The Ink jet concept is not going to disappear because of e-books.
The ink jet concept is now used to print 3-D models.
Engineers are thinking about scaling up the technology to make houses
using quick drying cement as the 'ink'.
That's true, but I doubt that is what the New York Times had in mind. They said, "printers and cartridges." That is like telling IBM in 1960 they should stick to the punch card business because it is so profitable.
Mind you, I am not predicting that paper will suddenly disappear because of e-books and e-printers. But it will gradually decline, year by year, until it is only perhaps a tenth of what it is today.
The trend in manufacturing is to lay down smaller and smaller units. The starting material is often on a smaller scale, too. Metal parts made starting from powder no longer need to be finished or ground into shape, because they are formed in the proper shape to start with. Assembling parts is done with Ink-jet devices today and -- as Veeder says -- new devices will probably evolve from them in the future. In the far distant future, I expect these machines will be assembling products one atom at a time. Arthur Clarke predicted that in "Profiles of the Future." (Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon and Arthur Clarke together predicted just about everything -- leaving no room for other futurologists. Also, as Clarke says, Hugo Gernsback, "thought of everything.")
Some experts are very upset by this prediction of "atomic assembly" because they point out, no doubt correctly, that we have no idea how to move one atom of most elements at a time. Most of the time when you try to move an atom with something like a diamond point, it ends up sticking to the diamond rather than the substrate or the molecule you are trying to move it into. I suppose what this means is that the progress we must make before we can assemble products one atom at a time is roughly as great as all of the progress we have made so far, from stone-age flint tools to the present. It may take centuries, or perhaps thousands of years. Nevertheless, I expect it will eventually be done, and I am sure it can be done, because nature does it with DNA.
Some clever person here suggested that most future products will, in fact, be assembled with DNA, from organic materials. That's a clever idea! If it happens, I suspect it will only be a way station along the way to assembling anything out of any materials, who knows how -- with force fields, perhaps?
Also, Clarke (and I) predict industrial scale transmutation, so we will actually be assembling atoms out of other atoms, to make molecules, to make products.
One of the big advantages of this will be that it will make "original works of art" and all so-called "luxury goods" as cheap as dirt. That, I hope, will put an end to mindless materialism.
- Jed
