like to show you the future of the way we make things
i believe that soon our buildings and machines will be self assembling replicating and repairing themselves so i 'm going to show you what i believe is the current state of manufacturing and then compare that to some natural systems
so in the current state of manufacturing we have skyscrapers two and a half years of assembly time five hundred thousand to a million parts fairly complex
new exciting technologies in steel concrete glass we have exciting machines that can take us into space five years of assembly time two point five million parts
but on the other side if you look at the natural systems
we have proteins that have two million types can fold in ten thousand nanoseconds
or dna with three billion base pairs we can replicate in roughly an hour so there 's all of this complexity in our natural systems but they 're extremelyefficient far more efficient than anything we can build far more complex than anything we can build they 're far more efficient in terms of energy
they hardly ever make mistakes and they can repair themselves for longevity so there 's something super interesting about natural systems and if we can translate that into our built environment then there 's some exciting potential for the way that we build things and i think the key to that is self assembly
so if we want to utilize self assembly in our physicalenvironment i think there 's four key factors the first is that we need to decode all of the complexity of what we want to build so our buildings and machines and we need to decode that into simple sequences basically the dna of how our buildings work then we need programmable parts that can take that sequence
and use that to fold up or reconfigure
we need some energy that 's going to allow that to activate allow our parts to be able to fold up from the program and we need some type of error correction redundancy to guarantee that we have successfully built what we want so i 'm going to show you a number of projects that my colleagues and i at mit are working on to achieve this self assembling future
and you send that sequence through the string each unit takes its message so negative one hundred and twenty it rotates to that checks if it got there and then passes it to its neighbor
so these are the brilliant scientists engineers designers that worked on this project and i think it really brings to light is this really scalable i mean thousands of dollars lots of man hours made to make this eight foot robot can we really scale this up can we really embed robotics into every part
the next one questions that and looks at passive nature or passively trying to have reconfiguration programmability but it goes a step further and it tries to have actual computation it basically embeds the most fundamental building block of computing the digital logic gate directly into your parts
so this is a nand gate you have one tetrahedron which is the gate that 's going to do your computing and you have two input tetrahedrons one of them is the input from the user as you 're building your bricks the other one is from the previous brick that was placed and then it gives you an output in three d space
so what this means is that the user can start plugging in what they want the bricks to do
it computes on what it was doing before and what you said you wanted it to do and now it starts moving in three dimensional space so up or down so on the left hand side eleven input equals zero output which goes down on the right hand side zero input is a one output which goes up
and so what that really means is that our structures now contain the blueprints of what we want to build so they have all of the information embedded in them of what was constructed so that means that we can have some form of self replication in this case i call it self guided replication
because your structure contains the exact blueprints if you have errors you can replace a part all the local information is embedded to tell you how to fix it so you could have something that climbs along and reads it and can output at one to one it 's directly embedded there 's no external instructions so the last project i 'll show is called biased chains
so basically you have a chain of elements each element is completely identical and they 're biased so each chain or each element wants to turn right or left so as you assemble the chain you 're basically programming it you 're telling each unit if it should turn right or left so when you shake the chain
it then folds up into any configuration that you 've programmed in so in this case a spiral or in this case
two cubes next to each other
and from that you have new possibilities for computing we 'll have spatial computing imagine if our buildings our bridges machines all of our bricks could actuallycompute that 's amazingparallel and distributed computing power new design possibilities so it 's exciting potential for this so i think these projects i 've showed here are just a tiny step towards this future
if we implement these new technologies for a new self assembling world thank you
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