March 16th, 2005
Atoms and bits assemble at Etech
Neil Gershenfeld opened the third day at Etech with a talk about the digitization of fabrication and how it’ll revolutionize the world the same way the personal computer has already done. The human ribosome is proof of existence of digitization of fabrication. Gershenfeld said that the ribosome passes all the tests of a computer and it could be thought of as a state of the art chip fab–it computes itself to fabricate. He then showed a couple videos of novel fabrications created by students enrolled in his MIT class, "How to build (almost) anything." One called "ScreamBody," looks like a backpack (but you wear it on your chest) with an opening for your mouth that allows you to silence and store a scream and then release it (playback) later (you have to see the video). Another equally humorous project was a web browser customized for parrots.
He said we are twenty years away from making molecular assemblers, or having the equivalent of an automobile plant on your desktop. But, today his goal is to provide the tools to make almost everything, with $20,000 worth of equipment, such as a laser cutter, milling machine and electronics assembly tools, and he is convinced that the real way to scale this concept is through micro venture capital. "It doesn’t work to bring the world to Sand Hill Road," he said. Instead, investments of $10,000 rather than $10 million is needed to bring the tools to the masses.
Gershenfeld is well known for the fab labs he helped set up all over the world, particularly in third-world countries like Ghana. His new book, Fab: Personal Fabrication, Fab Labs, and the Factory in Your Computer will be available in about a month.
