AGI-26 keynote
Neil Gershenfeld
Neil Gershenfeld is Director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, an interdisciplinary initiative the Center describes as exploring the boundary between computer science and physical science.
“How to turn data into things, and things into data.”
— the Center for Bits and Atoms, stating its own question, cba.mit.edu
One boundary, crossed in both directions
Read the archive in order and the subject never really changes: what happens where information meets matter? The answer keeps getting more literal — from the thermodynamics of a bit, to a molecule used as a computer, to a building assembled the way a message is coded.
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Physics of computation
from the 1980sThe archive opens in experimental physics and dynamical systems, and arrives at a question about computers themselves: they have, in his words, “many orders of magnitude more thermodynamic degrees of freedom than information-bearing ones (bits)” — a gap that closes as devices approach physical limits, at which point hardware and software “must be understood together.”
Signal entropy and the thermodynamics of computation (1996) ↗ -
Quantum computing in a beaker
1997–1998With Isaac Chuang, a proposal for doing quantum computation in bulk nuclear magnetic resonance — a room-temperature liquid rather than a single isolated system. The follow-up implements Grover’s search on chloroform molecules and reports “the first complete experimental demonstration of loading an initial state into a quantum computer”.
Bulk Spin-Resonance Quantum Computation, Science (1997) ↗ -
Things that think
Media Lab, 1990sThen the boundary moves outward: electric field sensing that lets ordinary objects notice people, instruments modelled from data, and the argument that computing was about to leave the computer. The book of that argument gives the period its name.
Applying electric field sensing to human-computer interfaces (1995) ↗ -
Digital materials
2013The pivotal move, and the one that separates this record from 3D printing. Instead of depositing continuous material, build from a discrete set of mass-produced parts that interlock — a lattice you can assemble, disassemble and reuse, reported in Science as “an elastic solid with an extremely large measured modulus for an ultralight material.”
Reversibly Assembled Cellular Composite Materials, Science (2013) ↗ -
The robot that assembles it
2015–2020If the material is discrete, the machine that places it can be simple, and can crawl over what it has already built. This line runs through robotic macrofabrication to mechanical metamaterials and walking machines assembled from the same voxel kit as the structure they walk on.
Discretely assembled mechanical metamaterials, Science Advances (2020) ↗ -
Machines that make machines
2017–2022The end of that logic is self-replication. A hierarchical model for building a spacecraft out of a small part set, aimed at “exponential space exploration via self-replicating spacecraft (known as Von Neumann probes)”; then a robotic swarm reported as “capable of serial, recursive” construction — robots that assemble more robots.
Self-replicating hierarchical modular robotic swarms (2022) ↗ -
Say it and it exists
2024–2025And the newest work joins the two threads a conference like this one cares about. Generative AI produces a 3D mesh from speech; the mesh is not directly buildable, so the system converts it into an assembly of discrete parts a robot can actually place. Language in, object out.
Speech to Reality (2024) ↗
At a conference called AGI-26
Most of the roster asks what a mind is or how to build one. This archive asks a question that sits underneath that: what can be made, by what, and how cheaply does the ability to make it spread?
The through-line is discretization. Digital communication became reliable when signals were coded into a finite symbol set; this work argues fabrication becomes reliable, reversible and error-correcting for the same reason — when parts come from a discrete set instead of a continuous deposit. Self-replicating swarms are that argument taken to its end.
The 2024–2025 papers are where it meets the rest of the conference: a generative model proposes a shape, and the discrete-assembly stack is what makes the proposal buildable.
Read Speech to Reality ↗A lab, not a solo record
After 2013 almost everything here is co-authored with the Center for Bits and Atoms — Benjamin Jenett, Amira Abdel-Rahman, Kenneth Cheung, Will Langford, Miana Smith, Nadya Peek, Alfonso Parra Rubio and others recur across the discrete assembly line of work. The earlier quantum computing papers are with Isaac L. Chuang, and the time-series work with Andreas Weigend.
Selected work
15 entries drawn from the archive, titled exactly as the records read, with his position in the author list computed from each record. Everything else — including the early physics, the time-series prediction work, and the books in their several translations — is in the corpus.
- 2022Self-replicating hierarchical modular robotic swarmsCommunications Engineering last of 5 authors
- 2020Discretely assembled mechanical metamaterialsScience Advances last of 6 authors
- 2020Discretely assembled walking machinesJournal of Micro-Bio Robotics last of 2 authors
- 2017Hierarchical assembly of a self-replicating spacecraftlast of 4 authors
- 2015Macrofabrication with Digital Materials: Robotic AssemblyArchitectural Design first of 5 authors
- 2013Reversibly Assembled Cellular Composite MaterialsScience last of 2 authors
- 2012How to Make Almost AnythingForeign Affairs sole author
- 2011Aligning the representation and reality of computation with asynchronous logic automataComputing sole author
- 2007Microfluidic Bubble LogicScience last of 2 authors
- 1999When Things Start to ThinkForeign Affairs last of 2 authors
- 1998Experimental Implementation of Fast Quantum SearchingPhysical Review Letters author 2 of 3
- 1997Bulk Spin-Resonance Quantum ComputationScience first of 2 authors
- 1996Signal entropy and the thermodynamics of computationIBM Systems Journal sole author
- 1995Applying electric field sensing to human-computer interfaceslast of 5 authors
Background
- Now
- Professor at MIT and Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms, which describes itself as an interdisciplinary initiative exploring the boundary between computer science and physical science.
- In this corpus
- Records from 1981 to 2026: early experimental physics and dynamical systems, NMR quantum computing with Isaac L. Chuang, electric field sensing and physics-and-media work, and — from 2013 — the discrete assembly programme that dominates the recent record.
- Books in the corpus
- When Things Start to Think and The Nature of Mathematical Modeling appear as reviews and translated editions; Designing Reality, with Alan Gershenfeld and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, appears as a 2017 record.
About this archive
This is an independent archive of Neil Gershenfeld’s publication record, built for Society of Minds Aligned and AGI-26. Records span 1981–2026 and are drawn from OpenAlex; preprints, versions of record, book reviews and translated editions are all kept, so the archive is a reading index, not a bibliometric count.
Biography is limited to what his own MIT pages state. The corpus was checked for the name-collision problem that affects common names; every record retained here lists him among its authors.
Not written by, reviewed by, or endorsed by Neil Gershenfeld. If you are Neil and something here is wrong, the feedback control at the bottom of the page reaches us directly — and the claim bar will hand you the site.