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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