When Things Start To Think

By Neil A. Gershenfeld

“Smart money will be able to be personalized and spent in many ways.”

- Gershenfeld, 2000

Gershenfeld extends a peek into the post-computerized world, where microchips work for us instead of against us. He contends that we squander the potential of the microchip when we confine it to a box on our desk: the real electronic revolution will come when computers have all but disappeared into the walls around us. This should remind us of the Kevin Kelly video at Ted.com.  He too, discusses the power of grid computing.

The present Digital Revolution features machines that merely entertain and dazzle when what we need is a digital world accessible to everyone and interactive on all occasions. Gershenfeld thinks our binary world is immature and cumbersome. Personal computers are already as outmoded as typewriters; even the Internet and Worldwide Web are just emerging from their juvenile phase.

The new interface paradigms will allow people to create, innovate, learn, and teach. But, he claims, the digital world must be in harmony with the natural world, and we can learn from biological models. Gershenfeld’s vision of a digitized future is a humanistic one. The cyber world should enhance the real world, not replace it, and should empower people, not machines, to solve problems.

The author will ask you to visualize a digital book that looks like a traditional book printed on paper and are pleasant to read in bed, but it also has all the flexibility of a screen display! Or how about a personal fabricator that can organize digitized atoms into anything you want, or a musical keyboard that can be woven into a denim jacket?

We must grow larger than our two-dimensional digital world; Gershenfeld urges, and enter the multi-dimensional digitized world of sounds, sights, and even touch. The fact that a desktop needs a desk and a laptop needs a lap, he says, shows we are in the formative stages. Again, another idea presented in the Kelly video at Ted.com.

Forces that affect its success are obviously the financial, economical, and social.  While other forces are impacted by the innovation of digital cash, these three are more significant because they are heavily woven into the fabric of our society. It is almost impossible to touch the financial markets or the laws of economics, even the norms of our society and not create a ripple effect.


In chapter six he determines there is something happening here. The economy appears to be detached from the laws of physics, creating and eliminating great wealth with little apparent connection to the material world. And that is exactly the case: money is increasingly digital, packets of data circulating in global networks. The electronic economy is weaving the digital and physical worlds together faster than anything else.


The demand for more sophisticated ways to manipulate money is forcing computing to go where money goes, whether in a trader’s workstation, a smart card in a wallet, or a thinking vending machine.


“Freeing money from its legacy as a tangible asset carries with it great promise to make the economy more accessible to more people, but we’ll be in trouble if we continue to act as if money is worth something. The bits of electronic cash still retain a vestigial reflection of their origin in the atoms of scarce resources.”