YouSaid · the spoken record

Neil Gershenfeld

lines on the record: 150
first: 2023-05-28
most recent: 2023-05-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, so you could take morphogenesis as a summary of the whole conversation, or you could take recursion that in a sense what we've been talking about is recursion all the way down.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's nothing deeper to consciousness than it's a derived property of distributed problem solving. There's nothing deeper to life than embodied AI in morphogenesis. So why so much of this conversation in my life is involved in these fab labs? And initially it just started as outreach. Then it started as keeping up with it. Then it turned to Uh... It was rewarding. Then it turned to we're learning as much from these labs in as goes out to them. It began as outreach, but now more knowledge is coming back from the labs than is going into them. And then finally, it ends with What I described as competing with myself at MIT, but a better way to say that is tapping the brain power of the planet. And so I guess for me personally, that's the meaning of my life.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just the next step in the hierarchy of that, in the fulfillment of the inexorable drive of the violation of thermodynamics. So you could view, you know, I'm an embodiment of the will of the violation of thermodynamics speaking.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so sigmoids are things grow and they taper, and then there can be one after it and one after it. I'll pass on whether there's enough of them that they diverge. But the selfish gene answer to the meaning of life is the meaning of life is the propagation of life. And so it was a step for Adams to assemble into a molecule, for molecules to assemble into a protocell, for the protocell to form to then form organelles, for the organ cells to form organs, the organs to form an organism. Then it was a step for organisms to form family units, then family units. Each of those is a stack in the level of organization. So you could view everything we've spoken about as The imperative of life.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Singularity I'm not sure if Ray Kurzweil is listening, if he is hi Ray. But I have a complex relationship with Ray. A lot of the things he projects I find annoying, but then he does his homework and then somewhat annoyingly he points out how almost everything I'm doing fits on his roadmaps And so the question is, are we heading towards a singularity? So I'd have to say I lean towards sigmoids rather than exponentials.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can tell you my insights into how life works. I can tell you my insights in how to make life meaningful and fulfilling. And sustainable. I have no idea what the meaning of life is, but maybe that's the meaning of life.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me violently agree in two ways. One way is This community making crosses many sensitive sectarian boundaries in many parts of the world where there's just implicit or explicit conflict, but sort of this act of making seems to transcend a lot of historical divisions. I don't say that philosophically. I just say that as an observation. And I think There's something really fundamental in what you said, which is deep in our brain is shaping our environment. A lot of what's strange about our society is the way that we can't do that. The act of shaping our environment touches something really, really deep that gets to the essence of who we are. That's again why I say that in a way the most important thing made in these labs is making itself.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If anybody can make almost anything anywhere, how do you live, how do you learn, how do you work, how you play these very basic assumptions about how society functions? There's a way in which it's kind of back to the future in that this mode where work is money is consumption and consumption is shopping by selecting is only a kind of a few decade old stretch In some ways we're getting back to a Sami village in North Norway is deeply sustainable But rather than just reverting to living the way we did a few thousand years ago, Being connected globally having the benefits of modern society, but connecting it back to older notions of sustainability, I hadn't remotely anticipated just how fundamentally that challenges how a society functions and how interesting and how hard it is to figure out how we can make that work.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's not utopia, it's not free, but come back to today, we separately have education. We have big business. We have startups. We have entertainment. Sort of each of these things are segregated. When you have global connection to one of these local facilities, in that you can do play and art and education and create infrastructure, you can make many of the things you consume. You could make it for yourself. It could be done on a community call. It could be done on a regional scale. The research we spent the last few hours talking about I thought was hard. And in a sense, I mean, it's non-trivial, but in a sense, it's just sort of playing out, returning the crank. What I didn't think was hard is...”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The original Fab Labs would have a whole team to get involved in the setting up and training. And the Fab Academy is a real in-depth, deep technical program in the training. But in this next phase, how sort of the lab itself knows how to do the lab, that we've talked deeply about the intelligence in fabrication, but in a much more accessible one about how the AI in the lab in effect becomes a collaborator with you in this nearer term to help get started. For people wanting to connect, it can seem like a big step, a big threshold. But we've gotten to thousands of these and they're doubling exactly that way just from people opting in.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From one to a thousand, we carefully counted labs. Now we're going from 1,000 to a million, where it ceases to become interesting to count them. And in the thousand to the million, what's interesting about that stage is technologically you go to a lab not to get access to the machine, but you go to the lab to make the machine. But the other thing interesting in it is we have an interesting collaboration on a fab lab in a box. And this came out of a collaboration with SolidWorks on how you can put a fab lab in a box, which is not just the tools, but the knowledge. So you open the box and the box contains the knowledge of how to use it as well as the tools within it so that the knowledge can propagate. And so we have an interesting group of people working on, you know.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great question. So This is part of a much bigger maker movement that has a lot of embodiments. The part I've been involved in, this Fab Lab network, you can think of as a curated part that works as a network. So you don't benefit in a gym if somebody exercises in another gym. But in the FAB network, you do in a sense benefit when somebody works in another lab in the way it functions as a network. So you can come to CBA.mit.edu to see the research we're talking about. There's a fab foundation run by Sherry Lassiter at fabfoundation.org. Fab Labs.io is a portal into this lab network. Fabacademied.org is this distributed hands-on educational program. Fab.city is the platform of cities producing what they consume. Those are all nodes in this network.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the thing that gives me most hope for the future is that population. Once a year, this whole lab network meets. And it's my favorite gathering. It's in Bhutan this year because it's every body shape. It's every language, every geography, but it's the same person in all those packages It's the same sense of bright invent of joy and discovery.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's your mistake. Here's what you should have been doing And they just sort of say, I'm here and get to work. And again, I don't know how far this resource goes. So I've said I consider the world's greatest resource, this engine of Brightonvent of people, of which we only see a tiny little iceberg of it. And everywhere we open these labs, they come out of the woodwork. We didn't create all these educational programs, all these other things I'm describing. We tried to partner everywhere with local schools and local companies and kept tripping over dysfunction and find we had to create the environment where people like this can flourish. And so I don't know if this is everyone, if it's 1% of society, what the fraction is, but it's so many orders of magnitude bigger than we see today. We've been racing to keep up with it to take advantage of that resource.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One important one is If you look at junior faculty trying to get tenure at a place like MIT, the ones who try to figure out how to get tenure are miserable and don't get 10 year, and the ones who don't try to figure it out are happy and do get it. I mean, you have to love what you're doing and believe in it and nothing else could possibly be what you want to be doing with your life. And it gets you out of bed in the morning. And again, it sounds naive, but within like the limited domain I'm describing now of getting tenured MIT, that's a key attribute to it. And then same sense if you take the sort of outliers students were talking about 99 out of 100 come to me and say your work is very fascinating. I'd be interested to work. For you, and one out of 100 come and say, you're wrong.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, that information is a resource, you can't have infinite information in finite space. Information propagates and interacts. And from there, you erect the scaffolding of physics. Now, it happens, the words I just said look a lot like quantum field theories. But there's an interesting way where instead of starting with different differential equations to get to quantum field theories and quantum field theories you get to quantization, if you start from computation information, you begin sort of quantized and you build up from there. And so that's the sense in which absolutely I think about the universe as a computer, the easy way to understand that is Just almost anything is computationally universal, but the deep way is it's a real fundamental way to understand how the universe works.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who starts with a theory of the universe should start with information and computation as the fundamental resources that explain nature. And then you build up from that to something that looks like throwing baseballs down a slope. And so in that sense, The work on physics and computation. Has many applications that we've been talking about, but more deeply, it's really getting at new ways to think about how the universe works. And there are a number of things that are hard to do in traditional physics that make more sense when you start with information and computation as the root of physical theory.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can't be true because information is a fundamental resource that's connected to energy. And in fact, one of my favorite questions you can ask a cosmologist to trip them up is ask, is information a conserved quantity in the universe? Was all the information created in the Big Bang or can the universe create information? And I've yet to meet a cosmologist who doesn't stutter and not clearly know how to handle that existential question. But sort of putting that to a side, in physics theory the way it's taught, Information comes late. You're taught about X, a variable, which can contain infinite information, but physically that's unrealistic. And so physics theories have to find ways to cut that off. So instead, There are a number of people”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the description of nature. So physics is written in terms of partial differential equations. That is an information technology from two centuries ago. The equations of physics are not This would sound very strange to say, but the equations of physics Schr ⁇ dinger's equations and Maxwell's equations and all of them are not fundamental. They're a representation of physics that was accessible to us in the era of having a pencil and a piece of paper. They have a fundamental problem, which is if you make a dot on a piece of paper in traditional physics theory, there's infinite information in that dot. A point has infinite information.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would even kind of say quantum computing is overhyped in that there's a few things quantum computing is going to be good at. One is breaking crypto systems, but we know how to make new crypto systems. What it's really good at is modeling other quantum systems. So for studying nanotechnology, it's going to be powerful. But quantum computing is not going to disrupt and change everything. But the reason I say that is this interesting group of strange people who helped invent quantum computing before it was clear anything was there. One of the main reasons they did it wasn't to make a computer that can break a crypto system. It was you could turn this backwards. You could be surprised quantum mechanics can compute, or you can go in the opposite direction and say, if quantum mechanics can compute,”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it really is. It really is. And that's where you can't separate communication, computation, and fabrication. You can't separate computer science and physical science. You can't separate hardware and software. They all intersect right at that place.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's why for me the heart of this whole conversation is morphogenesis. So just to come back to that, what Turing... Ended his sadly cut short life Studying was how genes give rise to form. So how the small amount of it relatively, in effect, small amount of information in the genome can give rise to the complexity of who you are. And that's where What resides is this molecular intelligence, which is first how to describe you, but then how to describe you such that you can exist and you can reproduce and you can grow and you can evolve. And so that's the seat of our molecular intelligence.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost any non trivial physical system is computationally universal. So the first part of the answer to your question is this comes back to my comment about how do you bootstrap a civilization. You just don't need much to be computationally universal. So then there isn't today a notion of like fabricational universality or fabricational complexity, the sort of numbers I've been giving you about you eating lunch versus the chip fab, sort of that's in the same spirit of what Shannon did. But once you connect computational universality to kind of fabricational universality, you then get the ability to grow and adapt and evolve.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be universal, you need a persistent state, you need a nonlinear operation to interact with them. And you need connectivity. So that's what you need to show computational universality. So they showed that a CA modeling billiard balls is a universal computer. Chris Moore went on to show that instead of chaos Turing showed their problems in computation that you can't solve, that they're harder than you can't predict. They're actually in a deep reason. They are unsolvable. Chris Moore showed it's very easy to make physical systems that are uncomputable, that what the physics system does, just bouncing balls and surfaces, you can make systems that solve uncomputable problems. And so only”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So understand what it is much easier than it sounds. I complained about Turing's machine making a physics mistake. Turing never intended it to be a computer architecture. He used it just to prove results about uncomputability. What Turing did on what is computation is exquisite, is gorgeous. He gave us our notion of computational universality. And something that sounds deep and turns out to be trivial is it's really easy to show almost everything is computationally universal. So Norm Margulis wrote a beautiful paper with Tom Toffelli showing in a cellular automata world is like the game of life where you just move tokens around. They showed that modeling billiard balls on a billiard table with cellular automata is a universal Computer”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they look like they grew in a forest because that's sort of exactly what they are, that they're solving the ways of how you handle loads in the same way biology does. And so you get things that look like trees and shells and all of that. And so that's a peek at this transition to From we design to, we teach the machines how to design.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an early peak at that, which is there's a misleading term, which is generative design. Generative design is where you don't tell a computer how to design something. You tell the computer what you want it to do. That doesn't work, that only works in limited subdomains. You can't do really complex functionality that way. The one place it's mature, though, is topology optimization for structure. So let's say you wanted to make a bicycle or a table You describe the loads on it and it figures out how to design it. And what it makes are beautiful organic looking things. These are things that look like they grew in a forest.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And just numerically, I said big computations now have the degrees of freedom of the brain. And they're showing a lot of the phenomenology of what we think as properties of what a brain can do. And I don't see any reason to invoke anything else.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have really interesting echoes to how brains work. And there's an interesting conversation that's sort of coming back of neuroscientists looking over the shoulder of people training these deep networks, seeing interesting echoes for how the brain works, interesting parallels with it. And so I didn't say consciousness. I just said cognition, but I don't know any experimental evidence that points to anything in neurobiology that says we need quantum mechanics. And I view the question about whether a large language model is conscious as silly in that Biology is full of hacks. It works There's no evidence we have that there's anything deeper going on than just this sort of stacking up of hacks in the brain.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That led to perceptrons that then through a couple boom busts led to deep learning. One of the interesting things about that sequence is it diverged off. So deep neural networks used in machine learning diverged from trying to understand how the brain works. What makes them work, what's emerged is it's a really interesting story. This may be too much of a technical detail, but it has to do with function approximation that we talked about exponentials. A deep network needs an exponentially larger shallow network to do the same function. And that exponential is what gives the power to deep networks. But what's interesting is the sort of lessons about building these deep architects. And how to train them.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How they sense magnetic fields. That involves a coupling between a very weak energy with a magnetic field coupling into chemical reactions. And there's a beautiful system. Standard in chemistry is magnetic fields like this can influence chemistry, but there are biological circuits that are carefully balanced with two pathways that become unbalanced with magnetic fields. So each of these areas are expensive for biology. It has to consume resources to use quantum mechanics in this way. So, those are places where we know there's quantum mechanics in biology. In cognition, there's just no evidence. There's no evidence of anything quantum mechanical going on in how cognition works. I'm saying cognition. I'm not saying consciousness. But to get from cognition to consciousness So McCullough and Pitts made a model of neurons.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and I say that very precisely in the following sense. I was a program manager somewhat by accident in a DARPA program on quantum biology. And so biology Trivially uses quantum mechanics that were made out of atoms, but the distinction is in quantum computing, quantum information, you need quantum coherence. And there's a lot of muddled thinking about like collapse of the wave function and claims of quantum computing that garbles just Quantum coherence, you can think of it as a wave that has very special properties, but these wave-like properties. And so there's a small set of places where biology uses quantum mechanics in that deeper sense. One is how light is converted to energy in photosystems. It looks like one is all faction, how your nose is able to tell different smells. Probably one has to do with how birds navigate.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I won't name names, but if you know who I'm talking about, it's probably clear. I once did a drive In fact, up to the Mussoline era villa outside Torino in the early days of what became quantum computing with a famous person who thinks about quantum mechanics and consciousness. And we had the most infuriating conversation that went roughly along the lines of. Consciousness is weird. Quantum mechanics is weird. Therefore, quantum mechanics explains consciousness. That was roughly the logical process.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And there's a brain centrism that assumes our intelligence is centered in our brain. And in endless ways in this conversation, we've been talking about molecular intelligence. Our molecular systems do a deep kind of artificial intelligence. All the things you think of as artificial intelligence does in... Representing knowledge, storing knowledge, searching over knowledge, adapting to knowledge are molecular systems do, but the output isn't just a thought, it's us. It's the evolution of us. And that's the real horizon to come is now embodying AI of not just a processor and a robot, but building systems that really can grow and evolve.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we'll keep thinking as well as computers. And as I described, while we've been going through these five boom busts, if you just look at the numbers of ops per second bits storage, bits of I.O., that's the more interesting one. That's been steady, and that's what finally caught up to people. But as we've talked about a couple times, there's eight orders of magnitude to go, not in the intelligence and the transistors or in the brain, but in the embodied intelligence, in the intelligence in our body.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Embodied AI, molecular intelligence. So to step back to this AI story, there was automation and that was going to change everything. Then there were expert systems. There was then the first phase of the neural network systems. There have been about five of these. In each case on the slope up, it's going to change everything. In each case, what happens is on the slope down, we sort of move the goalposts and it becomes sort of irrelevant. So a good example is going up, computer chess was going to change everything. Once computers could play chess, that fundamentally changes the world. Now on the downside, computers play chess. Winning at chess is no longer seen as a unique human thing, but people still play chess. This new phase is going to take a new chunk of things that we thought.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can already, you know, it's exploding, but you can already see where it's heading, you know, how it's going to saturate what happens on the far side. The big thing that's not yet on horizons is”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what limits the speed of the computer is how fast you want an answer and how certain you want the answer to be. But where orders of magnitude away from that? So I have a student Cameron working with Lincoln Labs on making superconducting computers that operate near this Landauer limit that are orders of magnitude more efficient. So stepping back to all of that whole tour was driven by your question about life and right at the heart of it is Maxwell's demon. Life exists because it can locally violate thermodynamics. It can locally violate thermodynamics because of intelligence. And it's molecular intelligence that I would even go out on a limb to say we can already see we're beginning to come to the end of this. Current AI phase. So depending on how you count, this is, I'd say, the fifth AI boom bust cycle.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the demon open and closes the door, as long as it remembers what it did, you can run the whole thing backwards. But when the demon forgets, Then you can't run it backwards. And that's where you get dissipation. And that's where you get the violation of thermodynamics. And so the explanation of Maxwell's demon is that it's in the demon's brain. So then Rolf's colleague Charlie at IBM then shocked Ralph by showing you can compute with arbitrarily low energy. One of the things that's not well covered is the big computers used for big machine learning, the data centers use tens of megawatts of power. They use as much power as a city. Charlie showed you can actually compute with arbitrarily low amounts of energy by making computers that can go backwards as well as forwards.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That problem is connected to everything we just spoke about for the last few hours. So Leo Zillard around early 1900s was a deep physicist who then had a lot to do with also post-war anti-nuclear things. But he reduced Maxwell's demon to a single molecule. So the molecule and the question is which side of the partition is it on, that led to the idea of one bit of information. So Shannon credited Zalard's analysis of Maxwell's demon for the invention of the bit. For many years, people tried to explain Maxwell's demon by like the energy in the demon looking at the molecule or the energy to open and close the door and nothing ever made sense. Finally, Rolf Landauer, one of the colleagues I mentioned at IBM, finally solved the problem. He showed that you can explain Maxwell's demon by you need the mind of the demon.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After it does that for a while, one side is hot, one is cold, once something is hot and is cold, you can make an engine. And so you close that and you make an engine and you make energy. So, the demon is violating thermodynamics because it's never touching the molecule. Yet by just opening and closing the door, it can make arbitrary amounts of energy. And power a machine. And in thermodynamics, you can't do that. So that's Maxwell's demon.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so Maxwell, who helped give rise to the science of thermodynamics, posited a problem that was so infuriating it led to a series of suicides. There was a series of advisors and advisees three in a row that all ended up committing suicide that happened to work on this problem. Maxwell's demon is this simple but infamous problem where right now in this room we're surrounded by molecules and they run at different velocities. Imagine a container that has a wall and it's got gas on both sides and a little door. And if the door is a molecular sized creature and it could watch the molecules coming. And when a fast molecule is coming, it opens the door. When a slow molecule is coming, it closes the door.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So studying thermodynamics. Which is exactly the question of batteries run out and need recharging. Equipment. Cars get old and fail, yet life Doesn't. And that's why there's a sense in which life seems to violate thermodynamics, although of course it doesn't.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, molecular biology is dominated by geometry. That's why the protein folding is so important that the geometry gives the function. And there's this hierarchical construction of as you go through primary tertiary quatinary, the shapes of the molecules make the shape of the molecular machines. And they really are exquisite machines. If you look at how If you look at how your muscles move, if you were to see a simulation of it, it would look like a improbable science fiction cyborg world of these little walking robots that walk on a discrete lattice. They're really exquisite machines. And then from there, there's this whole hierarchical stack of once you get to the top of that, you then start making organelles that make cells that make organs. Through the stack of that hierarchy.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anticipate this. So fail fast is familiar, but fail fast tends to miss ready in aim. You can't just fail. You have to do your homework before the fail part and you have to do the aim part after the fail part. And so the whole language of research is about like milestones and deliverables. That works when you're going down a straight line, but it doesn't work for this kind of discovery. And to leap to something you said that really important is I view part of what the Fab Lab network is doing is Giving more people the opportunity to fail.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, to stay with that example, what we propose to do was to make a fluidic ribosome and the project crashed and burned. It was a disaster. This is what came out of it. And so it was. Precisely ready fire aim, and that we had to do a lot of homework to be able to make these microfluidic systems. The fire part was we didn't think too hard about making the ribosome. We just tried to do it. The aim part was we realized the ribosome failed, but something better had happened. And if you look all across research funding, research management, it”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now imagine a channel that has two wells and one bubble. If the bubble is in one well, the fluid has to go in the other channel. If the fluid is in the other well, it has to go in the first channel. So the position of the bubble can switch, it's a switch, it can switch the fluid between two channels. So now we have one element of switch. And it's also a memory because you can detect whether or not a bubble is stored there. Then if two bubbles meet, if you have two channels crossing, a bubble can go through one way or a bubble can go through the other way. But if two bubbles come together, then they push on each other and one goes one way and one goes the other way. That's a logic operation. A logic gate. So we now have a switch, we have a memory, and we have a logic gate, and that's everything you need to make a universal computer.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so I'll come back and explain it. But what it led to was we showed fluids could do, it'd been known fluid could do logic, like old automobile transmissions do logic, but that's macroscopic. It didn't work at little scales. We showed with these bubbles, we could do it at little scales. Then I'm going to come back and explain it. But what came out of that is MANU then showed you could make a 50-cent microscope using little bubbles. And then the techniques we developed are what we use to transplant genomes to make synthetic life all came out of the failure of trying to make the genome, the ribosome. Now, so the way the bubbologic works is in a little channel, Fluid at small scales is fairly viscous. It's sort of like pushing jello, think of it as. If a bubble gets stuck, the fluid has to detour around it.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Here's one more example. With a student Manu, we talked about ribosomes and I was trying to build a ribosome that worked on fluids so that I could place the little parts we're talking about. And it kept failing because bubbles would come into our system and the bubbles would make the whole thing stop working. And we spent about half a year trying to get rid of the bubbles. Then Manu said, wait a minute. The bubbles are actually better than what we're doing. We should just use the bubbles. And so we invented how to do universal object with little logic with little bubbles and fluid.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a complete parallel history of Maxwell de Boltzmann to Zalard to Landauer to Bennett. Most people won't know most of these names, but this whole parallel history thinking deeply about how computation and physics relate. So I was collaborating with that whole group of people and then at MIT, I was in this high traffic environment. I wasn't deeply inspired to think about better ways to detect shoplifting tags, but stumbled across companies that needed help with that and was thinking about it. And then I realized those two worlds intersected and we could use the failed approach for the shoplifting tags to make early quantum computing algorithms.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source