SXSWi 2013: MakerBot's Bre Pettis to Deliver Opening Remarks

Soon, all your base are belong to you, yes you, because you'll be fabbing them up in the privacy of your own home. The overnight popularity and exponentially increasing abilities of MakerBot's desktop 3D printers means that anyone anywhere will be able to design and create virtually whatever they can think of. And that's a good thing.

Or is it? Certainly, in addition to heat-seeking death kittens and awesomely cool retro-USB mix tapes, both black and white hats at the NSA and/or/probably Al Qaeda are hastily adapting to a universe where anyone can manufacture the component parts of a projectile weapon (i.e. a gun) cheaply and secretly. (Or they can just upload the specs to the web.) Personally, we're predicting this means the advent of bumper stickers reading "Guns don't kill people, people who use their desktop printers to make guns kill people."

But hey, that's so not what MakerBot is about. What it's about isn't totally clear yet, but what is obvious is the fact that Pettis and like-minded visionaries are going to change absolutely everything about the way we live now, and fast.

That's no hyperbole, either. With a price tag of $2,199, MakerBot's prosumer Replicator 2 is the way of the future. So please, people, less flabby instruments of death -- unless, of course, they're attached to kittens -- and more neato tchotchkes and fridge magnet marble slides.

Here's SXSWi's press release regarding Pettis.