this meeting has really been about a digital revolution,
but I’d like to argue that it’s done;we won.
we’ve had a digital revolution but we don’t need to keep having it.
and i’d like to look after that,to look what comes after the digital revolution.
so , let me start projecting forward.
these are some projects in involved in today MIT,looking what comes after computers.
this first one,internet Zero,up here-this is a web server that has the cost and complexity of an RFID tag -about a dollar- that can go in every light bulb and doorknob,and this is getting commercialized very quickly.And what’s interesting about it isn’t the cost;it’s the way it encodes the internet.
it uses a kind of a Morse code for the internet so you could send it optically;you can communicate acoustically through a power line , through RF.
it takes the original principle of the internet,which is inter-networking computers and now lets devices inter-network.
and bring it down to the physical world in this internet Zero,this internet devices.
so this is the next step from there to here,and this is getting commercialized today.
A step after that is a project on fungible computers.
Fungible goods in economics can be extended and traded.
so,half as much grain is half as much useful,but half a baby or half a computer is less useful than a whole baby or a whole computer,and we’ve been trying to make computers that work that way.so,what you see in the background is a prototype.
This was from a thesis of a student ,Bill Butow ,now at intel,who wondered why,instead of making bigger and bigger chips,you don’t make small chips,put them in viscous medium,and pour out computing by the pound or by the square inch.And that’s what you see here.On the left was postscript being rendered by a conventional computer,on the right is postscript being rendered from the first prototype we made , but there’s no frame buffer,IO processor,an of that stuff – it’s just this material.Unlike this screen where the dots are placed carefully,this is raw material.if you add twice as much of it , you have twice as much display.if you shoot a gun through the middle,nothing happens.if you needs more resource,you just apply more computer.So that’s the step after this = of computing as a raw material.that’s still conventional bits,the step after that is-this is an earlier prototype in the tab,this high-speed video slow down.Now , integrating chemistry in computation,where the bits are bubbles.this is showing making bits,this is showing-once again , slowed down so you can see it,bits interacting to do logic and multiplexing and demultiplexing.So,now we can compute that the output arranges material as well as information.And,ultimately,these are some slides from early project i did ,computing where the bits are stored quantum mechanically in the nuclei of atoms,so programs rearrange the nuclear structure of molecules.All of these are in the lab pushing further and further and further,not as metaphor but literally integrating bits and atoms,and they lead to the following recognition.we all know we’ve had a digital revolution,but what is that?Well, Shannon took us,in the ’40s,from here to here:from telephone being a speaker wire that degraded with distance to the internet.And he proved the first threshold theorem ,that shows if you add information and remove it to signal,you can compute perfectly with an imperfect device.And that’s when wwe got the internet.