What impresses me most about the do-it-yourselfers of the old days was their ability to make anything out of just about nothing being greatly imaginative. Nowadays in engineering, we look into catalogues, do machine work and integrate. It feels that with respect to technology, there are two kinds of people: those who manufacture and those who consume. In his presentation below, Neil Gershenfeld explains how everyone might create technology in the years to come, a little like how everyone creates information today.
He says that after the communications and computer revolutions, we will be part of a manufacturing revolution where digitalization will measure and interact with matter. His lab at MIT works on Fabers, machines out of science fiction books that manufacture anything from an object’s “genetic code” rather than from blueprints. Fab-labs are a prototype, small computer-controlled workshops that look like manufacturing machines on various scales.