The Coming Revolution
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- KuzIV
posted this before, but its been wiped off so here's a copy/paste of an article on fab labs from the Economist some people requested from me:
How to make (almost) anything
Jun 9th 2005
From The Economist print editionNeil Gershenfeld wants to build devices that do for atoms what PCs do for bits—make them cheap and easy to manipulate
A FEW weeks ago, on a crisp spring evening in Washington, DC, Neil Gershenfeld walked up to the podium before a modest crowd at the Library of Congress, adjusted his black, thick-rimmed glasses and told his audience that the world was about to shift beneath their feet. Before long, he explained, people will own inexpensive desktop machines that can print objects in three dimensions just as effortlessly as desktop computers can already print pictures and words in two dimensions. Such “personal fabricators” would, he explained, transform us into magicians, capable of conjuring up precisely what we want, when we want. We might design our own mobile phones, clothes or appliances, or we might download designs from the internet and modify them to our liking, like recipes. Either way, we wouldn't be going to a shop and picking items from shelves full of identical, mass-produced products.
Yeah, right. Yet Dr Gershenfeld is not a science-fiction writer, but an engineer, and his magical vision of the future is more than just a flight of fancy. He is at work now, making it happen. Back in 2001 he founded the Centre for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He first began exploring ways to create working electronic gizmos from scratch with students enrolled in his popular class “How to Make (Almost) Anything”. He soon found that when he gave his students a few electrical parts, some fancy manufacturing equipment (such as laser and water-jet cutters), and several boxes of computer chips, there was no end to the fascinating, some might say bizarre, inventions they would cobble together. “I was amazed with what they came up with,” says Dr Gershenfeld, shaking his head of unruly black hair.
It was as he watched his students enthusiastically create their wild inventions that the idea of personal fabricators began to take shape. He could see, in the so-called “fab lab” he had developed for his class at MIT, glimmerings of a future where people could make whatever they wanted. Then, when asked how some of the $13.75m grant made to his centre might be directed to educational outreach, Dr Gershenfeld and his colleagues had a thought: what if machines like those used in his class were made more widely available? Perhaps a good way to reach out and educate would be to create more fab labs, and see what people in different parts of the world did with them.
The answer, it turned out, was that like MIT's students, they were outrageously creative. By 2004, fab labs were popping up around the world, from inner-city Boston to the coast of Ghana to rural India. Each was made available to local residents so that they could use the labs to work on whatever problems they felt were important. Far above the Arctic Circle in Norway, herders began developing radios to track their sheep and reindeer in the mountains. In the Boston lab, children remade scrap materials into saleable jewellery, and started making and selling antennae with which to set up neighbourhood wireless-internet networks. A fab lab in Pabal, India, now makes a device to test the quality of milk to ensure that farmers get a fair price.
Why fab labs are fabIn each case, Dr Gershenfeld credits visionary activists and community leaders for seeing how the fab lab might best be put to use—people such as S.S. Kalbag in Pabal, Mel King in Boston and Nana Agyekum, a Ghanaian tribal chief who had, uncharacteristically, worked in the technology industry in America. They were the driving forces in the communities where the fabs took root. “It's an amazing group of people that have made all of this possible,” says Dr Gershenfeld.
He admits that his far-flung fab labs are not the advanced molecular machines he foresees proliferating in the next 20 years on a desktop near you, but just clunky precursors. Nevertheless, he says, they hint at the transformative power of giving ordinary people the ability to make whatever they want. When visiting each of the labs, he found that participants were “passionate unlike anything”, driven by the sudden power to solve problems unique to their lives. He picks up the book he has just written about his experiences, “Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop—From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication” (Basic Books, 2005) and opens it to a picture of a seven-year-old girl beaming and holding up a string of cut metal that she created using fab-lab machines. It spells out her name. “That smile says it all,” he says, pointing at the book.
“Today's clunky machines will turn into a universal fabricator that can make almost anything.”Dr Gershenfeld believes that the march he foresees towards personal fabrication will be a social revolution as much as a technological one—a democratisation of the ability to manipulate matter, just as personal computers have democratised the ability to manipulate information. Fabricators will, he says, begin migrating from factory floors into every home, just as computers evolved from room-sized mainframes to the laptops and mobile phones that billions of people now use to run their lives.
Dr Gershenfeld was a child who, by his own admission, operated in his own “little world”, was not much of a student, but loved to tinker. “Mostly I was better at taking things apart than I was at putting them together,” he recalls. He remembers the schools he attended in Plymouth Meeting, a community outside Philadelphia, as dismal, boring places where he seemed to get either As or Fs, depending on how passionate he was about the subject. But while life was boring in school, it was very different at home. Conversations at the dinner table were intellectual boot camps where the young boy and his two brothers discussed the cases their parents were handling in their jobs as law professors and arbitrators. Simply spouting opinions on the cases being discussed wasn't good enough: “You had to back up your thinking with solid logic,” says Dr Gershenfeld. Occasionally the family also took “sabbaticals” in other countries, including Jamaica and England, where they lived for a year.
When the time came for him to go to high school, Dr Gershenfeld had “a real knock-down, drag-out fight” with his parents. He wanted to go to the technical side of the high school where he could take “shop” and make real things. His parents wanted him to take a more academic approach. “That struck me as punitive,” he says. Making three-dimensional objects seemed much more sensible than sitting in a classroom, but in the end he did as his parents wanted and subsequently went on to Swarthmore College, not because his grades were particularly good, but because he won a swimming scholarship. He earned a degree in physics and then completed a PhD at Cornell before heading to Bell Labs in 1981. There he returned to tinkering, but he was now able to use his knowledge of physics and complex systems to put electronic devices together in interesting ways, rather than simply taking them apart.
At work in the fab labBy the mid-1980s he had made his way to MIT's Media Lab, where he got involved in a project called Things That Think. He developed shoes, for example, that generate power for other devices as you walk. He created an all-digital cello for Yo Yo Ma, a virtuoso musician, which turned out to be devilishly difficult but was ultimately successful. Along the way, Dr Gershenfeld wrote two physics textbooks and a popular book that described his attempts to build objects with minds of their own, fittingly entitled “When Things Start to Think”. In the mid-1990s he collaborated with several colleagues to create a quantum computer using a thimble of chloroform and a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging machine. It successfully solved a simple problem in a single computational step, lending credence to the idea that quantum computers may some day be able to operate far faster than current computers. A common theme runs through all of this work: combining information and atoms, and embedding intelligence in objects.
Bits to atoms, ideas to objectsDr Gershenfeld remains as rebellious and unconventional as he was when he was growing up, and is undaunted by those who say his ideas are novel but impractical. He is now exploring the creation of mini venture-capital funds to create more fab labs, which cost around $20,000 each. His goal is to turn the labs into self-sustaining operations that can have real local impact and generate revenue to fund more inventions. “Any of the emerging fabs are full of the little projects that could be businesses,” he says. These might not satisfy huge global markets, but they might profitably provide villages and rural areas with tailor-made products that big firms will never make because the markets are too small.
In some ways, Dr Gershenfeld's work is just an extension of his boyhood love of tinkering as a form of self-expression. Fab labs empower people by giving them the means to turn ideas into working, concrete objects. In time, he says, the separate, clunky machines of today's fabs will morph into a single, universal fabricator that can make almost anything.
Whether you believe that such a machine is just around the corner, or many decades away, its implications are truly mind-boggling. Fabricators would give people the power to make whatever comes into their heads and then share the plans over the internet—leading perhaps to a sort of Napster for real-world objects, or a new world of “open-source” manufacturing. People have asked Dr Gershenfeld if there is an opportunity in becoming the Microsoft of personal fabricators, but he says it makes no sense. After all, once you can make a machine that makes anything, who needs the company that makes the machine?
- skt0
God will not be happy.
- KuzIV0
you leave her out of it.
- KuzIV0
btw, sup skt? hope your well. My condolences for the funeral of your school friend.
- lowimpakt0
I think most of the planet needs food, clean water, shelter and to not be living on 2 dollars a days before they need a cheap SLA machine.
p.s. condolences skt
- KuzIV0
i think a cheap "SLA machine" (what's one of them?) could greatly facilitate all of the above
- lowimpakt0
can a cheap SLA make you a sandwich? No?
by the way. about 15 feet from where i am sitting there is a selection of cutting edge SLA technology that is mainly used for medical parts/implants.
- KuzIV0
are you being facetious low?
- lowimpakt0
sorry.
- paraselene0
thanks, kuz!
i'm gonna get me one o' them things and then you'll all be sorry.
- paraselene0
also, skt, you should go into that has anyone ever seen thread and help that kid out. if you want to, i mean.
- lowimpakt0
i know this was discussed before but can you link any of the results of the projects that are mentioned in the piece?
"Far above the Arctic Circle in Norway, herders began developing radios to track their sheep and reindeer in the mountains. In the Boston lab, children remade scrap materials into saleable jewellery, and started making and selling antennae with which to set up neighbourhood wireless-internet networks. A fab lab in Pabal, India, now makes a device to test the quality of milk to ensure that farmers get a fair price.
Why fab labs are fab"
- lowimpakt0
and by the way the work that is happening in the lab beside me is pretty amazing. it is applying SLA technology to reconstructive surgery - i.e. if you lost part of your skull in a car crash the lab can take scans from the hospital and make up a metal plate for your implant that is precisely tailored to your injury. or it can make up hip joints new jaws or whatever you need