There's plenty of room at the bottom

Classic Feynman. I read it every year with my CS students. But let's give it some context.

Von Neumann had delivered his talk "Computers and the Brain" only two years earlier where he referred to the components of a computer in biological terms -- "organelles", "the brain", etc.

No CRTs, mice, hard disk drives, or timeshare O/S. Internal memory was magnetic "core memory."

Kilby and Noyce had invented the integrated circuit a year earlier. The "old guard" i.e. Ken Olsen, Bob Metcalfe, and others were still in school. Grace Hopper thought it might be a good idea to "compile" code.

And here comes this guy from CalTech thinking it would be cool to have ants project manage aphids so The Library of Congress could fit on a credit card.

Am I wrong or could this world use a few more human beings "out there on the curve."

This is an absolute classic, and in my opinion it is up there with the the special theory of relativity and newtons theory of gravity. The reason is that feynman introduces one of those rare paradigm shifts that turns everything on its head: build from the bottom and up instead of the crudeness of building from the top down. The key insight being that atoms are like legos, and that it should be possible to make identical assemblers, based on the lego principle, that are able to replicate. Once this step is accomplished almost anything is possible.

Even now, almost 50 years later, the implications of what he started are only beginning to be felt - very few people even understand the implications of what he was proposing. He was so much ahead of his time it's unbelievable.

What a classic transcript! I loved reading it. What impresses me most is how far forward-looking Feynman was. A true visionary. This reminds me to go back and read those Feynman books again.

Thanks. That's the kind of content that keeps me coming back to news.yc.