With all the hype on mobile devices and mobile services, and MSPs, and ISVs, and enterprise software, and Cloud storage, and SaaS, little is being said about what has come to be seen as the dinosaur of the computing equation–the lowly desktop. The klieg lights may be aimed elsewhere, but a quiet development will soon bring them back. Now is the time to jump in, invest in the technology companies related to this development, or form your own company around the essential elements if you can nail down just the right patent. We are now in the midst of what I call a “Steve Jobs moment”. Even as computerization shrinks the physical dimensions of a desktop from a footprint to a handprint, even a fingerprint, the emergence of 3D printing is about to transform the lowly desktop into a miracle device capable of some of the most astounding, and frightening, processes ever conceived.

Today’s consumer 3D printers slowly and laboriously assemble tinker-toys for the delight of geeks and hackers. Tomorrow’s 3D “compuprinters” will produce clothing of every variety in one’s home or kitchen, and in any quantity and size desired, limited only by the size of the printable aperture incorporated into one’s desktop model, which will be re-designed with the printing mechanism as its central focus. The highest-end models already are manufacturing human skin and organs on demand for surgeons to implant in human subjects. The next wave of 3D printer-desktop fusion models will create biological substances according to downloadable and possibly hacked DNA codes. Life-saving insulin will soon be available at the touch of a radio button on a website, the printing instructions sent to the diabetic’s compuprinter residing in his home, coded to match the consumer’s personal body chemistry.

On the other hand, every conceivable pharmaceutical will also be available. No more meth-labs…instead drug gangs will have the option of assembling methamphetamines in their own homes without the need for chemical mixing or heating. The final product will be assembled molecule by molecule, noiselessly, privately, hygienically, without tell-tale odors, for clandestine packing and sale. Everything from dynamite to anthrax will soon be available for manufacture in home compuprinters. The next wave will be the most astounding. Who is to say whether the fourth wave will allow the creation, on demand and in private, of living things of whatever size and complexity limited only by the DNA coding and the dimensions and sophistication of the desktop “compuprinter”, beginning with viruses and ending with recognizable entities.

A Genie’s bottle? Or Pandora’s box? Whichever awaits, it’s coming full-tilt to you, and when your children are grown they will wonder why you ever bothered to go to a retail store to buy clothes, or to a grocery store to buy food, or to a pharmacy for medicine, or to a pet store to buy… [you fill it in!] Today’s humble tinker-toy, the object of play by hackers and gamers, in fact heralds a coming diaspora or decentralization of factory production, reversing a global trend that began three centuries ago, and reverses modern farming by economy of scale, and breaks up today’s pharmaceutical giants who will face in a few years the same erosion of their chief products as hackers download their chemical coding and assemble protected drugs without paying, just as the music industry has faced free downloads. POD is currently destroying a book industry with a 500 year old manufacturing tradition. Make On Demand, or MOD, is about to do the same to every kind of manufacturing that depends on economy of scale. “Which shall it be?” asked Cabal in H.G. Wells’ Things To Come. To which I add: will it be Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, where non-existent aliens stored only genetic memory banks to re-constitute their race when the timing was appropriate? Or my own novel www.Piranhoia.com, where a giant compuprinter expels piranhas to attack chosen targets as fast as the hacked gene-chips can assemble them? Watch my website www.progware.com for my own efforts to keep up with this field.  –Glenn L Roberts 10/18/11