Here's a transcript of Neil Gershenfeld's mindblowing talk about ubiquitous computing from last year's Doors of Perception conference. I know some of Neil's grad students at MIT and I've seen some of this stuff in action. It's great, futuristic smart-matter stuff, a peek at what a world of programmable stuff would look like.
…a lot of the things we make we need to connect to the net, and they are not really computer peripherals, they need to be citizens of the net. So this is a few years of evolution in the internet, each of these is a complete website, just done simpler and simpler as we really understood how to do that. So we thought that's great, I can make a complete website for a dollar and this little thing, we'll put it everywhere, we'll put it in light bulbs, door knobs, we'll fill the world with that. We thought that was a good idea. Until we thought a little bit more, and once again if those things work in any way like this one, it leads to a fairly distopian vision of the future: like if you wake up in the morning, and you are greeted by "Your house has crashed".
Now, a step after that is making conventional chips and pouring them out; painting them: we have realised we can paint the computer itself. We've developed a range of printing technologies; so this, for example, is an electronic ink you can print, it has the contrast mechanism of ink on paper, but you can change it after you put it down. This is a printed semi-conductor, that lets you print; this is a printed mechanical structure; this is a printed piece of paper that can move another piece of paper, your desk, and clean itself up; it was made out of this.
(via Blackbelt Jones)
