Neil Gershenfeld

speaker

1,202 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2023 last heard May 2023

Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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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 knows how to make itself?

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 von Neumann thought very deeply and very beautifully 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.

Now, the reason self-producing 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 in 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 the assemblers make assemblers.

Right, now let me give you the numbers.

So let me relate this to, right now we're living in AI mania 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.

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