California’s new bill requires DOJ-approved 3D printers that report on themselves targeting general-purpose machines.
Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan introduced AB-2047, the “California Firearm Printing Prevention Act,” on February 17th. The bill would ban the sale or transfer of any 3D printer in California unless it appears on a state-maintained roster of approved makes and models… certified by the Department of Justice as equipped with “firearm blocking technology.” Manufacturers would need to submit attestations for every make and model. The DOJ would publish a list. If your printer isn’t on the list by March 1, 2029, it can’t be sold. In addition, knowingly disabling or circumventing the blocking software is a misdemeanor.
The only possible way I can think of to make this work is require the firmware to only be able to print G-code files that have a cryptographic signature from some central slicing authority that users submit models to, which then analyzes the STL file with AI or some shit for approval. The only technology that can remotely go “is this STL file a piece of a gun?” is machine learning. You’re outright not going to get that done on the 3D printer locally; you’d have to increase the processing power of a 3D printer control board from “microcontroller” to “GPU” entirely for this dumbass tech. Maybe you’d run that on the user’s PC but PCs aren’t for sale to the public anymore so it will be done in the cloud.
It occurs to me that these initiatives are all popping up on the West coast where Microsoft, Google and OpenAI are based. The other day the CEO of Microsoft came out and said “We’re going to have to figure out something for our bullshit tech to actually do before the unwashed masses riot.” and what do you know, a couple states that are home to large AI firms start proposing legislation that can practically only be answered by AI out of the blue.
Yeah it seems like this is an excuse to implement complete surveillance of these machines under the guise of preventing guns, just like child abuse is used to justify age checks and chatcontrol to id everyone with id and biometrics and connect them to everything they say or do, in person and online, and make secret social scores, Palantir making those scores at that, the one that wants to use drones to spray people he doesn’t like, like his critics, with fentanyl, by his own words.
Every addition of spying by the government is accompanied by giving more spying power, and commercial value, to tech companies as well. They are co conspirators.