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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Another project early on was a web browser for parrots, which have the cognitive ability of a young child and lets parrots surf the internet. Another was an alarm clock you wrestle with and prove you're awake. And what connects all of these is so MIT made the first real time computer the whirlwind.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gone on to do a number of interesting things. Median, who's gone on to do a number of interesting things, made a dress instrumented with sensors and spines. And when somebody creepy comes close, it would defend your personal space.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's no big agenda. It was just aimed at a few research students to use the machines. And it were completely unprepared for the first time we taught it. We were swamped by every year since hundreds of students try to take the class. It's one of the most oversubscribed classes at MIT. Students would say things like, you know, can you teach this at MIT? It seems too useful. It's just how to work these machines. The students in the class, I would teach them all the skills to use all these tools, and then they would do projects integrating them. And they're amazing. So Kelly was a sculptor, no engineering background. Her project was she made a device that saves up screams when you're mad and plays them back later.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's a sequence. With colleagues, I accidentally started a network of what's now 2,500 digital fabrication community labs called Fab Labs right now in 125 countries. And they double every year and a half. That's called Lass's Law after Sherry Lassiter, who I'll explain. So here's the sequence. We started Center for Bits and Atoms. Do the kind of research we're talking about. We had all of these machines and then had a problem. It would take a lifetime of classes to learn to use all the machines. So with colleagues who helped start CBA, we began a class modestly called How to Make Almost Anything.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the casual meaning is the computer controls the tool to make something. And that was invented when MIT stole it in 1952. There's the deep meaning of what the ribosome does, of a complex description doesn't describe a thing. A digital description becomes the thing. That's the path to the Star Trek replicator. And that's the thing that doesn't exist yet. Now, I think the best way to understand what this roadmap looks like is to now bring in fab labs and how they relate to all of this.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But now, the reason I'm mentioning that is the Chip fab making the supercomputer is placing about 10 to the 10 transistors a second while you're digesting your lunch right now you're placing about 10 to the 18 parts per second. There's an eight order of magnitude difference. So in computational capacity, it's done, we've caught up. But there's eight orders of magnitude difference in the rate at which biology can build versus state-of-the-art manufacturing can build. And that distinction is what we're talking about. That distinction is not analog, but this deep sense of digital fabrication, of embodying codes in construction. So a description doesn't describe a thing, but the description becomes the thing.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, let me give you the numbers. So let me relate this to right now we're living in AIMania explosion time. Let me relate that to what we're talking about. A hundred Petaflop computer, which is a current generation supercomputer, not quite the biggest ones, does 10 to the 17 ops per second. Your brain does 10 to the 17 ops per second. It is about 10 to the 15 synapses and they run at about 100 hertz. So as of a year or two ago, the performance of a big computer matched a brain. So you could view AI as a breakthrough, but the real story is within about a year or two ago, and let's see, the supercomputer has about 10 to the 15 transistors in the processors, 10 to the 15 transistors in the memory, which is the synapses in your brain. So the real breakthrough was the computers match the computational capacity of a brain. And so we'd be sort of derelict if they couldn't do about the same thing.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, the reason self-reproducing automata intellectually is so important, because this is the foundation of life. This is really just understanding the essence of how to life. And in effect, we're trying to create life and non-living material. The reason it's so important technologically is because that's how you scale capacity. That's how you can make an elephant from a ribosome because assemblers make assemblers.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a computation can store a description of how to build itself. But now there's a really hard problem, which is if you have that in your mind, how do you transfer it and wake up a thing that then can contain it? So how do you give birth to a thing that... And so with Stan Ulam, he invented cellular automata as a way to simulate these. But that was theoretical. Now, the work I'm describing in my lab is fundamentally how to realize it, how to realize self-reproducing automata. And so this is something Van Neumann thought very deeply and very beautiful about theoretically. And it's right at this intersection. It's not communication or computation or fabrication. It's right at this intersection where communication and computation meets fabrication”
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 at the heart of all of this. In the stack I described, so one student, Will Langford, made these micro robots out of little parts that then were using for Miana's bigger robots up through this hierarchy. And it's really realizing this idea of the self-reproducing automata. So Van Neumann, when I complained about the van Neumann architecture, It's not fair to van Neumann because he never claimed it as this architecture. He really wrote about it in this one fairly dreadful memo that led to all sorts of lawsuits and fights about the early days of computing. He did beautiful work on reliable computation and unreliable devices. And towards the end of his life, what he studied was how, and I have to say this precisely, how a computation communicates its own construction.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Early on, I tried to go in a straight line from the bottom to the top, and that ended up being a bad idea. Instead, we're kind of doing all of these in parallel, and then they're growing together. And so to make the larger scale structures, there's a lot of hype right now about 3D printing houses where you have a printer the size of the house. We're now working on using swarms of these table scale robots that walk on the structures to place the parts much more efficiently.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you think about this primary, secondary tertiary quaternary structure, in my lab, we're doing that, but on different length scales for different purposes. So we're making micro-robots out of nanobricks. And to make the robots to build large-scale structures in space, the elements of the robots now are centimeters rather than micrometers. And so the assembly robots for the bigger structures are Are the cells that make up the structure, but then we have functional cells, and so cells that can process and actuate, each cell can move one degree of freedom or attach or detach or process. Now, those elements I just described, we can make out of the still smaller parts. So eventually there's a hierarchy of the little parts make little robots that make bigger parts of bigger robots up through that hierarchy.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, as part of this digitization of materials, we're in effect trying to create something like amino acids for engineering, creating all of technology from 20 parts. As another discretion, I helped start an office for science in Hollywood. And there was a fun thing for the movie The Martian. I did a program with Bill Nye and a few others on how to actually build a civilization on Mars that they described in a way that I like as I was talking about how to go to Mars without luggage. And at heart, it's sort of how to create life in non-living materials.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the answer is different at different length scales. So to explain that, in biology, primary structure is the code in the messenger RNA that says what the ribosome should build. Secondary structure or geometrical motifs. They're things like helices or sheets. Tertiary structures are functional elements like electron donors or acceptors. Quaternary structure is things like molecular motors that are moving my mouth or making the synapses work in my brain. So there's that hierarchy of primary secondary tertiary quaternary. Now what's interesting is... You want to buy electronics today from a vendor, there are hundreds of thousands of types of resistors or capacitors or transistors, huge inventory. All of biology is just made from this inventory of 20 parts, the amino acids. And by composing them, you can create all of life.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Telescopes and space habitats where the ribosome, who I mentioned a little while back, can make an elephant one molecule at a time. Ribosomes are slow. They run at about one molecule a second, but ribosomes make ribosomes. So you have thousands of trillions of them, and that makes an elephant. In the same way, these little assembly robots I'm describing can make giant structures at heart because the robot can make the robot. So more recently to my students, Amira and Miana had a nature communication paper showing how this robot can be made out of the parts it's making so the robots can make the robots so you build up the capacity of robotic assembly.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So lightweight materials are crucial for energy efficiency. This led us the lightest weight high modulus material. We then showed that with just a few part types, we can tune the material properties. And then you can create really wild robots that instead of having a tool the size of a jumbo jet to make a jumbo jet, you can make little robots that walk on these cellular structures to build the structures where they error correct their position on the structure and they navigate on the structure. And so using all of that with NASA, we made morphing airplanes, a former student Kenny, Chung, and Ben Jeanette made a morphing airplane the size of NASA Langley's biggest wind tunnel with Toyota, we've made super efficiency race cars. We're right now looking at projects with NASA to build these for things like space telescope.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With global geometry determined from local constraints. And so digitizing the materials. And so I'm coming back to what are the biggest things I've made. My lab was working with the aerospace industry. So Spirit Aero was Boeing's factories. They asked us for how to join composites. When you make a composite airplane, you make these giant wing and fuselage parts. And they asked us for a better way to stick them together because the joints were a place of failure. Instead of making a few big parts, if you make little loops of carbon fiber and you reversibly link them in joints and you do it in a special geometry that balances being under constrained and over-constrained with just the right degrees of freedom, we set the world record for the highest modulus ultralight material just by, in effect, Making carbon fiber Lego.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, absolutely. So what the ribosome figured out four billion years ago is how to embody these digital properties, but not for communication or computation in effect, but for construction. So a number of projects in my lab have been studying the idea of digital materials. And think of a digital material just as Lego bricks. The precise meaning is”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can join bricks made out of dissimilar materials. You don't need a ruler for Lego because the geometry locally gives you the global parts. And there's no LEGO trash. The parts have enough information to disassemble them. Those are exactly the properties of a digital code.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in that machinery, it does everything Shannon and von Neumann taught us. You detect and correct errors. So if you mix chemicals, the error rate is about a part in 100. When you make elongate a protein in the ribosome, it's about a part in 10 to the four. When you replicate DNA, there's an extra level of error correction. It's a part in 10 to the 8. And so in the molecules that make you, you can detect and correct errors, and you don't need a ruler to make you. The geometry comes from your parts. So now compare a child playing with Lego and a state-of-the-art 3D printer or computerized milling machine. The tower made by a child is more accurate than their motor control because the act of snapping the bricks together gives you a constraint on the joints.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Billion dollar 3D printing company, that's the modern version. But all of that's analog, meaning the information is in the control computer. There's no information in the materials. And so it goes back to Vanever Bush's analog computer. If you make a mistake in printing or machining just the mistake accumulates, the real birth of computerized digital manufacturing is 4 billion years ago. That's the evolutionary age of the ribosome. So the way you're manufactured is there's a code that describes you, the genetic code. It goes to a micro machine, the ribosome, which is this molecular factory that builds the molecules that are you. The key thing to know about that is there are about 20 amino acids that get assembled.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jet aircraft were just emerging. There is a limit to turning cranks on a milling machine to make parts for jet aircraft. Now, this is a messy story. MIT actually stole computer-controlled machining from an inventor who brought it to MIT Wanted to do a joint project with the Air Force, and MIT effectively stole it from him. So it's kind of a messy history. But that sounds like the birth of computer-controlled machining, 1952. There are a number of inventors of 3D printing. One of the companies spun off from my lab by Max Lebovsky's form labs, which is now a...”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the exponential reduction of error below a threshold if you restore state is called a threshold theorem. That's what led to digital. That means unreliable things can work reliably. So Shannon did that for communication. Then von Neumann was inspired by that and applied it to computation. And he showed how an unreliable computer can operate reliably by using the same threshold property of restoring state. It was then forgotten many years. We had to rediscover it in effect in the quantum computing era when things are very unreliable again. But now to go back to how does this relate to the biggest things I've made? So in fabrication, MIT invented computer-controlled manufacturing in 1952.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he proved a couple things. But one of the main things he proved was a threshold theorem for channel capacity. And so what he showed was my voice to you right now is coming as a wave-through sound. And the further you get, the worse it sounds. But people watching this are getting it as packets of data in a network. When the computer, they're watching this gets the packet of information, it can detect and correct an error. And what Shannon showed is if the noise in the cable to the people watching this is above a threshold, they're doomed. But if the noise is below a threshold for a linear increase in the energy representing our conversation, the error rate goes down exponentially. Exponentials are fast. There's very few of them in engineering.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worked on it as a student, and he got so annoyed in his master's thesis he invented digital logic. But he then went on to Bell Labs. And what he did there was communication was beginning to expand. There was more demand for phone lines. And so there's a question about how many phone lines you could, phone messages you could send down a wire. And you could try to just make it better and better. He asked a question nobody had asked, which is rather than make it better and better, what's the limit to how good it can be?”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In his master's thesis, he invented our modern notion of digital logic, where it came from was Vaniever Bush was a grand old man at MIT. He created the post-war research establishment that led to the National Science Foundation, and he made an important mistake, which we can talk about. But he also made the differential analyzer, which was the last grade analog computer. So it was a room full of gears and pulleys, and the longer it ran, the worse the answer was. And Shannon...”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So, viewed from one direction, what we're talking about is a crazy random seeming of almost unrelated projects. But if you rotate 90 degrees, it's really just a core thought over and over again, just very literally how bits and atoms relate, how digital, just going from digital to physical in many different domains. But it's really just the same idea over and over again. So to understand the biggest things, let me go back to bring in now Shannon as well as Van Neumann. Yeah, so what is digital The casual obvious answer is digital in one and zero, but that's wrong. There's a much deeper answer, which is Claude Shannon at MIT wrote the best master thesis ever.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Developing Zeptajule electronics for the lowest power computing to micro machining diamond to take 10 million RPM bearings for molecular spectroscopy studies up to exploring robots to build 100 meter structures in space”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a well equipped research lab has the sort of tools we're talking about, but they're segregated in different places. They're typically also run by technicians where you then have an account and a project and you charge. All of these tools are essentially When you don't know what you're doing, not when you do know what you're doing, in that when you need to work across length scales where we don't, once projects are running in this facility, we don't charge for time, you don't make a formal proposal to schedule, and the users really run the tools, and it's for work that's kind of incohate, that needs to span these disciplines and length scales. And so... Work in the project today.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so usually nanometers, micrometers, millimeters, meters are segregated, input and output is segregated. We wanted to look just very literally how digital becomes physical and physical becomes digital. And fortunately, we got NSF on a good day, and they funded this facility of one of almost every tool to make anything. And so with a group of core colleagues that included Joe Jacobson, Ike Trying, Scott Manales, we launched CBA.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Todd and Joe Paradiso and my colleague, we started a consortium called Things That Think. And this was around the birth of Internet of Things and RFID. But then we started doing things like work we can discuss that became the beginnings of quantum computing and cryptography and materials and logic and microfluidics. And those needed much more significant infrastructure and were much longer research arcs. So with a bigger team of about 20 people, we wrote a proposal to the NSF to assemble one of every tool to make anything of any size was roughly the proposal.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As MIT's president towards the end of his tenure, if he said, I'm going to make a department for things that don't fit in departments, the departments would have screamed. But everybody was sort of paying attention to Nicholas creating the media lab, and Jerry kind of hid in it a department called Media Arts and Sciences. It's really the department of none of the above. And Jerry explaining that, and Nicholas then confirming it is really why I pivoted and went to MIT. Because my students who helped create quantum computing or synthetic life get degrees from media arts and sciences, this department of none of the above. So that led to coming to MIT.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Musical instrument. Right. So now to get back to MIT, I was spending a lot of outside time at IBM research that had gods of the foundations of computing. There's just amazing people there. And I had always expected to go to IBM to take over a lab. But at the last minute pivoted and came to MIT to take a position in the media lab and start what became the predecessor to CBA. Media Lab is well known for Nicholas Negroponte. What's less well known is the role of Jerry Wiesner. So Jerry was MIT's president before that Kennedy science advisor, grand old man of science. At the end of his life, he was frustrated by how knowledge was segregated. And so he wanted to create a department. Of none of the above. Department for work that didn't fit in departments. And the media lab, in a sense, was a cover story for him to hide a department.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we did a magic trick in Las Vegas, and then the crazy thing that happened after that was Phil Ritmuller came running into my lab. He worked with, this became with Honda and NEC. Airbags were killing infants in rear-facing child seats. Cars needed to distinguish a front-facing adult where you'd save the life versus a bag of groceries where you don't need to fire the airbag versus a rear-facing infant where you would kill it. And so the seat need to in effect see in 3D to understand the occupants. And so we took the pen and teller magic trick derived from Josh's thesis from yo-yo's cello to an auto show. And all the car companies said, great, when can we buy it? And so that became Ellis and it was a hundred million dollar a year business making sensors. There wasn't a lot of publicity because it was in the car, so the car didn't kill you. So they didn't.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had to instrument the bow without interfering with it. So I set up local electromagnetic fields where I would detect how those fields interact with the bow he's playing. But we had a problem that his hand whenever his hand got near these sensing fields, I would start sensing his hand rather than the materials on the bow. And I didn't quite understand what was going on with that interference. So my very first grad student ever, Josh Smith, did a thesis on tomography with electric fields, had to see in 3D with electric fields. At that point, research scientists in my lab, Joe Paradiso, it led to a collaboration with a pen and teller where we did a magic trick in Las Vegas to contact Houdini. And sort of these fields are sort of like contacting spirits.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Students to make it work once the technology becomes as invisible as the strad, then sure, absolutely he would take it. And by the way, as a footnote on the footnote, an accident in the sensing of Yo-Yos Cello led to $100 million a year auto safety business to control airbags and cars.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Him in sound. And so what it led to was I had started by thinking about ops per second, but Yo Yo's question was really resolution and bandwidth. It's how fast can you measure what he does? And the bandwidth and the resolution of detecting his controls and then mapping them into sounds. What we found, what he found was if you instrument everything he does and connect it to almost anything, it sounds like yo-yo, that the magic is in the control, not in ineffable details in how the wood wiggles. And so with Yo-Yo and Todd, that led to a piece towards the end, I asked Yo-Yo, what it would take for him to get rid of his stradd and use our stuff. And his answer was just logistics. It was at that time our stuff was like a rack of electronics and lots of cables and some grads.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So one part of that is to understand the computing. And if you look at the finest timescale and length scale you need to model the physics, it's not heroic. A good GPU can do teraflaps today. That used to be a national class supercomputer. Now it's just a GPU. And that's about if you take the timescales and length scales relevant for the physics. That's about the scale of the physics computing. For yo-yo, what was really driving it was he's completely unsentimental about the strad. It's not that it makes some magical wiggles in the sound wave. Its performance as a controller, how he can manipulate it as an interface device.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they'd be beautiful, but then they'd get soggy. And then I discovered in the basement of the music department at Cornell was David Borden, who you might not have heard of, but is legendary in electronic music because he was really the first electronic musician. So Bob Moog, who invented Moog synthesizers, was a physics student at Cornell like me crossing the street. And eventually he was kicked out and invented electronic music. David Borden was the first musician who created electronic music. So he's legendary for people like Phil Glass and Steve Reich. And so that got me thinking about I would behave as a scientist in the music department, but not in the physics department, but not in the music department got me thinking about what's the computational capacity of a musical instrument. And through Marvin, he introduced me to Todd back over at the Media Lab, who was just about to start a project with Yo-Yo Ma that led to a collaboration instrument.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This will be another slight digression. And Cornell, I would study physics, and then I would cross the street and go to the music department where I played the bassoon, and I would trim reeds and play the reeds.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So anything that wasn't the liberal arts was for commercial gain and was just making stuff and wasn't valid for serious study. And so that's why we're left with learning to weld wasn't a subject for serious study. But the means of expression have changed since the Renaissance. So micro machining or embedded coding is every bit expressive as painting a painting or writing a sonnet. never understanding this difference between computer science and physical science. The path that led me to create CBA with colleagues was I was what's called a junior fellow at Harvard. I was visiting MIT through Marvin because I was interested in the physics of musical instruments.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it wasn't until MIT, and I'll explain how CBA started, but I could create CBA, that I came to understand this is a mistake that dates back to the Renaissance. So in the Renaissance, the liberal arts emerged. And liberal doesn't mean politically liberal. This was the path to liberation, birth of humanism. And so the liberal arts were the trivium quadrivium roughly language, natural science. And at that moment, What emerged was this sort of dreadful concept of the illiberal arts.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In high school, I really wanted to go to vocational school where you learned to weld and fix cars and build houses. And I was told, no, you're smart. You have to sit in a room. And nobody could explain to me why I couldn't go to vocational school. I then worked at Bell Labs, this wonderful place before deregulation, legendary place. And I would get union grievances because I would go into the workshop and try to make something. And they would say, no, you're smart. You have to tell somebody what to do.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so I never understood the difference between computer science and physical science. And working at that boundary helped lead to things like my lab was part of doing with a number of interesting collaborators the first faster than classical quantum computations. We were part of a collaboration creating the minimal synthetic organism where you design life in a computer. Those both involve domains where you just can't separate hardware from software. The embodiment of computation is embodied in these really profound ways.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, to end a long answer, Turing and von Neumann both knew this. So all of the canon of computer scientists credits them for what was never meant to be a computer architecture, both Turing and Van Neumann ended their life studying exactly how software becomes hardware. So von Neumann studied self-reproducing automata, how a machine communicates its own construction. Turing studied morphogenesis, how genes give rise to form. They ended their life studying the embodiment of computation, something that's been forgotten by the canon of computing, but developed sort of off to the sides by a really interesting lineage.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Appreciate, oh, see, if you're familiar with the movie, The Metropolis. People would frolic upstairs in the gardens and down in the basement people would move levers. How computing exists today that we pretend software is not physical, it's separate from hardware, and the whole canon of computer science is based on this fiction that bits aren't constrained by atoms, but all sorts of scaling issues and computing come from that boundary, but all sorts of opportunities come from that boundary. And so you can trace it all the way back to Turing's machine making this mistake between the head and the tape. Van Neumann He never called it van Neumann's architecture. He wrote about it in this dreadful memo. And then he wrote beautifully about other things we'll talk about.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the legacy of that is the computer somebody's using to watch this is spending much of its effort moving information from storage transistors to processing transistors, even though they have the same computational complexity. So in computer science, when you learn about computing, there's a ridiculous taxonomy of about 100 different models of computation, but they're all fictions. In physics, a patch of space occupies space. It stores state. It takes time to transit, and you can interact. That is the only model of computation that's physical. Everything else is a fiction. So I really came to appreciate that a few years back when I did a keynote for the annual meeting at the supercomputer industry. And then went into the halls and spent time with the supercomputer builders and came to”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is the head is distinct from the tape. So in the Turing machine, there's a head that programmatically moves and reads and writes a tape. The head is distinct from the tape, which means persistence of information is separate from interaction with information. Then Van Neumann wrote deeply and beautifully about many things, but not computing. He wrote a horrible memo called the first draft of a report on the Edvac, which is how you program a very early computer. In it, he essentially roughly took Turing's architecture and built it into a machine.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I worked with Andy Gleason, who was Turing's counterpart. So just for background, if anybody doesn't know, Toring is credited with the modern architecture of computing. Among many other things, Andy Gleason was his U.S. counterpart. And you might not have heard of Andy Gleason, but you might have heard of the Hilbert problems. And Andy Gleason solved the fifth one. So he was a really notable mathematician. During the war, he was Toring's counterpart. Then von Neumann is credited with the modern architecture of computing, and one of his students was Marvin Minsky. So I could ask Marvin what Johnny was thinking, and I could ask Andy what Alan was thinking. What came out from that, what I came to appreciate as background, I never understood the difference between computer science and physical science. But Turing's machine, that's the foundation of modern computing, has a simple physics mistake.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned why Van Neumann and Turing made fundamental mistakes. I learn the secret of life. I learned how to solve many of the world's most important problems, which all sound presumptuous, but all of those are things I learned at that boundary. Okay.”
2023-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source