3D printing.

If you don't know what 3D printing is, then where the hell have you been living? The Dark Ages? Now just in case you've been on a really long holiday, or in a coma, or cut off from civilisation, 3D printing is basically what you'd think it is. A 3D printer creates almost any solid object you tell it too, from a digital model. Unless you're the most difficult to impress person in the world, this is bloody amazing. Potentially we can send items thousands of miles in a digital form and have them created in minutes. I don't like it.

Call me miserable (do it in the comments box, otherwise you're talking to a screen and you'll just look silly), but I can see 3D printing destroying the postal service and lots of shops. I know we'll still need shops for food and really big things, but what about other shops and the post office. Where will all of these things go? What will happen to all of the jobs that these shops and services provide? What will happen to high streets? I am aware that I might be sounding like I'm living in the 1950's, but bear with me. If you were dropped from the sky and landed (somehow surviving) somewhere in the world, then there is a good chance that if you landed in Britain you'd know it. You'd see a red phone box, or a red post box or a newsagents, or a post office, or a Royal Mail van or a recognised brand or shop. What if 3D printing gets rid of all that? We are all getting more and more homogeneous and so are the places we live. The mobile phone is amazing, but has meant that there are very few telephone boxes on the streets any more, not just in Britain, but everywhere. Email is killing off postal services worldwide. What if 3D printers mean no more post offices and fewer shops; things that help define us? We live on a fantastically diverse planet, but at times it feels like it is becoming less so. Not just with species going extinct, but even our own self-made cultural diversity.

Please keep the planet vibrant, don't all go mad for 3D printing.