At first, it feels like a bad, even offensive idea. After the shooting of children in Newtown, reports of chemical weapons in Syria, threats of nuclear missile attacks from North Korea, and now the bombings in my home town of Boston, why would anyone make a play on the words ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’?

One of the highlights of our 2013 US Executive Forum held in Washington DC on March 13 was the sharply contrasting talks given by two of today’s leading digital economy thinkers. First up was MIT’s Andrew McAfee, co-author of the influential book Racing Against the Machine. Andrew argued that while computer technology is enhancing our lives in countless important ways, there is a downside. Information technology has eliminated – and will continue to eliminate – a wide range of jobs, not just clerks and secretaries, but increasingly highly skilled professionals such as writers, translators, doctors, and yes, even drivers. Andrew reminded us of the folly of continually thinking that there are certain things that computers “just can’t do”. This list gets shorter every day. In Andrew’s view, the emergence of IT marks an important economic and societal inflection point where our overall wealth and prosperity continue to increase but are increasingly decoupled from individual wages and employment.

The success of open-source software has far exceeded initial expectations. When Linus Torvalds launched the Linux project back in 1991, few people imagined that free software developed by open communities would ever match – let alone surpass – the efforts of industry giants such as IBM and Microsoft. Yet in a wide range of areas this has been precisely the case. Without the contributions of Linux, Apache, Java, Perl, Python, MySQL, Hadoop and many other open initiatives, the internet would be a smaller, less interesting and much more expensive place.

The progress of 3D printing (3DP) was the single biggest technology story of 2012. While the concept of additive manufacturing has been around since the 1960s, 3DP’s enormous potential in sectors such as electronics, aerospace, defence, health care, energy, architecture, construction, robotics and consumer products has now captured the public’s imagination. In November, we completed a study: 3D Printing and the Future of Manufacturing, which described the major 3DP applications and opportunities – everything from printed vehicles to artificial limbs, form-fitted running shoes and flying ‘insects’. In this commentary, we summarize those findings and discuss the likely implications for Enterprise IT.