3D printing: the new, bottom-up industrial revolution At present, it makes sense to produce large numbers of identical objects in a cheap location, such as China, ship them to the West and sell them in large supermarkets or online from equally large warehouses. That traditional model won't die out, but will have to coexist in a growing number of areas with a new, truly just-in-time bespoke industry, where manufactured goods will be produced to consumers" exact specification and dispatched to them from a UK plant within hours. For the time being at least, such products will be more expensive, and so won't grab all of the market, but they will become a very substantial business. There will also be an explosion in self-production and DIY manufacturing; making things using one's own equipment may even become almost as common as cooking one's own food or uploading one's own pictures to a social network. One can now buy a proper second-hand 3D printer for a few thousand pounds and the price will keep on falling; eventually, they could become as ubiquitous as microwave ovens. Given that economies of scale will no longer be so essential, 3D printing will drastically reduce the barriers to entry to start-ups. Anti-trust policy will become obsolete. The influx of new competitors will shake up many industries, just as old oligopolies built around intellectual property have already been smashed. One interesting case study is Makielab, a Shoreditch-based firm which allows users to design a truly bespoke doll; when a child or its parents are satisfied with the design, they can order a 10in model for £69.99. Expect vast numbers of such players to emerge, providing customers with apps and websites. Some will succeed, many will fail, fortunes will be made and lost in a great 3D bubble, but all will do Schumpeter proud. Again, there will still be plenty of room for Chinese, mass-produced models; but the disruption in areas where 3D printing already works well - including furniture, cutlery, machine tools, car components, toys, garden equipment and so on - will be intense. Some retailers will be disintermediated and go bust, just as music stores have been destroyed by Apple's iTunes. As choice becomes boundless, the economics of the long tail - a concept originally coined by Chris Anderson in a book on the subject - will apply to even more markets. The digitalisation of the music industry, and the rise of multi-channel TV and download on demand, mean that neither are as dominated by a few big hits or mass market networks. Instead, the marketplace has fragmented into hundreds of niches. The same will now happen elsewhere. Manufacturing has come a long way since the days when Henry Ford supposedly told his customers that they could have a car in any colour they wished, as long as it was black, but 3D printing will take customisation to its logical conclusion. Choices will often be created or supervised by consumers themselves; in extremis, micro-markets will consist of just one customer who really, really wants a very large and very bright green kitchen table. Some manufacturing activity will therefore be reshored to the UK, with factories based in rich countries becoming increasingly viable once again as machines price out even Chinese workers and proximity becomes essential. For all David Cameron's silly claims that he is seeking to reindustrialise Britain, the UK's manufacturing base is still shrinking. But, as ever, technological and economic forces will prove more powerful than gobby politicians and their vacuous sloganising, and 3D printing will be a partial saviour of British manufacturing. But it will be an even more automated industry that emerges, and few of the jobs - there are always lots, albeit in fresh areas, when new technologies emerge, contrary to Luddite fears - will actually be on anything that remotely resembles a factory floor. Yet all of these developments, which will begin to become noticeable in the next few years, may only represent the first stages of the 3D revolution. Far more complex items will become printable, a development which would truly change the world. Anthony Atala, of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina, recently harnessed a 3D printer with living cells as the "ink" to create a transplantable kidney. Even restaurants could be partly automated. Jeff Lipton, of Seraph Robotics, argues that food will be 3D printing's killer app, and has demonstrated how scientifically precise cakes can be produced, feeding all the usual ingredients into the machine. Eventually, even governments will be threatened by the 3D printing revolution. In a world of endless choice, who will put up with one size fits all public services and flawed, bureaucratic decision making? If they want to redeem themselves, the politicians will need to find a way of preventing maniacs from abusing this marvellous technology, while allowing a generation of visionary entrepreneurs to use it to engineer a new, bottom-up industrial revolution. Allister Heath is editor of City AM