Neil Gershenfeld

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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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Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · 28 May 2023 podcast

So now if we look at this Fab Lab 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 mini computer, it didn't fit in your pocket.

It filled the 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 the scale of a work group, not a corporation.

In the same way, fab labs are like the mini computers inventing how does the world work if anybody can 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, 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 hobbyist computer era, what it's called the Altair historically.

Then the work we spent a while talking about, about assemblers and self-assemblers, that's the equivalent of smartphones and internet of things.

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 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 spend 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 Fab Lab as a machine.

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