Neil Gershenfeld

Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Threshold theorems. Claude Shannon is famous for proving that if you add extra information to a signal and then later remove it, you can have perfect communication. John von Neumann did the same for computing, though most everyone has forgotten his result because Intel hides it in the chip.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The application of threshold theorems to the physical world.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Personal fabrication.

"One of the grandest challenges is a threshold theorem in fabrication, to build with logic so you can make perfect things out of imperfect parts. This is how the ribosome makes proteins in the body. Digital manufacturing promises to do for the physical world what digitization has done for communication and computation.

"The kinds of things engineers do in their day jobs—like designing circuits and making machines—to an amazing extent can now be done with a few thousand dollars' worth of equipment on a desktop. You can engineer down to microns and microseconds and create modern technology.

"Right now, in a big company, functions are chopped up among many people and departments. But in the future, ownership of the means of manufacturing will no longer be a business model; just like the transition from mainframes to PCs, personal fabrication will lead to products developed by and for markets ranging from one to one billion."