Neil Gershenfeld Quotations

If anyone can make anything, anywhere. It fundamentally changes the meaning of business.

The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems.

Computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to either computers or to science.

Fungible goods in economics can be extended and traded. So, half as much grain is half as much useful, but half a baby or half a computer is less useful than a whole baby or a whole computer, and we've been trying to make computers that work that way.

We've had a digital revolution, but we don't need to keep having it. And I'd like to look after that, to look what comes after the digital revolution.

You don't need personal fabrication in the home to buy what you can buy because you can buy it. You need it for what makes you unique, just like personalization.

What we are interested in is merging the computer with the clothing so that all you need to do is get dressed.

art became separated from artisans and mass manufacturing turned individuals from creators to consumers.

A Web browser for parrots isn't meant to serve a scalable business market,

The research is aiming to make a molecular assembler, one machine that can build, on a molecular scale, anything.

In a way, the Fab Labs are havens for inventive outliers in society.

In a sense, this is like open-source software, but for hardware.

If you give people access to means to solve their own problems, it touches something very, very deep,

In a few seconds, you can transform a two-dimensional sheet of acrylic into a three-dimensional object.

By personal fabrication, what I mean is ordinary people creating, rather than consuming technology, creating technology to solve local problems.

By not lobbing a few extra cannon shells, he could afford to make these community investments.

Chaos has come to be associated with the study of anything complex, but, in fact, the mathematical techniques are directly applicable only to simple systems that appear to be complex.

For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork.

Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid.

There is so much blandness and grayness out there, people want to be able to say "it's mine." They want to customize their cars like they customize a jeans jacket.

Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things.