WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

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.

So far, 3D printing has not quite lived up to expectations. Skeptics are abandoning the idea of a future when you'll be able to 3D print just about anything in your living room, and MakerBot, the only relatively well-known maker of 3D printers, has stopped producing its own printers, outsourcing the work to China. Industrial use, rather than personal, ha