this meeting has really been about a digital revolution but i'd like to argue that it's done we
we've had a digital revolution but we don't need to keep having it and i'd like to look after that to look what comes after the digital revolution
so let me start projecting forward these are some projects i'm involved in today at mit looking what comes after computers this first one
internet zero up here this is a web server that has the cost and complexity of an rfid tag about a dollar that can go in every light bulb and doorknob
and this is getting commercialized very quickly and what's interesting about it isn't the cost it's the way it encodes the internet it uses a kind of a morse code for the internet so you could send it optically you can communicate acoustically through a power line through rf
it takes the original principle of the internet which is inter networking computers and now lets devices inter network that we can take the whole idea that gave birth to the internet
and bring it down to the physical world in this internet zero this internet of devices so this is the next step from there to here and this is getting commercialized today
step after that is a project on fungible computers fungible goods in economics can be extended and traded so
half as much grain is half as much useful but half a baby or half a computer is less useful than a whole baby or a whole computer
and we've been trying to make computers that work that way so what you see in the background is a prototype this was from a thesis of a student bill butow now at intel
who wondered why instead of making bigger and bigger chips you don't make small chips put them in a viscous medium and pour out computing by the pound or by the square inch
but there's no frame buffer io processor any of that stuff it's just this material unlike this screen where the dots are placed carefully
this is a raw material if you add twice as much of it you have twice as much display if you shoot a gun through the middle nothing happens if you need more resource you just apply more computer
so that's the step after this of computing as a raw material that's still conventional bits the step after that is this is an earlier prototype in the lab this is high speed video slowed down
now integrating chemistry in computation where the bits are bubbles this is showing making bits this is showing once again slowed down so you can see it bits interacting to do logic and multiplexing and de multiplexing so now we can compute
the output arranges material as well as information and ultimately these are some slides from an early project i did computing where the bits are stored quantum mechanically in the nuclei of atoms so programs rearrange the nuclear structure of molecules
all of these are in the lab pushing further and further and further not as metaphor but literally integrating bits and atoms and they lead to the following recognition
we all know we've had a digital revolution but what is that well shannon took us in the forties from here to here
from a telephone being a speaker wire that degraded with distance to the internet and he proved the first threshold theorem that shows if you add information and remove it to a signal
you can computeperfectly with an imperfectdevice and that's when we got the internet von neumann in the fifties did the same thing for computing he showed you can have an unreliable computer but restore its state to make it perfect
this was the last great analog computer at mit a differential analyzer and the more you ran it the worse the answer got after von neumann we have the pentium where the billionth transistor is as reliable as the first one
but all our fabrication is down in this lower left corner a state of the art airplane factory rotating metal wax at fixed metal or you maybe melt some plastic a ten billion dollar chip fab uses a process a village artisan would recognize you spread stuff around and bake it
all the intelligence is external to the system the materials don't have information yesterday you heard about molecular biology which fundamentally computes to build it's an information processing system
we've had digital revolutions in communication and computation but precisely the same idea precisely the same math shannon and von neuman did hasn't yet come out to the physical world
so inspired by that colleagues in this program the center for bits and atoms at mit which is a group of people like me who never understood the boundary between physical science and computer science
i would even go further and say computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to either computers or to science
the canon computer science many of them are great but the canon of computer science prematurely froze a model of computation
we started to figure out how you can compute to fabricate this was just a proof of principle he did of tiles that interact magnetically where you write a code much like protein folding
that specifies their structure so there's no feedback to a tool metrology the material itself codes for its structure in just the same ways that protein are fabricated
so you can for example do that you can do other things that's in two d it works in three d the video on the upper right i won 't show for time shows self replication templating so something can make something that can make something
and we're doing that now over maybe nine orders of magnitude those ideas have been used to show the best fidelity and direct rate dna to make an organism in functionalizing nanoclusters with peptide tails that code for their assembly so much like the magnets but now on nanometer scales
laser micro machining essentially three d printers that digitally fabricate functional systems all the way up to building buildings not by having blueprints but having the parts code for the structure of the building
so these are early examples in the lab of emerging technologies to digitize fabrication computers that don't control tools but computers that are tools where the output of a program rearranges atoms as well as bits
now to do that
with your tax dollars thank you i bought all these machines we made a modest proposal to the nsf we wanted to be able to make anything on any length scale
all in one place because you can't segregate digital fabrication by a discipline or a length scale so we put together focused nano beam writers and supersonic water jet cutters and excimer micro machining systems
you
like this this student made a web browser for parrots lets parrots surf the net and talk to other
this student 's made an alarm clock you wrestle to prove you're awake this is one that defends a dress that defends your personal space this isn't technology for communication it's technology to prevent it this is
that lets you see your music this is a student who made a machine that makes machines and he made it by making lego bricks that
so with that in turn twenty million dollars today does this twenty years from now we'll make star trek replicators that make anything
the students hijacked all the machines i bought to do personal fabrication today when you spend that much of your money there's a government requirement to do outreach which often means classes at a local school a website stuff that's just not that exciting
so i made a deal with my nsf program managers that instead of talking about it i'd give people the tools
both what the twenty million dollars does and where it's going a laser cutter to do press fit assembly with three d from two d a sign cutter to plot in copper to do electromagnetics
a micron scale numerically controlled milling machine for precise structures programming tools for less that a dollar one hundred nanosecond microcontrollers it lets you work from microns and microseconds on up
and they exploded around the world this wasn't scheduled but they went from inner city boston to pobal in india to secondi takoradi on ghana 's coast to soshanguve in a township in south africa to the far north of norway uncovering
that there's really a fabrication and an instrumentation divide bigger than the digital divide and the way you close it is not it for the masses but it development for the masses
so in place after place we saw this same progression that we'd open one of these fab labs where we didn't this is too crazy to think of we didn't think this up that we would get pulled to these places we'd open it
the first step was just empowerment you can see it in their face just this joy of i can do it this is a girl in inner city boston who had just done a high tech on demand craft sale in the inner city community center
it goes on from there to serious hands on technical education informally out of schools
in ghana we had set up one of these labs we designed a network sensor and kids would show up and refuse to leave the lab there was a girl
didn't really know what she was doing or why she
the first time and i've shown this to engineers at big companies and they say they can't do this
any one thing she's doing they can do better but it's distributed over many people and many sites and they can't do in an afternoon what this little girl in rural ghana is doing
how to use it they invented a way to do a construction kit out of a cardboard box which as you see up there that's becoming a business
but their design was better than saul 's design at mit so there's now three students at mit doing their theses on scaling the work of eight year old children
and i finally got what's been going on this is kernigan and ritchie inventing unix on a pdp pdps came between mainframes and minicomputers they were tens of thousands of dollars
clear what was going on in the same sense we are now today in the minicomputer era of digital fabrication
the only problem with that is it breaks everybody 's boundaries in dc i go to every agency that wants to talk
you know in the bay area i go to every organization you can think of they all want to talk about it but it breaks their organizational boundaries in fact it's illegal for them in many cases
to equip ordinary people to create rather than consume technology and that problem is so severe that the ultimateinvention coming from this community surprised me
the social engineering that the lab in far north of norway this is so far north its satellite dishes look at the ground rather than the sky because that's where the satellites are
the lab outgrew the little barn that it was in it was there because they wanted to find animals in the mountains
but it outgrew it so they built this extraordinary village for the lab this isn't a university it's not a company it's essentially a village for invention it's a village for the outliers in society
and those have been growing up around these fab labs all around the world so this program has split into
so i'd like to leave you with two thoughts there's been a sea change in aid from top down mega projects to bottom up grassroots micro finance investing in the roots so that everybody 's got that that's what works
but we still look at technology as top down mega projects computing communicationenergy for the rest of the planet are these top down mega projects if this room full of heroes is just clever enough you can solve the problems
the message coming from the fab labs is that the other five billion people on the planet aren't just technical sinks they're sources the real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems
i thought that's the projection twenty years hence into the future but it's where we are today it breaks every organizational boundary we can think of the hardest thing at this point is the social engineering and the organizational engineering but it's here today
and finally any talk like this on the future of computing is required to show moore 's law but my favorite version this is gordon moore 's original one
is the transition from two d to three d from programming bits to programming atoms turns the ends of moore 's law scaling from the ultimate bug to the ultimate feature
and the killer app for the rest of the planet is the instrumentation and the fabrication divide people locally developing solutions to local problems thank you
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