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

When the demon open and closes the door, as long as it remembers what it did,

you can run the whole thing backwards, but when the demon forgets, then you can't run it backwards, and that's where you get dissipation, and that's where you get the violation of thermodynamics.

And so the explanation of Maxwell's demon is that it's in the demon's brain.

So then Rolf's colleague Charlie at IBM

then shocked Rolf by showing you can compute with arbitrarily low energy.

So one of the things that's not well covered is that the big computers used for big machine learning, the data centers use tens of megawatts of power.

They use as much power as a city.

Charlie showed you can actually compute with arbitrarily low amounts of energy by making computers that can go backwards as well as forwards.

And what limits the speed of the computer is how fast you want an answer and how certain you want the answer to be.

but we're orders of magnitude away from that.

So I have a student, Cameron, working with Lincoln Labs on making superconducting computers that operate near this Landauer limit that are orders of magnitude more efficient.

So stepping back to all of that, that whole tour was driven by your question about life.

And right at the heart of it is Maxwell's demon.

Life exists because it can locally violate thermodynamics.

It can locally violate thermodynamics because of intelligence.

And it's molecular intelligence.

I would even go out on a limb to say we can already see we're beginning to come to the end of this current AI phase.

So depending on how you count, this is, I'd say, the fifth AI boom-bust cycle.

Mm-hmm.

And you can already, you know, it's exploding, but you can already see where it's heading, you know, how it's going to saturate what happens on the far side.

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