PROGRAMMABLE
MATTER: CLAYTRONICS OR GERSHENFELD
We still tell our children “you can
be anything when you grow up.” It’s time to start telling them “you’re going to
be able to make anything…right now.” Similar work at MIT and Carnegie Mellon is
pointing towards the next revolution in computers and manufacturing:
programmable matter. In the future you won’t use computers to design a car, the
car will form from billions of tiny computers that arrange themselves into
anything you want. The physical and computational world will merge. Hope you’re
ready.
Claytronics is developing tiny computers that can work together
to form shapes. This cylindrical prototype is about 3cm across, 10 times bigger
than the goal.
How can a material be intelligent? By
being made up of particle-sized machines. At Carnegie Mellon, with support from
Intel, the project is calledClaytronics.
The idea is simple: make basic computers housed in tiny spheres that can
connect to each other and rearrange themselves. It’s the same concept as we saw
with Modular Robotics, only on a smaller scale.
Each particle, called a Claytronics atom or Catom, is less than a millimeter in
diameter. With billions you could make almost any object you wanted. See the
concept video after the break.
Carnegie Mellon isn’t the only
university pursuing intelligent materials. MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA)
is actively trying to merge physics and computer science. Neil
Gershenfeld, CBA’s director and one of the leaders in computational
physics, is seeking to design, build and program computers that are what they
compute. He’s taking the “bit” and turning it into an “it,” instead of the
other way around.
It All Looks Good on Paper
It would be amazing if these
technologies were available today, but they are still a long way off. In fact,
as far as accomplishments, modular robotics on the human sized scale have shown
a lot more success. What makes CBA and Claytronics so interesting is that they
are proceeding at a steady (albeit slow) pace and making clear progress in the
underlying research of the concept.
In hardware, Claytronics has already
made centimeter sized cylindrical catoms that have basic features. They can
latch together and recognize when they are latched, and they can be moved using
electrostatic forces. Carnegie Mellon is also researching how to power the
catoms using magnetic resonance coupling (having each catom convert a magnetic
field into electricity). Catoms will be so small that electric forces will be
more important than gravity so they’re using helium filled cubes to test how
catoms will work when gravity is no longer the dominate force.
To test Catom forces without gravity, helium filled prototypes
are used.
Software research is just as
rigorous. Programmers have to create a system where catoms can communicate
wirelessly over relatively long ranges and with little power. In a single cubic
meter, there could be a billion catoms. That means a billion computers trying
to talk to each other and move themselves to form a shape. It’s a daunting task
but it’s helped by a great concept known as “fungibility.”
When something is fungible, not only
is twice as many twice as useful, half as many is half as useful. Bread is
fungible, a human is not. Cut one in half and you still have food, cut the
other in half and you go to jail. Right now, computers are not fungible. With
programmable matter, they would be. That same cubic meter of a billion catoms
is essentially a network of a billion computers. That’s a lot of computational
power – more than enough to organize it into different shapes. And if the
computer was separated into sections, the overall computing power would still
be the same. Don’t try that with your laptop.
Fungbility is a concept that
Gershenfeld at CBA can really get behind. At TED 2006,
he discussed how programmable matter and fungible computers will allow you to
“pour out” as much computer as you need to solve a problem. The amount of
computational strength you need would be matched by a physical quantity in the
real world. Watch his talk below, but be warned: it’s long, he talks fast, and
some of the ideas are a little heady.
What will it mean for us to be
Post-Scarcity?
For those of you who managed through
all seventeen minutes of Gershenfeld’s talk, you’ll notice a lot of it didn’t
have anything to do with programmable matter at all. He started discussing
“fabrication labs” as well. The two concepts are related. When you have
programmable matter, tiny computers will be able to form into any shape. You’ll
be able to make almost anything. So what will we do with this technology?
Working with non-programmable matter,
Gershenfeld organized a lab with some basic tools: a
laser cutter, milling machines, a sign cutter, and programming instruments.
Costing somewhere around $20,000 these basic labs can make almost any useful
modern device. Computer boards, antennas, you name it. He shared these labs
with educational groups all over the world. What did he find? Human ingenuity
is more powerful than previously expected.
Children, and adults, were designing
chips, tools, and many other inventions to solve local problems. By providing
the means, local solutions arose from local inventors. This, my friends, is one
of the most promising aspects of programmable matter: when we can build
anything, we can solve any problem. The programmable matter will provide the
computational power and the physical forms that we can organize into tools to
fix…well…everything.
That’s the dream, and I believe in
it, but I would be amiss if I didn’t point out the nightmare. Look at the
weapons humanity has made from sticks and stones and you can begin to imagine
the destruction that could be unleashed with programmable matter. Even if we
learn to love and let live, the programmable matter will have a huge amount of
computational power, enough to support artificial intelligence. Can we hope to
control a material that can out-think and out-build us?
Fear doesn’t help us much, however.
Intelligent material isn’t just a powerful and promising concept, it’s an
inevitable invention. Computer chip manufacturers are creating smaller and
smaller devices, modular robotics are becoming more sophisticated, and
artificial intelligence is pre-natal but growing. These trends will converge
and lead us to programmable matter eventually. Instead of fearing that
development, we can work to understand it better and harness it for limitless
possibilities.
Because that’s a real likelihood. The world could really use
programmable matter to move beyond living for day to day necessities and start
exploring humanity’s potential. When everyone has access to a fabrication lab
that can make almost anything, the world will be populated by inventors. Not
only will every cubic meter have billions of computers, the world will have 7
billion (or more) human minds guiding those computers to new discoveries. In
our life times, or our children’s, we will come to realize an inevitable and
quite literal truth: the world is what we make it.
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