Bits and Atoms

Last week I was on the coolest panel ever at the Navy R&D Partnership conference.  Organized by Etan Ayalon, it was designed to scare the crap out of the audience by introducing them to current and future technologies that they neither understand nor control.  I went first covered the power of distributed creation, building with bits, breadth and depth of creation within Second Life, and more generally the impact of amateur-to-amateur creation.  Next up was Neil Gershenfeld, the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms.  He's created a US$20k fabrication lab that can be dropped into schools all over the world and allows kids to build "just about anything."  Specifically, just about anything down to sub-millimeter and mili-second sizes and timings.  Very cool stuff.  He likens fabrication today to computing in the PDP-11 days -- in other words, just ready to start taking off as hackers get ahold of it.  All of the principles that he expounds are the same as Second Life's: distributed creation, play as learning, and the power of everyday people to succeed at doing "hard" things.  Moving on, from building with bits, to using bits to build atoms, the panel concluded with another MIT researcher, Randy Rettberg, who's created MIT's registry of standard biological parts.  The goal is to apply engineering approaches to biology.  This is amazing/scary stuff and they've been holding intercollegiate competitions to create interesting things out of the pieces.  UT Austin had one of the first significant successes, and more schools are competing this year.  Biological construction is in its infancy, but it has the potential to improve quickly, with "garage biological hacking" only 10 years away.  Most of the questions (to all the panelists) focused on "how do we control these technologies" and/or "we're scared" with general panel responses of "you can't" and "if you're scared, you better be a world leader not stick your head in the sand."

What was a little sad is that the lunch talk at the conference was by Dr. John Marburger who spoke about the US' loss of leadership in IT and that the solution was quantum computing.  Leaving aside that whole spontaneous symmetry breaking thing, thinking about loss of leadership in communications and information as a technical problem is missing the point.  What Second Life (Or Dr. Gershenfeld's work.  Or Wikipedia.) keeps proving is that real advances and innovation in these spaces come from building connections and allowing collaboration.  Not too mention the early work of people like Doug Thomas and Josh Fouts at USC which is investigating how attitudes between cultures can change based on cooperation in virtual spaces.  But instead, Marburger -- who happens to be the Presidential Science Advisor, and thus the most influencial scientist in the United States -- feels that the focus should be on quantum computing.  Compare that the recent announcement that China is going to invest $1.8 billion in game development.

Oh crap -- is there a game gap?!