Smith's recent film, Jesse's Gone , shot entirely with a Sony Betacam, looks at the life and death of Jesse Hall, a young rapper from Oakland, California, who was killed in 1992. More important than technology, Smith argues, is the need to nurture basic writing skills within the black community. Peter Will, director of the Enterprise Integration Systems Division at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California's School of Engineering, spots an opportunity. Will hopes to build a small plant that will do for micromachines what Henry Ford's assembly line did for the automobile. Will is designing a micro assembly bench based on humankind's most successful conveyor system - intestinal cilia.
Cilia are the tiny, hairlike structures that move digested food down the intestines.
Will is working to create silicon cilia flexible enough to bend, programmable to move in the desired direction, and strong enough to carry an object. Will hasn't yet figured out how to make weight-bearing silicon cilia compatible with VLSI chipmaking techniques. The machine, an ADIC 448 tape robot, looks like a cross between a jukebox and an extra-tall dishwasher. Brewster Kahle pokes at the keypad, and suddenly it whirs to life with 2 terabytes of automated data storage. Kahle, a founder of the legendary Cambridge, Massachusetts-based supercomputer company Thinking Machines, has an idea.