A few weeks ago, on a crisp spring evening in Washington, DC, Neil Gershenfeld walked up to the podium before a modest crowd at the Library of Congress, adjusted his black, thick-rimmed glasses and told his audience that the world was about to shift beneath their feet. Before long, he explained, people will own inexpensive desktop machines that can print objects in three dimensions just as effortlessly as desktop computers can already print pictures and words in two dimensions. Such "personal fabricators" would, he explained, transform us into magicians, capable of conjuring up precisely what we want, when we want. We might design our own mobile phones, clothes or appliances, or we might download designs from the internet and modify them to our liking, like recipes. Either way, we wouldn't be going to a shop and picking items from shelves full of identical, mass-produced products.
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