Makers – More than a movement…

John Tierney [ The Atlantic ] raises some excellent questions/challenges regarding the rapidly changing and profoundly reforming “maker-movement“.

He refers to the comments by panelists at the recent Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, USA.

Tierney states:

 I want to consider some of the intriguing challenges and dilemmas (educational, legal, moral, and ethical) all this will increasingly pose in the years to come.

This he does.

Policy-makers and educators alike need to closely consider the strategic challenges that ubiquitous, distributed additive manufacturing will place on existing legal and regulatory frameworks, let alone the historical structures of economies.

The ethical and moral questions are [potentially] enormous.

Tierney asks:

In an age when anybody can print out a 3-D copy of almost anything, what happens to intellectual property?

Ponder any of these questions for a moment and consider what if?

• the printing of human body parts became available? Who would have access to this?
• the printing/assembly of food – Which foods, for who? Would these be copyrighted?
• Consider Defense Distributed that has come up with an open-source  3-D print model for firearms. “Basically, you can get everything except the firing pin. It works. And with the open-source distribution of this 3-D print gun design, you’ve in one stroke wiped out any gun-control law in the world.”

The list goes on….

The full article can be found here;

Links:

• Article – The Atlantic – Makerspaces and Morality
• Conference on World Affairs
• Article – Time – maker-movement
• World First – 3D printing, now what?
• Can a 3D Printer cool the planet?