Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication | Lex Fridman Podcast #380

The ribosome, who I mentioned a little while back, can make an elephant one molecule at a time.

Mm-hmm.

Ribosomes are slow. They run at about one molecule a second, but ribosomes make ribosomes, so you have trillions (laughs) of them and that makes an elephant. In the same way, these little assembly robots I'm describing can make giant structures, at heart because a r- the robot can make the robot. (laughs) So more recently, two of my students, Amira and Miana, had a Nature Communication paper showing how this robot can be made out of the parts it's making, so the robots can make the robots, so you build up the capacity of robotic assembly.

The following is a conversation with Neil Gershenfeld, the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, an amazing laboratory that is breaking down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, fabricating objects and machines at all scales of reality, including robots and automata that can build copies of themselves and self-assemble into complex structures. His work inspires millions across the world as part of the maker movement to build cool stuff, to create, the very act that makes life so beautiful and fun. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Neil Gershenfeld. You have spent your life working at the boundary between bits and atoms, uh, so the digital and the physical. What have you learned about engineering and about nature of reality from, uh, working at this divide, trying to bridge this divide?

I learned why von Neumann and Turing made fundamental mistakes.

(laughs) That's good stuff.

Um, I learned the secret of life.

Yeah.

Um, I- I- I learned how to ss-solve many of the world's most important problems, which all sound presumptuous, but all of those are things I learned at that boundary.

Okay, so, uh, Turing and von Neumann, let's start there.

Okay.

Some of the most impactful, important humans who have ever lived in computing. Why were they wrong?

So I worked with, uh, Andy Gleason, who was Turing's counterpart. So ju- just for background if anybody doesn't know, Turing is credited with the modern architecture of computing, among, uh, many other things. Uh, Andy Gleason was his US counterpart, and you might not have heard of Andy Gleason, but you might have heard of the Hilbert problems and Andy Gleason solved the fifth one, so he was a really notable mathematician. Uh, during the war, he was Turing's counterpart. Then von Neumann is credited with the modern architecture of computing and one of his students was Marvin Minsky, so I could ask Marvin what Johnny was thinking and I could ask Andy what Alan was thinking. And w- what came out from that, what I came to appreciate... As background, I never understood the difference between computer science and physical science.