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how US military needs during World War II and the Cold War steered engineers and applied mathematicians to an economic way of thinking about scarce resources, including limited computational resources, and how economists subsequently incorporated that mathematics.

"Along with the rise of the connected consumer - a subject that has no shortage of consultants, writers and public speakers ready to tell your company what to do - shouldn't we also be thinking of the rise of empowered employee, the people in the most advantageous position today and tomorrow to fill those job shortages? "

The BBC's Matt Danzico investigates what place traditional academic institutions have in a world consumed by do-it-yourself education.

I'd always intended to talk about The New Aesthetic, but up until about the day before I didn't really know how. The original title of the talk was "The Robot-Readable World", but this didn't really sit right with me; it's one aspect of NA, for sure, but there was something else I wanted to emphasise: the human aspects and emotions of NA, and the becoming-human of the machines.

"As technology evolves to make the office more obsolete, it's going to result in massive changes--and massive opportunities." But the process is sometimes painstakingly slow, as it conflicts with traditions, the desire for 'real face time' and office politics. 

"The idea is to design more realistic virtual characters, which, in turn, should make video games more compelling and software simulations used for training more useful. In the future, the software could drive physical robots capable of navigating the real world in a human-like manner." Okay, the bots are not 'really' intelligent and language is much harder to crack. But still, it's a nice result, this  human thinks.  

"Project aims to let anyone print a gun in their own home, raising new concerns about the legality of homemade firearms" There really was no reason to believe people would only use this technology to print cute toys and cool components for race bikes. 

A new generation of tools has been improved over the last five years, changing the entire financial world, thanks to the unprecedented levels reached by technology - impossible to conceive some years ago. Velocity, liquidity, price efficiency and systemic risks: the HFT (High-Frequency Trading) era has started.

"Unlike the jerry-built contraptions of the past, the Replicator 2s are sleek, metal, and stylish: MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis likens the design to "Darth Vader driving Knight Rider's KITT car while being airlifted by a Nighthawk spy plane." There is also the lighting. Oh, the lighting. "LEDs are part of our core values as a company," Pettis jokes. "

Yet 3D printing is just one of many production technologies and trends which are transforming the way companies will be able to make things in the future. The old rules of manufacturing, such as "you must seek economies of scale" and "you must reduce unit-labour costs", are being cast aside. New machines can print every item differently. More flexible robots are getting cheaper and better at doing all the boring and dirty stuff.