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Diego Golombeck: Here on the table, please. Take it, kid.
Andrei Vazhnov: Only 10 pesos?
DG: Yes, 10 pesos, you brought me a box, did you want more?
Good, good.
Today, I want to tell you about something that is going to change the world
in a way that we still don't fully understand.
My first job was moving boxes like this.
I was a silly kid. I dreamed of getting an oscilloscope
and my mom got me a job in a textile factory.
My responsibility was to physically move boxes like this
from the truck to the place where the fabric was stored.
That was over 20 years ago.
20 years ago I would have been paid to move
this box that I have in front of me.
Today, I'm not so sure.
And, for sure, in 10 years time nobody will pay me to do it.
Because what I have here are magazines,
records,
-- great stuff --
photos,
books.
All are objects that used to be physical
and have turned completely digital.
They dematerialized.
When you send a song to a friend, you no longer need
to put it inside an envelope and physically send it.
You send an MP3 as an attachment.
There is no need to buy physical books.
We can download any of the millions
available on Amazon, instantly.
There's no need to buy magazines because we almost always read them online.
The [digital] world is almost infinitely flexible.
If we take a photo, we can enlarge it, shrink it,
put waves from the 70's on it on Instagram,
(Laughter)
add a mustache, remove a mustache, whatever.
And when an object becomes digital, the world changes.
One of the most powerful and famous companies
of the 20th century, Kodak,
went bankrupt last year because business from physical photos disappeared.
Does that mean we take fewer photos now?
No, we take a lot more than before.
A lot more than ever.
But business is elsewhere.
What would happen if we had a technology
that allowed us to send objects like chairs and tumblers
through the Internet the same way that an MP3 is sent today?
This technology exists, it's called 3D printing.
This vase, for example, that we see here, is not a physical object.
It is a series of bits and bytes on a server on the Internet.
You can download it, modify it, print it, print multiples of it.
It's one of the thousands of objects that are freely available.
There are tools, jewelry, all kinds of design objects.
For example, we can print a castle like this. Very cute.
We can also choose the color.
Every time we show this to an architect
they almost start to cry because they remember the years of their lives
they lost making models by hand.
(Laughter)
Nobody is going to return those years to them, unfortunately,
but for the next generation it's going to be a little easier.
If we don't like any of the designs we can
find on the Internet, we can draw our own.
Like for example, this tumbler.
It was drawn with a program in less than an hour.
And like any digital object, it is infinitely flexible.
We can enlarge it, shrink it,
add a handle, or two handles, or five.
(Laughter)
Then, we can choose the color and print those we want.
I like the ones with one and five handles.
The one with five, from a functional standpoint,
is not very useful but it's great fun to print.
(Laughter)
And it shows the possibilities of this technology.
How does it work? It's pretty simple.
It is a head, like a normal printer,
but it moves in three dimensions.
It deposits a material in a fine layer,
pass after pass, over and over,
and thus builds up an object.
It is as if it were a series of photos glued one on top of the other.
It seems simple enough, but it has profound implications.
What are the limitations of this technology?
Is it only good for toys like this,
for annoying architects?
No, you can print with metal
like, for example, this engine part.
In fact, the companies that are investing most
in this technology are aerospace companies.
Because they say that within five years they want to print entire wings.
And after that, they want to print aircraft,
the body and the wings, altogether in one piece.
Once, I saw an interview in which a journalist asked,
"Hey, is this technology reliable enough for people's lives to depend on it?"
The director of Airbus said,
"Well, which is better, wings bolted together
or wings printed in one piece?"
I thought, he's right. In 10 years it's going to seem crazy
that we trusted our lives to some machines
that had wings screwed together with a screwdriver.
It will look something like a show about ancient Rome.
And this goes much further -- we can print buildings.
They are still simple,
but there are companies that are starting to market
technology that can print any
architectural structure up to 6 square meters.
With that power we can print benches, small bridges, statues, brickwork.
And there are ventures that soon
will be able to print entire buildings.
In Spain, there is even a venture that is experimenting
with a printer that can print
with local sand and light from the sun as energy.
Imagine what this will one day mean
for the housing problem.
You can print teeth,
other types of prosthesis, and the best part is that
they are made based on a 3D scan.
Thus, they look exactly the same
as the part of your body that you lost
and you need to replace.
You can print organs, very simple ones for the time being.
That are patients living with [printed] bladders.
But it is advancing rapidly.
And one day we will be able to solve the problem of transplants.
What do organs, teeth, buildings, and engines all have in common?
It seems like they have nothing to do with each other.
But they actually share something very profound.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell said there are two types of work:
moving matter in space,
and telling other people to move matter in space.
(Laughter)
as Diego recently told me.
This analogy is actually fairly accurate.
Moving a box, mixing the ingredients of a salad,
constructing a building level by level, brick by brick,
they are all basically the same problem of placing some type of substance,
some type of component, in a desired manner.
What does this change? It changes everything.
It changes, for example, the world of logistics.
The iPhone has many parts: a compass, two cameras,
a screen, a microphone.
And all of these parts come from Italy, from the US, from Taiwan,
to China, where they are assembled and then sent back
to the US, to Italy, to Taiwan, to be sold.
What would happen if they could be printed
directly in the neighborhood of the end consumer?
It would change the entire paradigm of retail.
There could never be stock liquidation,
because what does stock liquidation mean?
That the store bought too many items and couldn't sell them.
With this technology, if nobody buys it, nobody prints it.
For the same reason, it could never happen that you come and they tell you,
"Sorry, we ran out of that item.
Next week to be sure."
Because if the consumer orders it, you print it,
and if they don't order it, you don't print it.
It changes the world of design.
If we look around us, almost everything around us,
all the structures, have straight edges.
Straight, straight, straight, everything is straight.
And if we look outside the human world, at nature,
every tree, every animal, has a form that fits perfectly
its existence, its way of life.
Why does our world seem
like it comes from a geometry book?
It's simply because previous technology was not
sufficiently flexible
to allow this type of flexibility.
And for designers, in the next decade
the possibilities are going to open up more than we've ever imagined.
Our buildings may look, for example, like this.
Our chairs may look like this.
It's not very pretty, but it allows us to see the possibilities.
I can print structures like this
which show that it can attach internally.
Effectively, things will not need to be assembled either.
It totally changes the paradigm of the mass market.
Why, when we go to the store,
are there only small, medium and large?
Nothing fits perfectly, but we buy it
because it's what there is, we're used to it.
(Laughter)
With 3D printing, personalization won't cost you extra.
For an ordinary printer, printing a black square
is the same as printing a picture of the Mona Lisa.
Likewise, every object printed in 3D can be
completely personalized, as I did with the tumblers.
This goes far beyond allowing us to make our parties look good.
In medical applications, for example, this is critical.
It is a problem if a shirt doesn't fit you.
But it is an entirely different level of discomfort
if a tooth or hip doesn't fit you.
And, finally, it changes completely the nature of work.
The digital world is really amazing.
If I have one song and I want to make a copy
for a friend, I can make one instantly.
If I want 10, I can make them instantly.
If I want 100, I can make them instantly.
Once something is made once,
it can be made a million times.
It's why there are so many videos available on YouTube.
Many are very good, because people
share what they make and other people see them
who have millions of followers,
who have millions of views.
Will the same thing happen in the world of design
when we can print, we can share,
designs from the Internet -- of cars, bicycles, and chairs?
I don't know, honestly. Maybe, maybe not.
The whole paradigm of intellectual property
will have to be rethought.
But what I do know is, that a new world is coming,
where we will tell the machines to move matter in space,
and we will dedicate ourselves to much more enjoyable
and creative tasks.
At the start, I told you I was going to tell you
about a revolution that is going to change the world.
We live in a truly magical time.
And there are various revolutions coming.
Some may be bigger than 3D printing.
Nanotechnology, cognitive computing,
synthetic biology, quantum computers.
And some day our life is going to change in an unforeseeable way.
But in the short term, what is going to amaze us most,
I think, is 3D printing.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)