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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“I wouldn't call it guts, I would call it collaboration. So at IBM, there was this amazing group of, like, I mentioned Charlie Bennett and David DiVincenzo and Ralph Landau and Nabil Lamir. And these were all gods of thinking about physics and computing. I yelled at the whole computer industry being based on a fiction, metropolis, programmers frolicking in the garden while somebody moves levers in the basement.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Algorithm, and then it was used for Sure's factoring algorithm, and it worked out. The systems we did it in nuclear magnetic resonance don't scale beyond a few qubits, but the techniques have lived on. And so all the current quantum computing techniques grew out of the ways we would talk to these spins. I'm telling this whole story because it came from a bad way to make a shoplifting tag.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For spin resonance, the sort of things you use when you go in an MRI machine. And so I was studying how to use that. And it turns out that it was a bad idea. You couldn't remotely use it for shoplifting tags. But I realized you could compute. And so with a group of colleagues thinking about early quantum computing like David DeVincenzo and Charlie Bennett, was articulating what are the properties you need to compute and then looking at how to make the tags. It turns out the tags were a terrible idea for sensing objects in a supermarket checkout, but I realized they were computing. So with Ike Chuang and a few other people, we realized we could program nuclear spins to compute. And so that's what we use to do Grover search.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I was studying how you can remotely sense materials to make low cost tags that could let you distinguish multiple objects simultaneously to do that you need nonlinearity so that the signal is modulated And so I was looking for material sources of nonlinearity. And that led me to look at how nuclear spins interact.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Source of great frustration. So I mentioned the early quantum computing. So quantum computing is this power of using quantum mechanics to make computers that for some problems are dramatically more powerful than classical computers. Before it started, there was a really interesting group of people who knew a lot about physics and computing that were inventing what became quantum computing before it was clear anything there was an opportunity there. It was just studying how those relate. Here's how it fits to the ReadyFire aim. I was doing really short-term work in my lab on shoplifting tags. This was really before there was modern RFID. And so how you put tags in objects to sense them. Something we just take for granted commercially. And there was a problem of how you can sense multiple objects at the same time.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, everything I've ever worked on has failed. But in failing something better happened. So the way I like to describe it is ready aim fire is you do your homework. You aim carefully at a target you want to accomplish. And if everything goes right, you then hit the target and succeed. What I do, you can think of as ready fire aim. So you do a lot of work to get ready. Then you close your eyes and you don't really think about where you're aiming, but you look very carefully at where you did aim. You aim after you fire. And the reason that's so important is if you do ready aim fire, the best you can hope is hit what you aim at. So let me give you some examples because this is a source of grateful.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we need to invest in that pipeline. The reason I considered a mistake is almost all of the examples we've been talking about in my lab went backwards, that the basic research came from applications. And further, almost all of the examples we've been talking about came fundamentally from mistakes.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just come from so I had mentioned Van Ever Bush and he wrote a really influential thing called the Endless Frontier. So science won World War II. The more known story is nuclear bombs. The less well-known story is the Rad Lab. So at MIT, an amazing group of people invented radar, which is really credited as winning the war. So after the war, grand old man from MIT and was charged with science won the war, how do we maintain that edge? And the report he wrote led to the National Science Foundation and the modern notion we take for granted, but didn't really exist before then of public funding of research or research agencies. In it, he made again what I consider an important mistake, which is he described basic research leads to applied research, leads to applications, leads to commercialization, leads to impact.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I skipped over that. But my favorite sensor is a step response. So if you just make a step and measure the response to the electric field, that ranges from user interfaces to positioning to material properties. And if you do it at higher frequencies, you get chemistry. And you can get all of that just from a step in an electric field. So for example, once you have time resolution in logic, something as simple as two electrodes let you do amazingly capable sensing. So we've been talking about all the work I do. There's a story about how it happens, where do I ideas come from?”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, go through primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary You extract properties like conducting, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic dielectric flexoral. These are the kind of roughly 20 properties. With those are enough for us to assemble logic and they're enough for us to assemble actuation. With logic and actuation, we can make micro-robots The micro robots can build bigger robots, the bigger robots can then take the building block materials and make the structural elements that you then do to make construction. And then you boot up through the stages of a technological civilization.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and I say that not philosophically, just empirically. That's where it's heading. I like thinking about how you bootstrap a civilization on Mars, that problem. There's a fun video on bonus material for the movie with a neat group of people we talk about it because it has really profound implications back here on Earth about how we live sustainably.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have typical but not extremal properties, but they're good enough, you can combine them to make you. So what this is leading towards is technology doesn't need enormous global supply chains. It just needs about 20 properties you can compose to create all technology as the minimum building blocks for a technological civilization.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's sort of how you do your own personal industrial revolution. ISRU is what NASA calls in situ resource utilization. And that's how do you go to a planet and create a civilization. ISRU has essentially assumed Gingari. You go through the Industrial Revolution and you create the inventory of 100,000 resistors. What we're finding is the way the minimum building blocks for a civilization is Roughly 20 parts. So it's interesting about the amino acids is they're not interesting, they're hydrophobic or hydrophilic.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So yeah, so ultimately absolutely. If you add everything I'm talking about, it's building up to creating life in non living materials. And I don't view this as copying life. I view it as deriving life. I didn't start from how does biology work and then I'm going to copy it. I start from how to solve problems and then it leads me to, in a sense, rediscover biology. So if we go back to Valentina in Ghana making her circuit board, she still needs a chip fab very far away to make the processor owner circuit board. For her to make the processor locally for all the reasons we described, you actually need the deep things we were just talking about. And so it really does lead you. So let's see, there's a wonderful series of books by Gingery. Book one is how to make a charcoal furnace. And at the end of book seven, you have a machine shop. So”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not sort of metaphorically, but create life in that you need to learn how to evolve. But evolutionary design has a really misleading trivial meaning. It's not as simple as you randomly mutate things. It's this much more deep embodiment of AI and morphogenesis.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the developmental programs in the genome beautifully encapsulate the lessons of AI. And it's molecular intelligence. It's AI embodied in our genome. It's every bit as profound as the cognition in our brain, but now this is sort of thinking in molecular thinking in how you design. And so I'd say the most fundamental problem we're working on is it's kind of tautological that when you design a phone, you design the phone. You represent the design of the phone. But that actually fails when you get to the sort of complexity that we're talking about. And so there's this profound transition to come. Once I can have self-reproducing assemblers placing 10 to the 18 parts, you need to”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You are stored not as a body plan, but as a growth plan. And there's two reasons for that. One reason is just compression. Billions of genes can place trillions of cells. But the much deeper one is evolution doesn't randomly perturb. Almost anything you did randomly in the genome would be fatal or inconsequential but not interesting. But when you modify things in these developmental programs, you go from like webs for swimming to fingers or you go from walking to wings for flying. It's a space in which search is interesting. This is the heart of the success of AI. In part, it was the scaling we talked about a while ago. And in part, it was the representations for which search is effective. AI has found good representations. It hasn't found new ways to search, but it's found good representations of search.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nowhere in your genome is the number five. It doesn't store the fact that you have five fingers. What it stores is what's called a developmental program. It's a series of steps. And the steps have the character of like grow up a gradient or break symmetry. And at the end of that developmental program, you have five fingers.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the end, most fundamentally Literally the mother of all problems is Who designed us? So assume success and that we're going to transition to the machines making machines and all of these new sort of social systems we're describing will help manage them and curate them and democratize them. If we close the gap, I just let off with 10 to the 10 to 10 to the 18 between Chip Fab and U, we're ultimately in marrying communication computation and fabrication going to be able to create unimaginable complexity. And how do you design that? And so I'd say. The deepest of all questions that I've been working on is goes back to the oldest part of our genome. So in our genome, what are called Hox genes? And these are morphogenes.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I don't say that as sort of dewey-eyed naive. I say that empirically from just years of seeing how this plays out in communities.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, but really, the heart of what we do is you could do this by yourself in a basement for And there's an incentive to do it in the open, not in the dark. And that might sound naive, but in the sort of places we're working Again, bad people do bad things in these places already, but providing openness and providing transparency is a key part of managing these. And so it transitions from regulating risks as regulation to soft power to manage them”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prior threats we dealt with command and control. So like early color copiers had unique codes and you could tell which copier made them. Eventually you couldn't keep up with that. There was a famous meeting at Asilamar in the early days of recombinant DNA where that community recognized the dangers of what it was doing and put in place a regime to help manage it. And so that led to the kind of research management. MIT has an office that supervises research and it works with the national office. That works if you can identify who's doing it and where. Don't work in this world we're describing. So anybody could do this anywhere. And so what we've found is you can't contain this. It's already out. You can't forbid because there isn't command and control the most useful thing you can do is provide incentives for transparency.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so something to be scared about is a Fab Lab can make a biolab, a biolab can make biotechnology somebody could learn to make a virus That's scary. That's unlike some of the things I said, I don't worry about that's something I really worry about that is scary. Now, how do you deal with that?”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the Fab Lab, you could roughly make a bio lab, then learn biotechnology. Now, that's terrifying because making self-reproducing gray goo that outcompetes biology, I consider Doom because biology knows everything I'm describing and is really good at what it does. How to grow almost anything, you learn skills in biotechnology that let you make serious biological threats.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for two reasons. One reason was because if we rely on informational superiority in the battlefield, it means other people could get access to it. But this intelligence person's point, bless him, wasn't that it was getting at the root causes of conflict is if this young girl in an African village could actually master surface mount electronics, it changes some of the most fundamental things about recruitment for terrorism, impact of economic migration, basic assumptions about an economy. It's just existential for the future of the planet.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Malevolent. Let me tell you a story about I was doing a briefing for the National Academy of Sciences group that advises the intelligence communities. And I talked about the kind of research we do. And at the very end, I showed a little video clip of Valentina in Ghana making a local girl making surface mount electronics in the Fab Lab. And I showed that to this room full of people. One of the members of the intelligence community got up livid and said, how dare you waste our time showing us a young girl in an African village making service mount electronics? We're looking at, we need to know about disruptive threats to the future of the United States. And somebody else got up in the room and yelled at him, and you idiot, I can't think of anything more important than this.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the 1952 NC Mill was subtractive. You remove material. And 3D printing additive, and there's a couple claims to the invention of 3D printing. That's closer to what's called net shape, which is you don't have to cut away the material you don't need. You just put material where you do need it. And so that's the 3D printing revolution. But there are all sorts of limitations on 3D printing to the kinds of materials you can print, the kind of functionality you can print. We're just not going to get to making everything in a cell phone on a single printer. But I do expect to make everything in a cell phone with an assembler. And so instead of printing and cutting technologically, it's this transition to assembling and disassembling. Going back to Shannon and van Neumann, going back to the ribosome 4 billion years ago. Now, you come to...”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It reduces global supply chains to locally sourcing these building blocks. But one of the key implications is it gets rid of technological trash because you can disassemble and reuse the parts, not throw them away. And so initially that's of interest for things at the end of long supply chains like satellites on orbit. But one of the things coming is eliminating technical trash through reuse of the building blocks.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's as simple as there's no trash in a Lego room. When you assemble Lego, the Lego bricks have enough information to disassemble them. So as you go through this Fab 1234 story, one of the implications of this transition to from printing to assembling. So the real breakthrough technologically isn't additive versus subtractive, which is a subject of a lot of attention and hype. 3D printers are useful. We spun off companies like FormLabs led by Maxwell 3D printing. But in a fab lab, it's one of maybe 10 machines. It's used, but it's only part of the machines. The real technological change is when we go from printing and cutting to assembling and disassembling. But that reduces inventories of hundreds of thousands of parts to just having a few parts to make almost any.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, first, let me start with a benevolent story. Is trash is an analog concept. There's no trash in a forest, all the parts get disassembled and reused. Trash means something doesn't have enough information to tell you how to reuse it.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we find is people don't go to them to make weapons, which you can already do anyway. It's an alternative to making weapons. Coming back to your question, I'd say the single most important thing I've learned is the greatest natural resource of the planet is this amazing density of Brightonvent of people whose brains are underused. And you could view the social engineering of this lab work as creating the capacity for them. And so in the end, the way this is going to impact society isn't going to be command and control. It's how the world uses it. And it's been really gratifying for me to see just how it does.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big platforms. In this world of machines that can make machines, I'm asked, for example, what's the killer opportunity? Who's going to make all the money? Who to invest in? But if the machine can make the machine, it's not a great business to invest in the machine. In the same way that if you can think globally but produce locally, then the way the technology goes out into society isn't a function of central control, but is fundamentally distributed. Now, that raises an obvious kind of concern, which is, well, doesn't this mean you could make bombs and guns and all of that? The reason that's much less of a problem than you would think is making bombs and guns and all of that is a very well-met. Anywhere we go, there's a fine supply chain for weapons. Hobbyists have been making guns for ages, and guns are available just about anywhere. So you could go into the lab and make a gun. Today it's not a very good gun, and guns are easily available. And so generally, we've run these lab in.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And the but to the yes but is let me clarify two things. One is that immediately raises King Charles fear of Gregu, of runaway, mute and self-reproducing things. The reason why there are many things I can tell you to worry about, but that's not one of them, is if you want things to autonomously self-reproduce and take over the world, that means they need to compete with nature on using the resources of nature, of water and sunlight. And in light of everything I'm describing, biology knows everything I told you. Every single thing I explain, biology already knows how to do what I'm describing isn't new for biology. It's new for non-biological systems. So in the digital era, the economic win ended up being centralized.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've had a few students almost get to that. And so in what I'm describing, there's this stack where we're getting closer, but it's still quite a few years to really go from a, so there's a layer below the transistors where we assemble the base materials that become the transistor. We're now just at the edge of assembling the transistors to make the circuits. We can assemble the micro parts to make the micro robots. We can assemble the bigger robots. And in the coming years, we'll be patching together all of those scales.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have to print the thesis with the means to exit the printer and it has to contain its description of the thesis that says how to do that.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's why that's a great question. So I have a prize that's almost but not been claimed for the students whose thesis can walk out of the printer.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. That's a research project in my lab called DICE on discrete assembly of integrated electronics. And we're just at the point to really start to take seriously this notion of not having a chip fab make integrated electronics, but having not a 3D printer, but a thing that's across between a pick and place makes circuit boards in 2D. The 3D printer extrudes in 3D. We're making sort of a micromanipulator that acts like a printer but it's placing to build electronics in 3D.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back in the lab, what we can do today is we have robots that can build structures and can assemble more robots that build structures. We have finer resolution robots that can build micromechanical systems. So robots that can build robots that can walk and manipulate. And we're just now, we have a project at the layer below that where there's endless attention today to billion-dollar chipfab investments. But a really interesting thing we pass through is today the smallest transistors you can buy as a single transistor, just commercially for electronics, is actually the size of an early transistor in an integrated circuit. So we're using these machines making machines, making assemblers to place those parts to not use a billion dollar chip fab to make integrated circuits, but actually assemble little electronic components.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But other than that, they're making their own things. And I should note as a footnote, the stack I described of computers controlling machines to machine-making machines to assemblers to self-assemblers, view that as fab 1, 2, 3, 4. So we're transitioning from fab one to fab two, and the research in the lab is three and four. At this fab two stage, a big component of this is sustainability in the material feedstocks. So Alicia, colleague, in Chile, is leading a great effort looking at how you take forest products and coffee grounds and seashells and a range of locally available materials and produce the high-tech materials that go into the lab. So all of that is machine building today.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a student Nadia Peak with Jonathan Ward, who for me started this idea of how do we use the tools in my lab to make the tools in the lab? In a very clear sense, they are making self reproducing machines. So one of the really cool things that's happened is there's a whole network of machine builders around the world. So there's Danielle now in Germany and Jens in Norway. Each of these people has learned the skills to go into a fab lab and make a machine. And so we started creating a network of super fabs. So the fab lab can make a machine, but it can't make a number of the precision parts of the machine. So in places like Bhutan or Carolyn the south of India, we started creating super fab labs that have more advanced tools to make the parts of the machines so that the machines themselves become even cheaper. So that is self-reproducing machines, but you need to feed it things like bearings or microcontrollers. They can't make those parts.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has the power of the original PDP computer, not metaphorically, but literally. And now there's trillions of those in the same sense that when we finally merge materials with the machines in the self-assembly, that's like the Internet of Things stage. But here's the important lesson. If you look at the computing analogy, computing expanded exponentially, but it really didn't fundamentally change the core things happened in that transition in the minicomputer era. So in the same sense, the research now, we spent a while talking about, is how we get to the replicator. Today you can do all of that if you close your eyes and view the whole FabLab as a machine. In that room, you can make almost anything, but you need a lot of inputs. Bit by bit, the inputs will go down and the size of the room will go down as we go through each of these stages.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make anything, then if you look at that scaling labs today are transitioning from buying a machine to machines making machines. So we're transitioning to, you can go to a fab lab not to make a project to make, but to make a new machine. So we talked about the deep sense of self-replication. There's a very practical sense of fab lab machines making fab lab machines. And so that's the equivalent of the habeas computer era, what it's called the Altair historically. Then the work we spent a while talking about assemblers and self-assemblers, that's the equivalent of smartphones and Internet of Things. That's when, so the assemblers are like the smartphone where a smartphone today has the capacity of what used to be a supercomputer in your pocket. And then the smart thermostat on your wall.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was one whirlwind computer and my team made the first real-time computer. There were thousands of PDPs. There were millions of habeas computers that came from that, billions of personal computers, trillions of Internet of Things. So now if we look at this FabLab story, 1952 was the NC mill. There are now thousands of Fab Labs, and the FAB lab costs exactly the same cost and complexity of the mini computer. So on the minicomputer, it didn't fit in your pocket. It filled a room, but video games, email, word processing, really anything you do, the internet, anything you do with a computer today happened at that era because it got on this scale of a workgroup, not a corporation. In the same way, Fab labs are like the mini computers inventing how does the world work if anybody can.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“South Africa, I mentioned Sochengovi in this apartheid township, the local technical institute taught kids how to make bricks and fold sheets. It was punitive. But Topiso in the Fab lab was actually doing all the work of my MIT classes. And so over and over, we found precisely the same kind of bright invent of creativity. Historically, the answer was you're smart, go away. It's sort of like me in vocational school. But in this lab network, what we could then do is in effect bring the world to them. Now let's look at the scaling of all of this. So there's one earth, a thousand cities, a million towns, a billion people, a trillion things.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“MIT a few years back, somebody added up businesses spun off from MIT, and it's the world's 10th economy. It falls between India and Russia. And I view that in a way as a bad number because it's only a few thousand people, and these aren't uniquely the 4,000 brightest people. It's just a productive environment for them. And what we found is in rural Indian villages in African shanty towns and Arctic hamlets, I find exactly precisely that profile. So Ling cited a few hours above Tromso, way above the Arctic circles. It's so far north, the satellite dishes look at the ground, not the sky. Hans Christian in the lab was considered a problem in the local school because they couldn't teach him anything. I showed him a few projects. Next time I came back, he was designing and building little robot vehicles.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A mainframe computer, Seymour said, The goal was not for the kids to program the robot, it was for the kids to create the robot. And so, in that sense, the fab labs, which for me were just this accident, he described as sort of this fulfillment of the arc of kids learn by experimenting, it was to give them the tools to create, not just assemble things and program things, but actually create. So coming to your question, what I've learned is...”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mentioned Marvin. Another mentor at MIT sadly no longer living is Seymour Pepper. So Pepper studied with Piaget. He came to MIT to get access to the early computer. Piaget was a pioneer in how kids learn. Papper came to MIT to get access to the early computers with the goal of letting kids play with them. Piaget helped show kids are like scientists. They learn as scientists and it gets kind of throttled out of them. Seymour wanted to let kids have a broader landscape to play. Seymour's work led with Mitch Resnick to Lego, Logo, Mindstorms, all of that stuff. As FabLab spread, and we started creating educational programs for kids in them, Seymour said something really interesting. He made a gesture. He said, it was a thorn in his side that they invented what's called the turtle. A robot kids could, early robot kids could program to connect it to”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, yep And it's grown to multiple labs at MIT with as many people involved in teaching as taking it. And there's even a Harvard lab for the MIT class.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Kelly didn't make the screen body because it was for a thesis. She wasn't writing a research paper. It wasn't a business. Wanted was because she wanted one It was personal expression going back to me in vocational school, personal expression in these new means of expression. So that's happened every year since.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was transistorized as the TX. The TX was spun off from MIT as the PDP. PDPs were the mini computers that created the internet. So outside MIT was DEC Prime Wang Data General, the whole mini-computer industry. The whole computing industry was there. And it all failed when computing became personal. Ken Olsen, the head of digital, famously said, you don't need a computer at home. There's a little background to that, but deck completely missed computing became personal. So I mention all of that because I was asking had to do digital fabrication, but not really why. The students in this how to make class were showing me that the killer app of digital fabrication is personal fabrication.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source