MAKERS: The New Industrial Revolution

My favorite Chris Anderson book will apparently always be the “latest” Chris Anderson book — he keeps topping himself. The Long Tail blew me away, Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing sparked new ideas, and now his most recent work Makers: The New Industrial Revolution has me thinking about the steps that follow idea generation — turning a concept into a physical product.

I didn’t know much about the Maker movement. I know what a 3D printer is and that they are becoming more and more affordable. What I didn’t think about was the context in which Anderson puts this technologies. His assertion that the current state of desktop 3D printers is approximately where Apple was when it issued its first Laser Writer can’t help but cause you to think forward a dozen years to imagine where the tech will be at that time.

There is a great amount of information on the variety of uses 3D printing can be put to, and after reading this book the idea of cloning doesn’t seem all that far fetched — but I don’t think the scientists will be growing clones in a lab, I think they’ll be PRINTING them.*

Think that sounds crazy?
Read the book and see if you don’t end up agreeing with me!

*UPDATE: February 22, 2013
Cornell 3D prints human ear.
http://news.techeye.net/science/cornell-3d-prints-human-ear