3D Libraries

Soon you will not be able to tell a library from a shop class. Slowly becoming home to 3D printers, libraries aren't so much a natural fit for them as other places offer a rounder hole for this square  technology peg. However, should 3D printing become popular and profitable enough, established places will accommodate themselves or new niches will crop up, luring away the audience that libraries fostered.

Flying Cars of Yesterday (2)

To counterbalance my skepticism in a prior post about the rosy-painted future of 3D printing, I offer this too-good-to-be-true quote attributed to a U.S. Patent Office Commissioner who in 1899 is purported to have said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented."

(For those who can't get enough of forecasts that went wrong, there is "Incorrect Predictions" at Wikiquote.)

Flying Cars of Yesterday (1)

Where are the flying cars promised so long ago? Unfortunately, they may be in the same future-past junk heap as 3D printing for libraries. Bracing, exciting is the concept presented on the American Libraries video. But so much of it is infiltrated with wish fulfillment, a projection of what would be were progress assured and circumstances utopian. As Voltaire said, if every infant grew up to the promise of its potential, the world would overflow with geniuses.