A Look at the Future

Electronic News, Sept 4, 2000 by Chris Evans-Pughe

Dublin - In an old Guinness hops storehouse in Dublin, the new European branch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab seeks to reproduce the institute's famous research culture. Electronics Weekly, a sister publication to Electronic News, recently discovered some of the ideas crossing the pond by talking to Professor Neil Gershenfeld, head of the lab's Physics and Media Group in the United States.

"Completely barking (mad)" was the opinion of many of the people emerging from a recent talk Professor Gershenfeld gave at a Motorola Inc. bash marking the launch of its DigitalDNA brand in Europe. Ideas such as "printing chips at home" and "the body as a data network" were regarded as entertaining but too off-the-wall to be taken seriously.

MIT formed its original Media Lab in the 1970s as a technology applications think-tank. The research environment and the people who work there tend to be unconventional and antiestablishment, yet the lab boasts a solid record for innovation and maintains close ties with industry.

The Physics and Media Group, for example, is involved in molecular computers, smart furniture and virtuoso musical instruments.

Then there is the Things That Think research consortium, which Gershenfeld directs, comprising 40 companies including Motorola, Hewlett-Packard Co., AT&T, Microsoft Corp., Deutsche Telekom and Nike, all broadly exploring intelligence in everything bar traditional computers.

The ideas emerging from the lab do challenge the status quo, but at heart, they're very sane. In contrast to consumer-oriented, stylish but intrusive ("I'm on the train") technology such as mobile phones and laptops, Gershenfeld's vision is the "world as the interface" with electronic intelligence merging invisibly with everyday objects.

He describes using today's gadgetry as like living with a small child. "It makes great presumptions on its users. It requires a lot of services to diaper it and feed it, and it doesn't know when not to interrupt. Even just traveling with my laptop computer, I have to carry power supplies, adapters, modem cables and so on."

He continues: "Appliances presume a disconnection from everyday objects, but they are necessary as a transitional stage. Rather than having a distinguishable set of objects such as a camera and an audio recorder, the next step is for those to merge to form a 'reality transducer'. Beyond that, they merge with me so perhaps my spectacles are the reality transducer."

Gershenfeld's ideas on "the body as a data network" - wearing tiny computers (perhaps in your shoe or clothing) with the physical media of the body acting as the network - repeat the theme.

"How many times have you stood around juggling a collection of gadgets trying to work out how you get data between them? Sending data up to geosynchronous orbit seems easy nowadays - it's those last few inches that are so tricky," he jokes.

Sending data through the body is a nuisance to implement technically, but Gershenfeld reckons it will be a useful way to integrate gesture and data.

"If you think about entering your house, there's an identity gesture, the key, and an opening gesture, turning the knob. It makes more sense if putting your hand on the door is both the physical act of opening it and the logical act of identifying yourself to the house."

"Or if I'm wearing a computer and I've programmed it to broadcast my identity, then I can set it up so that the act of shaking hands at a cocktail party exchanges a business card."

Gershenfeld forecasts a future of chips in everything.

Beyond that, he sees computing becoming more personalized - the logical limit being desktop printers using "electronic ink" to print electronics at home.

"We're only a few cycles away from wafer fabs costing countries' worth of wealth. If you look at where Moore's Law first starts to run out of steam, it's on the cost per fab," he states. This exponential rise in costs, he suggests, will push prototyping closer to end-users. Fabs will eventually disappear.

"Semiconductor companies will then become the source of insight into how you make the electronics you print out," he suggests.

Gershenfeld, disappointingly, didn't say when he thought this might happen, but I don't think we need to worry just yet.