(music)
We've had a digital revolution,
but we don't need to keep having it.
We can declare success. We won.
What's coming now is the
digital revolution in fabrication.
My colleagues and I started teaching a
class called "How to make almost anything".
And the idea was just that.
It's a program looking at how the digital
world relates to the physical world.
And one of the core things coming out of
the research is the idea of digital fabrication:
making the "Star Trek" replicator -- an assembler
that makes anything you want
by building the atoms on up.
[To class: "This is designed where you..."]
Millions of dollars of equipment at MIT
are like the mainframes of digital fabrication.
We can make anything we want
using those tools and in 20 years,
we'll make it so that you can have it in the home.
The Fab Labs are in-between.
They've spread all around the world,
letting ordinary people create technology
from South Africa to the north of Norway,
and from rural India to inner-city Boston.
Instead of spending vast amounts of money
to send computers and energy
and comminication around the world,
you can spend much less to send the means
the means to create it.
Energy, communication, computation.
Just to say the words, they sound big.
They're being tackled as billion-dollar
mega-projects top-down.
Fab Labs is tackling them
from the bottom up.
We're just finding so many people,
with such interesting inventions
and such great ideas.
Sharing that is where I see this going.
[Principal Voices, in association with Shell.]