Digital Reality

Digital Reality →

We’ve been living with this notion that making stuff is an illiberal art for commercial gain and it’s not part of the means of expression. But, in fact, today, 3D printing, micromachining, and microcontroller programming are as expressive as painting paintings or writing sonnets but they’re not means of expression from the Renaissance. We can finally fix that boundary between art and artisans.

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Over the next maybe five years we’ll be transitioning from buying machines to using machines to make machines. Self-reproducing machines. But they still have consumables like the motors, and they still cut or squirt. Then the interesting transition comes when we go from cutting or printing to assembling and disassembling, to moving to discretely assembled materials. And that’s when you do tabletop chip fab or make airplanes. That’s when technical trash goes away because you can disassemble.

An amazing one hour talk from the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, Neil Gershenfeld on the digital fabrication, what it is, what it means for the future, and how we are getting there.