Quotes from Neil Gershenfeld

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.