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

So at IBM, there was this amazing group of, like, I mentioned Charlie Bennett and David DiVincenzo and Ralph Landauer and Nabil Amir, and these were all gods of thinking about physics and computing.

So...

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.

There's a complete parallel history of...

Maxwell to Boltzmann to Szilard to Landauer to Bennett.

Most people won't know most of these names, but this whole parallel history thinking deeply about how computation and physics relate.

So I was collaborating with that whole group of people.

And then...

At MIT, I was in this high traffic environment.

I wasn't deeply inspired to think about better ways to detect shoplifting tags, but stumbled across companies that needed help with that and was thinking about it.

And then I realized those two worlds intersected and we could use the failed approach for the shoplifting tags to make early quantum computing algorithms.

Right.

Here's one more example.

With a student, Manu, we talked about ribosomes and I was trying to build a ribosome that worked on fluids so that I could place the little parts we're talking about.

And it kept failing because bubbles would come into our system and the bubbles would make the whole thing stop working.

And we spent about half a year trying to get rid of the bubbles.

Then Manu said, wait a minute, the bubbles are actually...

better than what we're doing, we should just use the bubbles.

And so we invented how to do universal object logic with little bubbles and fluid.

Yeah, and so I'll come back and explain it.

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