecules, invisibly will use a lot of energy and will need to dissipate that heat.

It could be prohibitively expensive to set up the facilities for this, so it is a luxury for rich people who can afford the power bill and demand the pampering of invisible printing at a whim.

A slower, more visible version of this tech WOULD probably be used everywhere to fabricate things that make economic sense to.

It could be that the material properties of printed objects makes them not nearly as strong as traditionally produced goods, so no architecture.

The price in energy means it is still cheaper to grow potatoes, process them into chips, and ship them across the country to stock in your store than it is to fabricate them on site.

Answer 5

Given the multitude of things the system can print up to the smallest detail (You mentioned you can print living tissue. That would require nano-scale printing resolution), this technology is available, but restricted. It may fall into the wrong hands and be used by terrorists to build all kinds of things from weapons to biological warfare. So Governmental or licensed companies are called for providing such a service.

Answer 6

Slow adoption of cutting edge advanced Physics:**

The nanite swarm has to be able to print metal, stone, wood, plastic, whatever you want- right? A table with a coffee cup and a vase of flowers, a rug, an oil painting, and a cat with a bowl of milk*, and a fireplace, if you want. But where do the nanites store the materials?

IRL printers are specialized, limited and expensive. One that prints ink can't print plastic, one which prints plastic can't print concrete, one which prints concrete can't print metal, and one that prints metal can't print organic materials like organ tissue or DNA and so on. They are all expressly purpose-built for one specialized thing. Furthermore, there is a reservoir which holds the materials physically.

Your nanite swarm is a one size fits all solution. Each nanite cannot physically store all the materials. It has to bring the particles into being, either by transporting them or generating them. Such a generating technology suggests that the entire society has gone through a revolution in the way we look at physical materials. Transporting materials slowly from one location to another is antiquated in some way. Manufacturing assembly lines and factory workers, then, are obsolete to a degree.

That makes me wonder What is the availability of the technology?

The corporations control Access?

Linked to these questions is, what corporations profit from these nanite tools and what supply and demand looks like after a Quantum Teleportation Revolution.

IRL, I don't have a 3D printer, and I have a Canon printer that has more expensive ink cartridges than the printer itself. In order to 3D print a plastic toy, I have to walk to the local library and use theirs, but I must buy the filament. A 3D printer seems like a luxury item to me, even though I am fascinated by the technology. The state of the art, printing organ tissue and concrete houses, is something I have read about but never used.
I say all this because a more realistic world might not have everybody using the nanite swarms. If they did have access they might not be able to afford the best- build some grit into the world.

Do corporations lease out the nanite swarms to users in some way? Who controls the production of the nanites themselves, and who administers the UI, which allows the users to select what they want? You have to decide how the economy works when the materials are generated from thin air and making things by hand or in a factory may soon become outdated.

Answer 7

It requires an area of accelerated time

Since we're in science-fiction limitations, you can add requirements for the technology to satisfy all the requirements listed in the question. And they are quite contradictory - nanoscale printing of macroscopic objects, bioprinting, invisibility of the printers, hard matter, living plants being printed, and very small time frame to do all that stuff. You can perform all this, but waste heat problem would prevent doing the whole decoration quickly enough. Thus, you require that the area to be filled with 3D printing of this kind should be placed under accelerated time "field". Star Trek does have that tech in their FTL engines, so why not, anyway this solves a lot of problems, like for example invisibility of the swarm - the outside spectator would not be able to track movements of that swarm, but would be able to see the printed parts being built rapidly.

That area has to be portable

A portable device capable to project accelerated time is one heck of a Pandora's box. Steal that, and you're able to eliminate people undetected, just trap your target for a matter of seconds and watch them rot away into dust due to centuries passing inside the trap. Smuggle that into a ship, and not even an Enterprise-class starship would survive after a loss of the entire bridge, perhaps together with the main computer. In fact just making the computer "age" would cause various story-building effects, so while it could be controlled, incidents would still happen. Let a spy lay their hands on one, and in several decades the civ might face planet busters based on that tech, when a planet just gets older lacking insolation, and most stuff on it dies of hypothermia. Etc.

The accelerated time area might be limited by some principles not alterable by technology, both limiting the tech's use for building skyscrapers and stuff larger than a room, and preventing planetary apocalypses from a single DDD built on this tech, still having at least a human-sized field is enough to make the tech highly restricted, preventing its use "everywhere".

Answer 8

Once you've run it up a swarm can do exactly one thing, it may do it very well but it can't manufacture anything else. Many mass production businesses will use these systems to do exactly one thing cheap and fast. They'll never be everywhere though; there are many more businesses, and in fact whole industries, that are dedicated to doing different things. This may mean:

• customisation, taking an off-the-shelf object and changing it to the clients' wishes.
• repair/restoration, bringing new life to an old piece.
• bespoke pieces, very few problems in life have a "one size fits all" solution.
• Last but not least for want of a better word "art" objects where uniqueness is the primary consideration with function a close, but definite, second.

These businesses/industries have no use for a swarm that is hard/impossible to alter. Even if programming an alteration is easy the swarm is in a set space limiting the options.

Answer 9

If it's not atomic scale, then it doesn't convert matter but only assemble it.

Which means cost of the materials that can be used for it, limits on kind and properties of the materials, complexity in programming\designing the project.

Like, cost of the "buildbots" scale with their precision so bots to make a wall cost less than bots to make a working scissor despite being much larger in number. And the material fit for load-bearing walls or external walls(as in: exposed to elements) would also increase the cost. You want anything relatively complex\cooler than the plainest possible option? Cool design programming also increases the cost.

So they COULD be used to make "most everything" but they are not the most EFFICIENT way to make most stuff so they end up being used for simple inner walls and simple forniture AND Cost-Doesnt-Matter situations like, say, cross-oceans underwater power tubes or sealing containers for highly volatile radioactive substances.

Answer 10

Stupid Motes

The motes are too small to have much intelligence, their programming is just enough to maintain the networking layer and basic cooperation code. None of the motes have the full plan or even their individual compete work instructions. So they require their own control system and that control system needs to track trillions of threads of work and deconflict them. The hardware alone is expensive and insanely complex and the software is even worse. It took ages to work the bugs out and ensure safety of the system and making more of it isn't much cheaper.

Answer 11

Molecular 3D printers would be relatively slow. A double time of 30 minutes is the best you'll do. Luckily you don't actually have to 3D print anything. Just have a swarm of of microbots that shape shift into whatever form you want them to take. Elevated temperatures would be a problem. You'd need an actual oven for example not a microbot oven.

It would work by having 1 millimeter bots talk to a central computer. The king The millibots are the lords. The microbots are the knights. The nanobots are the peasants. This distributed way of sharing information and orders is more complex then ants and bees but still pretty simple. They could shape shift into anything with the appropriate volumetric file. Similar to a Cad file and they can do it in around a minute.

This is not a hypothetical. It's an inarguable fact. If living cells which are by default self replicating self repairing highly adaptive molecular 3D printers can accidentally happen naturally, then we can make them on purpose.

Answer 12

There have been incidents, were the house ate inhabitants, to store them from percieved decay (from cancer). Ocassionally it reprints them, gives them a few seconds of conciousness before reabsorbing them- all to "refresh" the memory. There are stories- of colonial worlds, with ghost cities- ever growing cities, with houses- and no people, but none the less, ocassionally you can hear a scream in the distance. As if somebody gained a idea of immortality without a future. Killing the houses, destroys the stored memories of the people that used to life within. Teardown is murder.

But someday, on some burned out rock, orbiting a red-sun, in some bungalow- some poor sob, will reincarnate one last time, to scream at the giant shining through the glass door on the perfect carpet. Like beeing burried alive in a IKEA catalog.

Answer 13

There's a couple of issues here.

First: why is it only used on a relatively small scale (one room, not a whole house or building).

The answer to this could be energy cost, or cost of the nanites themselves, but another good reason is that (if they're not using matter-energy conversion like Star Trek replicators) all the materials to build the structures have to come from somewhere. The room has a storage area with containers of basic elements or molecules that can be used in printing, and these can be recycled when it breaks down the room to build another, but there's only so much of it (so you couldn't build too much of one thing either). The nanites have a range limit, both on their internal power supply and to collect materials to build sufficiently fast enough to keep their owners happy. Recycling may not be perfect, so some material is lost each time and needs to be refilled.

The nanites or storage could be expensive to install in the first place (or top up if there's a leak or you remove something from the room). Though the latter would require a safety feature preventing them from disassembling foreign materials, otherwise you could just buy some ordinary plants and let the room disassemble them to top up your organic storage.

Secondly: why isn't it used in general manufacturing, or why don't people just print stuff in the room and then take them elsewhere?

One possibility was already mentioned: maybe it's more expensive to produce the pure matter storage than to make the goods the regular way. But more likely: there's some reason why printed goods are inferior to manufactured goods.

This could be a purely social one -- in our world, artisan goods are valued over mass-produced goods, and mined diamonds over lab-grown ones, even if indistinguishable -- but there could be some underlying reason as well, such as structural flaws that make them fine for temporary use or while in proximity of the nanites to be repaired, but would fail in short order if taken out of the room.

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Though also note that the Star Trek holodeck itself has the ability to produce real matter (similarly to replicators) -- as seen in instances where people consume real food, or fall into water and remain wet even after leaving. It's up to the almighty computer to figure out whether it needs to make certain things out of real or pseudo matter or just project non-solid images, and to deconstruct items that aren't supposed to be removed from the room.

Answer 14

The House itself is basically the 3D printer, with he bots being relatively dumb.

The walls of the hosue contain numerous computing units, power outlets for the bots, and radar/sonar/laser/photocell systems imagine the goal for the bots to fulfill: basically the House constructs an invisible data hologram inside itself, and tells bots which coordinates they need to fill within it.

Because of that:

• the House needs to be a closed cube, or at least close to a cube, so that coordinates beamed from the walls, ceiling and floor can intersect precisely. You cannot have the bots operate outside the walls, they would not "know" what to do.

• the bigger the volume of the House, the more powerful the coordinate beam system must be, or the bots rapidly lose precision and power. For example, If you tried to "print" the interior of an average sized Mall, the bots in the center of the Mall would be just roiling mess, since they would not be getting enough energy to work properly, or precise enough data to build anything complex.

All that directly translates to energy issues. Technically, it would not be impossible to have a Printer House the size of a Mall, or a sports stadium, or a factory, but the energy requirements, computing power, and bot quality and precision would be just absurd, not to mention the problem with heat and energy build-up. I mean, If you had a Mall-sized Printer House full of bots, then in order for the bots in the middle to get any energy to work, and enough signal strength to be controlled, the bots closer to the walls would be hot enough to cook you alive, and standing next to the wall would be as safe to your health as leaning on a military grade radar dish.

Answer 15

Not Strong Enough

The products of this 3-D printing technology may be fine for interiors - i.e. things like furniture, shelves, counter-tops.

But they're not for structural things like walls, roofs, floors (esp. upper-level floors), etc. which need to bear an awful lot more weight, resist the elements, comply with building regulations, etc.

e.g. imagine building a sky-scraper or even a house out of the same material you made your wardrobe.

Alternatively, the raw materials to make it big / strong enough are prohibitively expensive. e.g. look at your own house - your kitchen table likely weighs not much more than just a small number of concrete blocks.