I'm not sure that's entirely fair, if we're being honest. It's paid off exactly as much as it possibly could. We have desktop machines for under $200 that can produce any plastic physical object within pretty broad measure that you can tell it, describe it in terms that are sufficiently specific, and you can get whatever it is in under a day – sometimes under an hour.

That's a pretty big deal.

I think the problem is more that people remain uneducated about what the limitations of the basic technologies are, they want to believe things that are true, and they are essentially lazy. And they have no idea how things are actually done, which is perhaps one of the biggest problems.

Right now I can design a part that I need for fixing the leg of this microphone stand. I can specify it in my CAD software. I can print a prototype in the next room and see if it fits it looks right, and as importantly I can iterate on that prototype until it does. Then I can send that file, that one file, off to a printing service who will then turn it into a lovely piece of aluminum or stainless steel built exactly to my specifications and send it back to me.

Who needs tiny flying bots (which, point of order, is a technology which depends on a lot more magical imaginary tech than 3D printing) when I have FedEx?