It's Dangerous When You Build Things You Klutz, but MIT's Robots Will Save You

Remember when all furniture was custom made? I'm as much of a fan of modernist Scandinavian design and cheap meatballs as anyone, but mass produced furniture is by definition a compromise: It's sort of okay for everyone, which means it's never exactly what you want. But custom made furniture that's perfect for your space and style is expensive, because it takes a substantial amount of skill and equipment to produce. At MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which is presumably populated by researchers trying to afford furnishings for their overpriced and undersized Cambridge apartments, researchers have developed a system called AutoSaw that (nearly) solves the entire furniture problem. AutoSaw can help you pick out a piece of new furniture, customize it to the shape and size that you want, and then build it with a team of robots to your exact specifications.