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

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.

I had a student, Nadia Peek, 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.

One of the really cool things that's happened is there's a whole network of machine builders around the world.

Danielle and now in Germany and Jens in Norway.

And each of these people has learned the skills to go into a fab lab and make a machine.

And so we've started creating a network of super fab.

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 Kerala in 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.

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 1234.

So we're transitioning from Fab 1 to Fab 2, and the research in the lab is 3 and 4.

At this Fab 2 stage, a big component of this is sustainability in the material feedstocks.

So Alicia, a 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.

Then 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 micro mechanical systems.

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