Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it's not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it... Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. We built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that's to build.
WHY IT MATTERS:Â I spent the better part of my life moving physical processes in the digital world. Now the pendulum shifts and we must pour our engineering energy into building things locally - using digital processes, techniques, technologies, from 3D printing to robots to IOT. This is the next 20 years.