66 Times People Used a 3D Printer and Reached Absolute Peak Human Ingenuity

The legal questions have not kept pace with the technology, as it usually goes. The printing of functional firearms, made famous by Cody Wilson's 2013 Liberator design, triggered a global conversation about regulation that most governments are still having. So don’t go getting any ideas!

Copyright and trademark law struggles with printed replicas of branded products. The same file-sharing culture that distributes prosthetic hand designs also distributes exact replicas of commercial products, discontinued or otherwise. The technology is neutral. What people do with it is not always straightforward, and the legal infrastructure around it is catching up slowly in most countries and not at all in others.

The future that researchers and manufacturers are working toward involves printed houses, printed organs for transplant, and printed electronics with components embedded directly into the structure during printing. Construction company ICON has already printed livable homes in Texas and is working with NASA on structures for the Moon.

Bioprinting labs are even producing functional kidney tissue and vascular networks in research settings. What started as a faster way to make a prototype in an engineering firm in 1983 is currently being aimed at the housing crisis, the organ donor shortage, and interplanetary construction. The person in the thread who printed a replacement bracket for their IKEA shelf is part of a much longer story than they probably had in mind at the time.