Thingularity

With tons of upgrades to the printing infrastructure showing up, Thingiverse user Zingnig enthuses:

I’m glad to see that the thingiverse has reached the point where large upgrades and replacements of entire subsystems for a machine that can make more things.

Singularity here we come.

And he’s right.  Perhaps what’s coming isn’t The Singularity as Kurzweil puts it, where the first made intelligence is smarter than those that made it, thus allowing it to make even smarter ones and so on, but an equivalent in the making sphere: designs for new automated fabrication systems that are open source and makeable on existing fabrication systems, allowing anyone with the most basic system to bootstrap themselves to the state of the art, may not be that far off at all.

There need to be upgrades to the basic system in a few places: without certain machining capabilities none of these systems are fully self-propagating.  They can’t make their own circuit boards yet, either, and we certainly won’t see semiconductors printing on MakerBots any time soon.

But the Fabricator Singularity that’s happening right now is already a huge deal: if there are mechanical modifications and improvements that can be made to personal fabrication systems using those fabrication systems, they happen, and minutes later everyone has access.  This is a recipe for a self-boosting infrastructure that finds optima with a speed that no centralized manufacturer could ever dream of.