Hod Lipson

So, where are the robots? We've been told for 40 years already that they're coming soon. Very soon they'll be doing everything for us. They'll be cooking, cleaning, buying things, shopping, building. But they aren't here. Meanwhile, we have illegal immigrants doing all the work, but we don't have any robots.

If you gave kids peas that didn't look like peas and said they were a space shuttle, they're much more apt to eat them because it's now playtime.

The only way to make something cheaply today is to have it mass-produced. For example, you wear the same shoes as everyone else. If you had a fabber, you could custom-make shoes that perfectly fit your feet. Three-dimensional printing will help us move away from the mass consumption that is so deeply ingrained in our culture.

We tend to think of science as finding equations, like E=MC2, that are simple and elegant. But maybe some theories are complicated, and we can only find the simple ones.

When it costs you the same amount of manufacturing effort to make advanced robotic parts as it does to manufacture a paperweight, that really changes things in a profound way.

3D printing is already shaking our age-old notions of what can and can't be made.

The moment somebody is making money off the recipes, that's when you'll see digital rights management around it.

I think, once recipes become digital, pirating a digital recipe and all the questions that you have with music and so forth will become pertinent to food as well.

Similar to computer technology in the '60s, 3-D printing is a universal technology that has the potential to revolutionize our life by enabling individuals to design and manufacture things.