I recently bought 'Fab' for a buck. Its about the possibility of having desktop personal fabricators just like PC's. The entertaining author says that killer app for this is personalized devices.
One example is the Scream Storer. One girl wanted a device she could scream in when outraged which would not disturb others with the noise, and then she could release the noise of the scream later. So she designed it, and had the fabricating machines at MIT build it.
Someone else wanted to make a device for parrots to use a simplified form of IE so they could get some social interaction that parrots need. Imagine a world in which an owner at work can call home to talk to his parrot.
The author's five year old children when they wanted a new toy would say 'go to MIT' instead of 'go to toy store' because they would have a vision of a toy they wanted to make.
Very interesting book.
Its one answer kinda to MJ's question. Answer: We all become village artisans able to design and build just the tools and things we want for our life. If you decide you need a laptop that is green and solar powered and can walk behind you like a dog on robolegs....well, make it. Or any other bizzarre and highly personal idea you come up with. MJ can build a hunterbot that will 'fido, find my paper on Temporal problems in the TV show Dr. Who.' And fido, a spider like bot that MJ built over the last weekend, walks into MJ's office, scans each piece of paper, picks up each paper, and puts them back down in the position they were in until it finds the notes MJ wanted. It then leaves a text on MJ's cell phone which MJ made so that he could have a stopwatch dice roller fitted into the back of his cell phone.
Now, no one else in the world has a cell phone quite like MJ's, but he has a design for it posted on a design website in case someone wants to copy him. If they do, they perhaps pay MJ a dime, or MJ gets a point in the Useful Ideas to Others Index, and the website emails the design to the personal fab on the other guy's desk. OG's fab builds the new cellphone with no more than a click on a website.
At this point, you're probably wondering what 'Wars of Religion' has to do with this. Well, we're going to wander into Eric Flint and his book series 1632 and so on which alleges that the leadership in Germany was stupid, cowardly, and treacherous. And we'll be comparing Sarah Palin to Martin Luther....and perhaps seeing if the next few decades have a comparison in that rather brutal era in Germany called the Wars of Religion.