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computation.
Von Neumann and Turing posed their questions as theoretical studies, because it
was beyond the technology of their day to realize them. But with the convergence of
communication and computation with fabrication, these investigations are now becoming
accessible experimentally. Making an assembler that can assemble itself from the parts
that it’s assembling is a focus of my lab, along with collaborations to develop synthetic
cells.
The prospect of physically self-reproducing automata is potentially much scarier
than fears of out-of-control AI, because it moves the intelligence out here to where we
live. It could be a roadmap leading to Terminator’s Skynet robotic overlords. But it’s
also a more hopeful prospect, because an ability to program atoms as well as bits enables
designs to be shared globally while locally producing things like energy, food, and
shelter—all of these are emerging as exciting early applications of digital fabrication.
Wiener worried about the future of work, but he didn’t question implicit assumptions
about the nature of work which are challenged when consumption can be replaced by
creation.
History suggests that neither utopian nor dystopian scenarios prevail; we
generally end up muddling along somewhere in between. But history also suggests that
we don’t have to wait on history. Gordon Moore in 1965 was able to use five years of the
doubling of the specifications of integrated circuits to project what turned out to be fifty
years of exponential improvements in digital technologies. We’ve spent many of those
years responding to, rather than anticipating, its implications. We have more data
available now than Gordon Moore did to project fifty years of doubling the performance
of digital fabrication. With the benefit of hindsight, it should be possible to avoid the
excesses of digital computing and communications this time around, and, from the outset,
address issues like access and literacy.
If the maker movement is the harbinger of a third digital revolution, the success of
AI in meeting many of its own early goals can be seen as the crowning achievement of
the first two digital revolutions. Although machine making and machine thinking might
appear to be unrelated trends, they lie in each other’s futures. The same scaling trends
that have made AI possible suggest that the current mania is a phase that will pass, to be
followed by something even more significant: the merging of artificial and natural
intelligence.
It was an advance for atoms to form molecules, molecules to form organelles,
organelles to form cells, cells to form organs, organs to form organisms, organisms to
form families, families to form societies, and societies to form civilizations. This grand
evolutionary loop can now be closed, with atoms arranging bits arranging atoms.
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