The Emergence of Open Design and Manufacturing

The following was posted as a comment to the Reality Sandwich piece The Emergence of Open Design and Manufacturing, which you should read first in order for it to make any sense:

The Singularity Approacheth

You know, it's funny. Ten years ago or more the nascent transhumanist movement was abuzz with talk of the coming post-scarcity society, a model that is remarkably similar to what's being talked about here. Of course, they concentrated a lot more on flashy scifi technologies such as nanofactories (or, as Eric Drexler called it, machine-phase chemistry.) When technologies such as the RepRap and the Fab Lab started being developed, however, I realized that we wouldn't have to wait for mature nanotechnology to achieve this state.

And now, here we are, on the cusp of the Singularity ... an event I regard with a great deal more trepidation, now that it is more immanent than theoretical.
The real breakthrough, at least for me, was the realization that the real missing link wasn't technology, it was a state of mind. That is to say, we can have all the fantastic technology in the world and it isn't worth a brass farthing if we remain the same selfish, myopic, fear-driven beings we've been throughout the entire history of civilization. Conversely, at any level of technology a breakthrough to the right level of consciousness would allow us to create the kind of utopia we've been striving for ... always just over the hill ... in the future, a time that somehow never becomes now.

But of course, these things happen on a schedule, in a necessarily sequential fashion, the consciousness developing along with the technology. One cannot appear without the other, not so much as precursor as partner.