This article at Science Daily descibes the DIY Fab@Home specification which can be built for about $2,300 worth of off-the-shelf parts. You can download the specs from  the Fab@Home website. Amazing.

Yet another sci-fi scenario coming true. Neal Stephenson explored a world of networked fabrication in The Diamond Age.

Looking forward to seeing the Joost for Mac. It is blogged about here on the Om Malik blog.

This may sound like the title of a post-modern computer generated monster classic. Godzilla versus Mothra zapped through a Predator versus Alien filter!

But seriously, this may be the most important dichotomy of our blighted age.

I recently read two fantastic sci-fi novels, Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson and Accelerando by Charles Stross, which pose interesting scenarios of the Bottleneck and the Singularity, respectively.

Both novels suggest that humans (and posthumans) don't transcend natural (Darwinian) behaviour. This rings true and provides a great literary device, the tragic flaw, which lubricates the narratives.

Both authors are familiar with Sociobiology. The main character in Fifty Degrees Below, edits a sociobiology journal and exhibits, in his introspection, a growing awareness of the grip that hardwired routines have on his own and everyone's behaviour. Another scientist in this novel conducts an intriguing experiment in scientific democracy.

In Accelerando, "godlike" artificial intelligences, descended from corporations, behave like plague locusts and convert most of the solar system into Computronium.

This led me this think about our global predicament. The problem is timing. If we reach the bottleneck first, then the singularity won't happen in time to help. If we reach or approach the singularity before the bottleneck then perhaps we can survive it by applying powerful new technology (artificial intelligence, nanotech, 3D printers and so on). I guess, this is vaguely what we all hope will happen. Technology to the rescue.

But didn't technology cause the problem in the first place?

Technology is not the problem. The problem is human behaviour. While our wise men and women tell us that our survival is at stake, our leaders are obsessed by distracting territorial and ideological disputes. The resources of the final flowering of the post industrial economy are being squandered on the war machine.

Don't we all wonder from time to time why we are in this horrible predicament in the first place, and why we don't seem to be able to fix it?
 
The problem is human behaviour, which is stalled in prehistory. We are not adapted to the technosphere we have created. We are still running ancient war games, when we need to be running blue sky scenarios.

More than anything else we need to develop the ability to manage our own global behaviour.