It's certainly possible, but this kind of reminds me of discussions here on HN and elsewhere about way that the 3D printing of guns can create a crisis for gun control regimes. People in discussion threads reasonably pointed out that it's been possible to manufacture guns in home workshops for hundreds of years and that, for some kinds of weapons, it's not even toward the high end of challenging metalworking projects, and that indeed many people regularly do it either as a hobby or profession without 3D printing or even without CNC of any kind.
But this is kind of shocking for software-oriented people who might think that "manufacturing" "hardware" is a super-tough black art that can only be done by professionals in factories. And indeed that's pretty much my intuition as a software person who hasn't done woodworking since middle school shop class and never learned any of the other manufacturing skills that humanity has been working on for the last while. (Reading Bunnie's new book about manufacturing in China has been fascinating for me, because it's like "oh yeah, so all of these objects just come from people doing different tasks to fabricate them"!)
So people said about gun manufacturing that there was this funny intuition that 3D printing somehow allows people to casually manufacture complex objects at home which they otherwise simply couldn't do. But in fact, if people were moderately motivated, they could easily learn some of the other techniques that let them manufacture and/or duplicate objects. So we may tend to exaggerate the impact by thinking that other methods represent a huge, hard barrier while 3D printing represents true "push-button manufacturing". Neither side of this intuition is necessarily the reality.
For the problem of duplicating proprietary keys, it seems like anyone could already do this at home without especially expensive equipment and without especially extensive training. I remember reading a Mickey Mouse cartoon from many decades ago where a key was supposed to be duplicated from a negative impression taken in some clay (or something), and this was presented as a basic skill of a generalist mechanic!
On the other hand, maybe this intuition is partly right if some significant population of would-be home gunsmiths or key-copiers is intimidated enough by hardware and manufacturing that they're sort of waiting around for the pushbutton solution.
Edit: looks like other people in this thread have said this a lot more concisely. :-)
> But in fact, if people were moderately motivated, they could easily learn some of the other techniques that let them manufacture and/or duplicate objects.
That's actually a substantial barrier. People are lazy, and pressing 'print' on some design fed into a cornucopia machine (of which a 3D printer is a rudimentary fore-runner) substantially lowers that barrier. It requires no special knowledge beyond the feeding of raw materials into hoppers.
That's a lot less than what would be required to safely turn on a lathe, let alone making something with it.
the thing is that there are laws about some of these sorts of things, they applied before 3D printing came along, and they usually apply to 3D printing too.
I help run a Makerspace, a couple of times a year I get a teenage boy (and it is always a boy) come thru the door wanting to print a gun .... after I've given him the lecture about how stupidly dangerous that is, I then remind him that a) here in NZ hand guns are illegal, and b) he would still need to be police vetted and obtain a firearms license - the law doesn't change because you used a 3D printer
But this is kind of shocking for software-oriented people who might think that "manufacturing" "hardware" is a super-tough black art that can only be done by professionals in factories. And indeed that's pretty much my intuition as a software person who hasn't done woodworking since middle school shop class and never learned any of the other manufacturing skills that humanity has been working on for the last while. (Reading Bunnie's new book about manufacturing in China has been fascinating for me, because it's like "oh yeah, so all of these objects just come from people doing different tasks to fabricate them"!)
So people said about gun manufacturing that there was this funny intuition that 3D printing somehow allows people to casually manufacture complex objects at home which they otherwise simply couldn't do. But in fact, if people were moderately motivated, they could easily learn some of the other techniques that let them manufacture and/or duplicate objects. So we may tend to exaggerate the impact by thinking that other methods represent a huge, hard barrier while 3D printing represents true "push-button manufacturing". Neither side of this intuition is necessarily the reality.
For the problem of duplicating proprietary keys, it seems like anyone could already do this at home without especially expensive equipment and without especially extensive training. I remember reading a Mickey Mouse cartoon from many decades ago where a key was supposed to be duplicated from a negative impression taken in some clay (or something), and this was presented as a basic skill of a generalist mechanic!
On the other hand, maybe this intuition is partly right if some significant population of would-be home gunsmiths or key-copiers is intimidated enough by hardware and manufacturing that they're sort of waiting around for the pushbutton solution.
Edit: looks like other people in this thread have said this a lot more concisely. :-)