TED2006
Saul Griffith: Everyday inventions
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Inventor and MacArthur fellow Saul Griffith shares some innovative ideas from his lab -- from "smart rope" to a house-sized kite for towing large loads.
Saul Griffith - Inventor
Inventor Saul Griffith looks for elegant ways to make real things, from low-cost eyeglasses to a kite that tows boats. His latest projects include open-source inventions and elegant new ways to generate power. Full bio
Inventor Saul Griffith looks for elegant ways to make real things, from low-cost eyeglasses to a kite that tows boats. His latest projects include open-source inventions and elegant new ways to generate power. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:24
So anyway, who am I?
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I usually say to people, when they say, "What do you do?"
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I say, "I do hardware,"
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because it sort of conveniently encompasses everything I do.
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And I recently said that to a venture capitalist casually at some
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Valley event, to which he replied, "How quaint."
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(Laughter)
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And I sort of really was dumbstruck.
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And I really should have said something smart.
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And now I've had a little bit of time to think about it,
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I would have said, "Well, you know,
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if we look at the next 100 years
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and we've seen all these problems in the last few days,
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most of the big issues -- clean water, clean energy --
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and they're interchangeable in some respects --
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and cleaner, more functional materials --
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they all look to me to be hardware problems.
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This doesn't mean we should ignore software,
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or information, or computation."
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And that's in fact probably what I'm going to try and tell you about.
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So, this talk is going to be about how do we make things
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and what are the new ways that we're going to make things in the future.
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Now, TED sends you a lot of spam if you're a speaker
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about "do this, do that" and you fill out all these forms,
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and you don't actually know how they're going to describe you,
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and it flashed across my desk that they were going to introduce me as a futurist.
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And I've always been nervous about the term "futurist,"
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because you seem doomed to failure because you can't really predict it.
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And I was laughing about this with the very smart colleagues I have,
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and said, "You know, well, if I have to talk about the future, what is it?"
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And George Homsey, a great guy, said, "Oh, the future is amazing.
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It is so much stranger than you think.
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We're going to reprogram the bacteria in your gut,
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and we're going to make your poo smell like peppermint."
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(Laughter)
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So, you may think that's sort of really crazy,
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but there are some pretty amazing things that are happening
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that make this possible.
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So, this isn't my work, but it's work of good friends of mine at MIT.
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This is called the registry of standard biological parts.
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This is headed by Drew Endy and Tom Knight
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and a few other very, very bright individuals.
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Basically, what they're doing is looking at biology as a programmable system.
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Literally, think of proteins as subroutines
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that you can string together to execute a program.
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Now, this is actually becoming such an interesting idea.
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This is a state diagram. That's an extremely simple computer.
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This one is a two-bit counter.
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So that's essentially the computational equivalent of two light switches.
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And this is being built by a group of students at Zurich
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for a design competition in biology.
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And from the results of the same competition last year,
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a University of Texas team of students programmed bacteria
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so that they can detect light and switch on and off.
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So this is interesting in the sense that you can now
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do "if-then-for" statements in materials, in structure.
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This is a pretty interesting trend,
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because we used to live in a world where everyone's said glibly,
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"Form follows function," but I think I've sort of grown up in a world
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-- you listened to Neil Gershenfeld yesterday;
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I was in a lab associated with his -- where it's really a world
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where information defines form and function.
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I spent six years thinking about that,
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but to show you the power of art over science --
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this is actually one of the cartoons I write. These are called "HowToons."
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I work with a fabulous illustrator called Nick Dragotta.
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Took me six years at MIT,
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and about that many pages to describe what I was doing,
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and it took him one page. And so this is our muse Tucker.
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He's an interesting little kid -- and his sister, Celine --
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and what he's doing here
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is observing the self-assembly of his Cheerios in his cereal bowl.
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And in fact you can program the self-assembly of things,
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so he starts chocolate-dipping edges,
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changing the hydrophobicity and the hydrophylicity.
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In theory, if you program those sufficiently,
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you should be able to do something pretty interesting
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and make a very complex structure.
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In this case, he's done self-replication of a complex 3D structure.
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And that's what I thought about for a long time,
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because this is how we currently make things.
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This is a silicon wafer, and essentially
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that's just a whole bunch of layers of two-dimensional stuff, sort of layered up.
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The feature side is -- you know, people will say,
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[unclear] down around about 65 nanometers now.
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On the right, that's a radiolara.
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That's a unicellular organism ubiquitous in the oceans.
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And that has feature sizes down to about 20 nanometers,
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and it's a complex 3D structure.
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We could do a lot more with computers and things generally
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if we knew how to build things this way.
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The secret to biology is, it builds computation
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into the way it makes things. So this little thing here, polymerase,
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is essentially a supercomputer designed for replicating DNA.
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And the ribosome here is another little computer
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that helps in the translation of the proteins.
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I thought about this
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in the sense that it's great to build in biological materials,
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but can we do similar things?
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Can we get self-replicating-type behavior?
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Can we get complex 3D structure automatically assembling
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in inorganic systems?
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Because there are some advantages to inorganic systems,
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like higher speed semiconductors, etc.
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So, this is some of my work
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on how do you do an autonomously self-replicating system.
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And this is sort of Babbage's revenge.
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These are little mechanical computers.
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These are five-state state machines.
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So, that's about three light switches lined up.
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In a neutral state, they won't bind at all.
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Now, if I make a string of these, a bit string,
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they will be able to replicate.
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So we start with white, blue, blue, white.
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That encodes; that will now copy. From one comes two,
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and then from two comes three.
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And so you've got this sort of replicating system.
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It was work actually by Lionel Penrose,
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father of Roger Penrose, the tiles guy.
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He did a lot of this work in the '60s,
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and so a lot of this logic theory lay fallow
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as we went down the digital computer revolution, but it's now coming back.
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So now I'm going to show you the hands-free, autonomous self-replication.
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So we've tracked in the video the input string,
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which was green, green, yellow, yellow, green.
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We set them off on this air hockey table.
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You know, high science uses air hockey tables --
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(Laughter)
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-- and if you watch this thing long enough you get dizzy,
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but what you're actually seeing is copies of that original string
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emerging from the parts bin that you have here.
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So we've got autonomous replication of bit strings.
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So, why would you want to replicate bit strings?
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Well, it turns out biology has this other very interesting meme,
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that you can take a linear string, which is a convenient thing to copy,
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and you can fold that into an arbitrarily complex 3D structure.
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So I was trying to, you know, take the engineer's version:
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Can we build a mechanical system in inorganic materials
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that will do the same thing?
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So what I'm showing you here is that we can make a 2D shape --
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the B -- assemble from a string of components
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that follow extremely simple rules.
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And the whole point of going with the extremely simple rules here,
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and the incredibly simple state machines in the previous design,
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was that you don't need digital logic to do computation.
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And that way you can scale things much smaller than microchips.
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So you can literally use these as the tiny components in the assembly process.
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So, Neil Gershenfeld showed you this video on Wednesday, I believe,
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but I'll show you again.
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This is literally the colored sequence of those tiles.
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Each different color has a different magnetic polarity,
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and the sequence is uniquely specifying the structure that is coming out.
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Now, hopefully, those of you who know anything about graph theory
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can look at that, and that will satisfy you
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that that can also do arbitrary 3D structure,
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and in fact, you know, I can now take a dog, carve it up
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and then reassemble it so it's a linear string
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that will fold from a sequence. And now
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I can actually define that three-dimensional object as a sequence of bits.
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So, you know, it's a pretty interesting world
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when you start looking at the world a little bit differently.
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And the universe is now a compiler.
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And so I'm thinking about, you know, what are the programs
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for programming the physical universe?
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And how do we think about materials and structure,
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sort of as an information and computation problem?
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Not just where you attach a micro-controller to the end point,
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but that the structure and the mechanisms are the logic, are the computers.
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Having totally absorbed this philosophy,
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I started looking at a lot of problems a little differently.
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With the universe as a computer,
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you can look at this droplet of water
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as having performed the computations.
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You set a couple of boundary conditions, like gravity,
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the surface tension, density, etc., and then you press "execute,"
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and magically, the universe produces you a perfect ball lens.
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So, this actually applied to the problem
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of -- so there's a half a billion to a billion people in the world
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don't have access to cheap eyeglasses.
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So can you make a machine
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that could make any prescription lens very quickly on site?
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This is a machine where you literally define a boundary condition.
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If it's circular, you make a spherical lens.
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If it's elliptical, you can make an astigmatic lens.
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You then put a membrane on that and you apply pressure --
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so that's part of the extra program.
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And literally with only those two inputs --
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so, the shape of your boundary condition and the pressure --
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you can define an infinite number of lenses
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that cover the range of human refractive error,
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from minus 12 to plus eight diopters, up to four diopters of cylinder.
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And then literally, you now pour on a monomer.
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You know, I'll do a Julia Childs here.
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This is three minutes of UV light.
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And you reverse the pressure on your membrane
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once you've cooked it. Pop it out.
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I've seen this video, but I still don't know if it's going to end right.
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(Laughter)
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So you reverse this. This is a very old movie,
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so with the new prototypes, actually both surfaces are flexible,
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but this will show you the point.
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Now you've finished the lens, you literally pop it out.
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That's next year's Yves Klein, you know, eyeglasses shape.
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And you can see that that has a mild prescription of about minus two diopters.
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And as I rotate it against this side shot, you'll see that that has cylinder,
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and that was programmed in --
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literally into the physics of the system.
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So, this sort of thinking about structure as computation
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and structure as information leads to other things, like this.
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This is something that my people at SQUID Labs
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are working on at the moment, called "electronic rope."
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So literally, you think about a rope. It has very complex structure in the weave.
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And under no load, it's one structure.
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Under a different load, it's a different structure. And you can actually exploit that
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by putting in a very small number of
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conducting fibers to actually make it a sensor.
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So this is now a rope that knows the load on the rope
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at any particular point in the rope.
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Just by thinking about the physics of the world,
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materials as the computer,
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you can start to do things like this.
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I'm going to segue a little here.
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I guess I'm just going to casually tell you the types of things
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that I think about with this.
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One thing I'm really interested about this right now is, how,
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if you're really taking this view of the universe as a computer,
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how do we make things in a very general sense,
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and how might we share the way we make things in a general sense
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the same way you share open source hardware?
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And a lot of talks here have espoused the benefits
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of having lots of people look at problems,
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share the information and work on those things together.
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So, a convenient thing about being a human is you move in linear time,
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and unless Lisa Randall changes that,
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we'll continue to move in linear time.
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So that means anything you do, or anything you make,
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you produce a sequence of steps --
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and I think Lego in the '70s nailed this,
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and they did it most elegantly.
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But they can show you how to build things in sequence.
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So, I'm thinking about, how can we generalize
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the way we make all sorts of things,
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so you end up with this sort of guy, right?
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And I think this applies across a very broad -- sort of, a lot of concepts.
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You know, Cameron Sinclair yesterday said,
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"How do I get everyone to collaborate on design
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globally to do housing for humanity?"
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And if you've seen Amy Smith,
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she talks about how you get students at MIT
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to work with communities in Haiti.
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And I think we have to sort of redefine and rethink
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how we define structure and materials and assembly things,
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so that we can really share the information
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on how you do those things in a more profound way
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and build on each other's source code for structure.
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I don't know exactly how to do this yet,
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but, you know, it's something being actively thought about.
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So, you know, that leads to questions
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like, is this a compiler? Is this a sub-routine?
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Interesting things like that.
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Maybe I'm getting a little too abstract, but you know,
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this is the sort of -- returning to our comic characters --
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this is sort of the universe, or a different universe view,
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that I think is going to be very prevalent in the future --
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from biotech to materials assembly. It was great to hear Bill Joy.
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They're starting to invest in materials science,
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but these are the new things in materials science.
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How do we put real information and real structure into new ideas,
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and see the world in a different way? And it's not going to be binary code
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that defines the computers of the universe --
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it's sort of an analog computer.
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But it's definitely an interesting new worldview.
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I've gone too far. So that sounds like it's it.
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I've probably got a couple of minutes of questions,
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or I can show -- I think they also said that I do extreme stuff
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in the introduction, so I may have to explain that.
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So maybe I'll do that with this short video.
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So this is actually a 3,000-square-foot kite,
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which also happens to be a minimal energy surface.
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So returning to the droplet, again,
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thinking about the universe in a new way.
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This is a kite designed by a guy called Dave Kulp.
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And why do you want a 3,000-square-foot kite?
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So that's a kite the size of your house.
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And so you want that to tow boats very fast.
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So I've been working on this a little, also,
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with a couple of other guys.
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But, you know, this is another way to look at the --
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if you abstract again,
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this is a structure that is defined by the physics of the universe.
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You could just hang it as a bed sheet,
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but again, the computation of all the physics
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gives you the aerodynamic shape.
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And so you can actually sort of almost double your boat speed
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with systems like that. So that's sort of another interesting aspect of the future.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Saul Griffith - InventorInventor Saul Griffith looks for elegant ways to make real things, from low-cost eyeglasses to a kite that tows boats. His latest projects include open-source inventions and elegant new ways to generate power.
Why you should listen
Innovator and inventor Saul Griffith has a uniquely open approach to problem solving. Whether he's devising a way to slash the cost of prescription eyeglasses or teaching science through cartoons, Griffith makes things and then shares his ideas with the world.
A proponent of open-source information, he established Instructables , an open website showing how to make an array of incredible objects. He is the co-founder of numerous companies including Squid Labs, Low Cost Eyeglasses, Potenco and Makani Power, where he is President and Chief Scientist. His companies have invented a myriad of new devices and materials, such as a "smart" rope that senses its load, or a machine for making low-cost eyeglass lenses through a process inspired by a water droplet. He is a columnist at Make magazine and co-writes How Toons! He's fascinated with materials that assemble themselves, and with taking advantage of those properties to make things quickly and cheaply.
Saul Griffith | Speaker | TED.com