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In the aforementioned Connecticut discussion on The Human Use of Human Beings, Neil
Gershenfeld provided some fresh air, of a kind, by professing that he hated the book,
which remark was met by universal laughter—as was his observation that computer
science was one the worst things to happen to computers, or science. His overall
contention was that Wiener missed the implications of the digital revolution that was
happening around him—although some would say this charge can’t be leveled at
someone on the ground floor and lacking clairvoyance.
“The tail wagging the dog of my life,” he told us, “has been Fab Labs and the
maker movement, and [when] Wiener talks about the threat of automation he misses the
inverse, Which is that access to the means for automation can empower people, and in
Fab Labs, the corner I’ve been involved in, that’s an exponential.”
In 2003, I visited Neil at MIT, where he runs the Center for Bits and Atoms.
Hours later, I emerged from what had been an exuberant display of very weird stuff. He
showed me the work of one student in his popular rapid-prototyping class (“How to
Make Almost Anything”), a sculptor with no engineering background, who had made a
portable personal space for screaming that saves up your screams and plays them back
later. Another student in the class had made a Web browser that lets parrots navigate
the Net. Neil himself was doing fundamental research on the roadmap to that sci-fi
staple, a “universal replicator.” It was a visit that took me a couple of years to get my
head around.
Neil manages a global network of Fab Labs—small-scale manufacturing systems,
enabled by digital technologies, which give people the wherewithal to build whatever
they'd like. As guru of the maker movement, which merges digital communication and
computation with fabrication, he sometimes feels outside the current heated debate on AI
safety. “My ability to do research rests on tools that augment my capabilities,” he says.
“Asking whether or not they are intelligent is as fruitful as asking how I know I exist—
amusing philosophically, but not testable empirically.”” What interests him is “how bits
and atoms relate—the boundary between digital and physical. Scientifically, it’s the most
exciting thing I know.”
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