Neil Gershenfeld’s Keynote speech from SC07 conference

Neil Gershenfeld challenged his audience to reconsider “obviously true” statements like “binary information is represented with two states”. In light of current and future technological trends what if we relax these statements? He listed several of these tautologies and set out to reword them to be more correct in today’s and tomorrow’s world:

Computers come in cases -> computers come in rolls, buckets
Compilers optimize programs -> optimizations program compilers
Bits are zero or one -> bits are between zero and one
Internetworking -> interdevice interworking
Programs can describe things -> programs can be things

As regular objects become computerized and interconnected at a smaller and smaller scale, we’re approaching the nano-scale of biological systems. We’re “in the moment”, he says, on the cusp of a fabrication revolution