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When Things Start to Think
One underlying theme dear to Gershenfeld's heart is the death of traditional academic distinctions between physics and engineering, or between academia and commerce. Applied research is real research.
Another major theme is that older technologies should be treated with respect as we seek to supplement or replace them. For example, a laptop's display is much harder to read in most light than the paper in a book.
The book starts by drawing a contrast between Digital Revolution and Digital Evolution. Digital Revolution is the already-tired metaphor for universal connectivity to infinite information and memory via personal computers, the Internet, etc. Digital Evolution describes a more democratic future, from Gershenfeld's point of view, when computers are so smart, cheap, and ubiquitous that they do many ordinary chores to help ordinary people. When things talk to things, human beings are set free to do work they find more appealing.
"What are things that think?" asks the first section of the book.
Gershenfeld's whizbang examples won't be big news to Slashdot readers. My favorite, the Personal Fabricator, ("a printer that outputs working things instead of static objects")-- whose relationship to a full machine shop analog is like that of the Personal Computer to the old-fashioned mainframe. Gershenfeld actually has one of these in his lab (it outputs plastic doohickeys)--seeing it was one of the high points of my visit there.
"Why should things think?" asks the second section.
My favorite here is the Bill of Rights for machine users. (In true Baby-Boom style, it's of list of wants arbitrarily declared to be rights.) "You have the right to
Have information available when you want it, where you want it, and in the form you want it
Be protected from sending or receiving information that you don't want
Use technology without attending to its needs"
Under the heading "Bad Words," Gershenfeld offers a snide but useful summary of many high-tech pop-sci buzzwords, showing how they get misused by people who don't understand their real content or context.
"How will things that think be developed?"
By making them small and cheap. By getting industry to pay the bills for targeted, practical research, using the Media Lab model TTT ("Things That Think.") By reorganizing education on the model of the Media Lab, where students learn things as they need them for practical projects, not all at once in a huge, abstract lump.
The book concludes with directions to various websites, including the Physics and Media Group (One of their projects these days is "Intrabody Signaling.") Slashdotters might also be interested in Gershenfeld's textbooks The Nature of Mathematical Modeling and The Physics of Information Technology.
You can purchase When Things Start To Think from bn.com, and Amazon has the book paperback discounted to $11.20. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
One website for you. babelfish.altavista.com. While it might goof up occasionally, it generally translates well enough for me to get a good idea of the contents. Also, computers *have* been getting better at turing tests (though only for limited domain interactions). I see no reason that computers cannot recreate some "abstract" (or atleast seemingly so) patterns. Hell, if a computer can play chess, thats abstract enough "thinking" for me.
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
I found that there was a mix of pure BS and interesting if not necessarily useful work being done in the Physics and Media Group. Honestly, though some was BS, this was still better than most of what is done in the Media Lab, where most work is 90% BS. Go look through the current publications list here. While not much of this is what I would consider "basic research", a lot of it is potentially interesting - physical one-way functions (have been discussed on