What's the next avalanche technology? Avalanche technologies are those ideas that by the very nature of their own existence change everything around them as they relentlessly self perpetuate. You know the list: gunpowder, printing, steam power, the computer. Everything they touch changes, old ways of doing things fold in their path.
What's next?
Well, we digitized numbers (calculation). Then text, then audio, then video. Do you think we're done?
What's next is the digitization of stuff. Real, physical stuff.
The way you get stuff now is that either somebody makes it themselves, piece by piece, or it gets mass produced. Things made by people are personal, but time consuming and expensive. Mass produced things are fast to make and cheap, but are not unique or typically modifiable (excepting things like Legos).
The promise of desktop fabrication is cheap, modifiable, personal stuff produced by the machine off of readily available design software.
