These chips could communicate the price of each item, total your bill, and debit your account as you walk out of the store. No checkers, no standing in line. And your cupboards could tally up what you've used and present you with a shopping list for the next time around or even place an order automatically. And again, there's no more waiting in line at the post office. It is these kinds of applications that companies often ask Gershenfeld about and that will eventually yield another true revolution in computing.
Biology teaches that hard problems are often solved by the interaction of many simple systems.
When a moth dies, an army of ants, water, and bacteria act in concert to return the moth ' s elements to the earth. Gershenfeld sees biology as bottom-up design updated with a minimum of central planning, much like the Internet. There are lessons here for those developing technology. For the developers of computing systems, the real challenge is to figure out how to create systems with many components that can work together and change. The digital world must merge with the physical world bits must work hand in hand with atoms.