Looking at some reactions to printed guns – they are all of knee-jerk type at this point. Some people are scared, some are not. Those who are not bring up many reasons: the technology is woefully fragile and even more woefully expensive, there are plenty other uses for this technology, and those are so beneficial that we can forget about the danger of printing guns…
I am actually scared for exactly the same reasons. How long ago did we first start seeing spam? About 19 years ago, and the shadowy cyber-nuisance business exploded, branched and turned to cyber-crime which has all but engulfed our everyday life. To the extent that we don’t care anymore, knowing full well that every time we go into cyberspace we are at risk of identity theft, for example.
How long did it take from when the first hijacking had taken place, to turn commercial airline business into a breeding ground for terrorist attacks? What about biotech? Yes, we will build organisms that are going to eat our garbage, but even today, it is quite affordable and possible to synthesize a deadly virus. And that was not at all affordable 10 years ago. See examples in Richard Baker’s Skating on Stilts.
This is just the dialectic of technology. It comes into being, and as it “becomes” (using Hegelian term), or “develops”, using natural language, it jumps out of the boundaries of its original intent (first negation), and then returns with all of the new knowledge within the expanded boundaries, becoming something completely new (second negation, or negation of the first negation). Thus, e-mail was never intended for spam. Now, not only is it riddled with spam (which is probably 99% of all e-mail traffic), but it also gave rise to many technologies and ideas that nobody fathomed would ever be associated with e-mail: we have advances in Bayesian statistics, machine learning, image processing, AI – all due to SPAM. But who could have thought that AI could be part of a good e-mail system thirty years ago!
Same thing will happen here. I don’t know if printed guns will become a problem, but with exponential development of technology we will do more with plastic, or steel, or whatever printers, they are likely to become better and more affordable very, very quickly, if there is sufficient demand, and if so I am sure people will find ways to adopt this otherwise extremely useful technology to their nefarious goals. And then printed guns will be the least of our problems.
