aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Print a product to your desktop

Andrew Zolli is the guest in the ITConversations’ debut of Globeshakers with Tim Zak:

[My transcription at 21:42] There’s technological change in virtually every area, from material science, to energy, to robotics, all of them are going to play an important role in continuing to dematerialize the economy in many Western nations and continue the shift from a national manufacturing productive sector to an international globalized services sector where much of the manual labor of production is outsourced, not simply because it can be done better by automatic or artificial or robotic means but because it can only be done by those things.

The thing about automated manufacturing is not that a chip is made better by a robot but it’s that it can only be made by a robot. You can actually make a chip today by hand if you wanted to you’d have to build a robot to build it.

Zolli has been chief curator for Pop!Tech, an annual conference taking place in Camden, Maine in October:

[My transcription at 21:42] We’re going to have a fellow there named Neil Gershenfeld who runs MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. He’s currently working on personal desktop fabrication. Imagine a device about the size of a laser printer sitting on your desk, you hit a few strokes on your keyboard and an object is printed on your desktop instead of a document on a piece of paper.

Cool. Can’t wait!