3D printers are inherently anti-developmental (but are huge fun and you should definitely get one)

I love 3D printing. I'm fascinated with it to the point where the stuff I make are, sometimes, almost meaningless. I love the designing part the most, all the problem-solving, contorting my brain to imagine a would-be geometry, touches something very primal in the sentient process. It forges into the realm of the real things, which are, at best, half-baked ideas and, usually, just wishful thinking. This process of forging is mostly absent in modern life; coding, genetic engineering, and writing are all highly generative, but have so many levels of abstraction, they might break, but not in a way that spills hot coffee on the floor in the middle of the night.

Designing a thing, making it walk, and turning on lights humbles you. It's hard, it takes many repetitions, small modifications, iterations, solder fumes, burnt plastic smell, and exotic parts from Ali Express. This process and its beautiful developmental nature stand in absolute contrast to the act of actually printing anything. Because, as you probably know, there is no repairing a failed print. It might be 1%,10% or 99% done. If a single mm shift happens, a gust of wind, a curious kid touch, alters the print process, it's a complete wash. Garbage fodder.

Life developmental processes are much more akin to a baker baking a cake than this highly rigorous, inherently fragile process of printing. Life improvises as it goes, salvaging, co-opting, and repurposing due to a major, simple difference- life, similar to me, designing the damn thing has a goal, my 3D printer doesn't give a shit.

The Organism's Internal Compass

Why does stuff happen? Why do organisms build? Themselves and their environment, the simplest answer is to avoid suffering, to live better. There is substantial energy investment going into sensing the environment, organizing the data coming in, inferring it, and making useful representations of it. None of these processes yields more information than the information coming in and can, in fact, only lower dimensionally, make it more digestible, so why even bother? The reason is that somewhere in that wealth of information, some useful clues are hiding. Clues that, once the spotlight of attention beams upon them, can serve the organism in the only useful way possible: alleviating stress.

This innate goal is intrinsic to the organism's well-being and, as such, is a very useful multidimensional compass. An organism must have some high-dimensional, immutable center of gravity to gear its efforts towards, something that permeates all sensing and homeostasis levels, from molecular machinery to regulatory schemes, and orients its resource allocation in a mostly adaptive manner. The selfish gene paradigm is a useful tool for viewing long-term, transgenerational decision-making, but it is like a far north star: cold, distant. Living things have decisions to make NOW, the danger is close, and a strong compass mounted on the dashboard is essential, especially when the wheels are flying off, the oil is burning, and the road is turning to lava. Alleviating an individual's stress is a tangible target that allows the most important resource allocation - attention.

The Fragility of Generative Processes

Most generative processes, that is, processes that make stuff, virtual or physical, only foster a transplanted, external goal.  They are, even if they masquerade well as an LLM or look like a brute force CNC machine, just tools. What I mean by that is that they follow a set of instructions to achieve a predetermined goal, one they neither care about nor understand. If that goal is achieved, great, if not, that's a failure, but it is akin to any kind of other step failure, the goal itself is just arbitrarily defined as the final step. The process of improvisation, creativity, and actual grit is lacking. This is not actually a problem, nor is it a failure, it's actually, as far as I can tell, a design principle. We don't want our drill to have an internal goal; we want a completely complacent extension of our own self-agency, so a drill with a mind of its own is firmly rooted in horror-movie territory.
This lack of an internal compass eliminates a crucial component of creative pursue, the ability to improvise, which is usually a small price to pay, and one we enforce on our generative systems by default. But that is the proximate price, not the ultimate one. The actual thing we are holding on to, when keeping our “tools” as a pure delivery system for our vision, is that we assume our internal representations of “should be” are perfect without actual, tactile interaction with reality. If we were to tell our 3D printer that we want a cool office gadget without telling it HOW to do it, we might be left with a block of completely smooth plastic, which is a pretty cool trick if you happen to be an agency-filled printer.

The Illusion of a Perfect Plan

I think what obscures the major difference between internal and external goal-seeking is the notion that we have a perfect path forward and an accurate, traceable inner model many steps ahead, just like my 3D printer's G-code. We ultimately don't do this. For us, it looks like we have a plan, it is rooted in reason, and it might work. We don't improvise too much, and if we do, it's because we lack planning, not because we're pursuing an ultimate goal strategically. So, in hindsight, there is a clear path, with good and bad turns, useful and detrimental decisions, all in the light of a specific, traceable, all-important goal.

This is most definitely not the case, and for the most part, the anchors and pegs in the roads are malleable and change in accordance with the overall compass.  What is missing is a retrospective representation of the plan is the fog. The uncertainty of the decision-making process, the very little, often completely absent amount of knowledge we have, is all completely omitted when looking at the road made. It is everything going forward. Like Laplace’s demon for my 3D printer, time can move forward and backward with the same eerie clarity. This notion is completely alien to a living, breathing, goal-thinking entity that aims at one thing, an ever-bright, ever-illuminating, highly adaptive goal.