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Neil Gershenfeld - CNN

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    (music)
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    We've had a digital revolution,
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    but we don't need to keep having it.
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    We can declare success. We won.
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    What's coming now is the
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    digital revolution in fabrication.
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    My colleagues and I started teaching a
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    class called "How to make almost anything".
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    And the idea was just that.
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    It's a program looking at how the digital
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    world relates to the physical world.
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    And one of the core things coming out of
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    the research is the idea of digital fabrication:
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    making the "Star Trek" replicator -- an assembler
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    that makes anything you want
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    by building the atoms on up.
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    [To class: "This is designed where you..."]
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    Millions of dollars of equipment at MIT
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    are like the mainframes of digital fabrication.
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    We can make anything we want
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    using those tools and in 20 years,
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    we'll make it so that you can have it in the home.
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    The Fab Labs are in-between.
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    They've spread all around the world,
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    letting ordinary people create technology
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    from South Africa to the north of Norway,
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    and from rural India to inner-city Boston.
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    Instead of spending vast amounts of money
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    to send computers and energy
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    and comminication around the world,
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    you can spend much less to send the means
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    the means to create it.
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    Energy, communication, computation.
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    Just to say the words, they sound big.
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    They're being tackled as billion-dollar
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    mega-projects top-down.
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    Fab Labs is tackling them
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    from the bottom up.
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    We're just finding so many people,
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    with such interesting inventions
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    and such great ideas.
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    Sharing that is where I see this going.
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    [Principal Voices, in association with Shell.]
Title:
Neil Gershenfeld - CNN
Description:

Beyond his many publications and patents, Prof. Gershenfeld is the author of the popular books "Fab" and "When Things Start To Think," and the technical texts "The Nature of Mathematical Modeling" and "The Physics of Information Technology." His work has been featured by the White House and Smithsonian Institution in their Millennium celebrations, he has been the subject of print, radio, and TV programs in media including the New York Times, The Economist, CNN, and PBS, and has been selected as one of the top 100 public intellectuals.

Dr. Gershenfeld has a B.A. in Physics with High Honors from Swarthmore College, was a member of the research staff at Bell Labs where he studied laser interactions with atomic and nuclear systems, received a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University for experimental tests of order in complex condensed matter systems, and was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows where he ran an international study on prediction techniques.
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Video Language:
English
Duration:
01:25
Kevin Cole edited English subtitles for Neil Gershenfeld - CNN
Kevin Cole added a translation

English subtitles

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