Philosophy

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Writings, Musings, and Essays on Replicator Technology

executive summary of the project

This page contains links to articles and papers written by the RepRap researchers on the social, economic, and philosophical aspects of the RepRap project.

  • Genesis How the RepRap Project came about and what it may mean if it is successful. This paper was written by AdrianBowyer just before he started the project to set out his initial ideas.
  • Technical, Biomimetic, and Economic aspects of RepRap - This is a reprint of AdrianBowyer's keynote address on RepRap at the Seventh National Conference on Rapid Design, Prototyping & Manufacturing, at the Centre for Rapid Design and Manufacture in High Wycombe in June 2006.
  • Chinese Growth Hurdles toward a New Great Wall - An analysis by ForrestHiggs of the likely impact of RepRap on future Chinese industrial growth, looking at parallels with the growth of nineteenth-century mechanised agriculture in the USA.
  • Aesthetics - The stylistic effects that RepRap may have on product design and architecture.
  • Why is 3D printing such a powerful way to make solid objects. There's a lot of journalistic 3D-printing-is-the-next-industrial-revolution hype about. Is it justified? And if it is, why? Here is an article by Adrian that shows the mathematical reasons why 3D printing is indeed special. It would be very interesting to see if the mainstream media that go on about 3D printing is grown up enough to put this mathematcs (which is quite easy to understand) in print. Add links here if they do: ...

Fallacy follows from the assumption that Adrian is intelligent

Hilariously a bunch of intelligent design loonies have latched onto RepRap in the forlorn hope that it will boost their cause. In one or two places they approach (but don't quite hit) the argument, "Adrian Bowyer designed a self-replicating machine. Adrian Bowyer is intelligent*. Therefore all self-replicating machines need an intelligent designer." They have clearly never heard of the fallacy of propositional logic called affirming the consequent.

  • An unestablished conjecture...

-- Main.AdrianBowyer - 26 Jul 2006