Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
And I think of nature in that way, in general, in the context of design specifically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
I think of nature as everything that isn't
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
and triple mass, everything that is not produced by humankind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
The birds and the rocks and everything in between, fungi, elephants, whales.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
Yes, and we're looking for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
I think that from, let's say, from the beginning of mankind, going back 200,000 years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
And it's ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind, those are exactly the things that separated us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
Before that, we were totally and completely connected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
And I want to return to that world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
I absolutely believe that there is so much to nature that we still have not leveraged and we still have not understood and we still haven't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
And so much of our work is design, but a lot of it is science, is unveiling and learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
and finding new truths about the natural world that we were not aware of before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has a kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
And it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
If you think about humans versus nature, at least in the realm, at least in the context of definition of nature is everything but anthropomass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
And I'm using Ron Milo, who is an incredible philosopher.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
professor from the Weizmann Institute, who came up with this definition of anthropomass in 2020, when he identified that 2020 was the crossover year when anthropomass exceeded biomass on the planet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature
So all of the design goods that we have created and brought into the world now outweigh all of the biomass.