9 MIT Media Lab Innovations that Changed the Future

back in the late 60s and early 70s we were experimenting with touch how does a piece of glass know it's being touched where it's being touched what happens when you hit it with multiple fingers and a lot of people thought it was quite silly they said well how could you have an interface where you're covering up the thing you're pointing at and isn't going to get covered with fingerprints and people laughed but now the the touch screen and multi-touch turned into iPhone and iPad and sort of the idea that you're not you know just using a mouse in a keyboard ian was invented here and that eventually becomes a Kindle and is driving all kinds of low-cost displays of Pebble watch and things like that but that field of working with very small materials at the molecular level has spawned a whole new area which is the ability to print genes on the semiconductor on a chip to massively scale the ability to do in synthesis Lego Mindstorms that was invented here at the Media Lab as the conversions of software and hardware so it's the idea that you can kind of put Legos together and that young kids can hack robots another one is scratch which is a programming language for kids kids will learn to code and that learning to code is a very important way to have kids become excited about creating their own works robotic prostheses developed in Hugh Harris biomechatronics lab and that's part of a larger initiative called the center for extreme Bionic who eliminate all disabilities whether their brain disabilities or organ failure or limbs Guitar Hero which is a game that many of you may have played also originated here at the Media Lab opto neurogenetics you can put photosynthetic sensors on to the nerves inside of the eye and actually make a blind Mouse see and we will hopefully be seeing this applied for human beings to your blindness a lot of the initial wearable work was done here at the Media Lab in the 80s that group evolves into things like Google glass and the Samsung watches and all the different sorts of wearables that are common now many of the people who lead those groups come from the Media Lab so the car GPS system was originally a project called backseat driver when they tried to patent it the MIT technology licensing office said oh that would be too full of risk no one would ever actually build that and we ended up not patenting it even though we invented the car GPS GPS and cars have become a common thing that everybody has but that continues too much forward into things like self-driving cars which are going to become a very important piece and a lot of the work around AI and data and things like that are things that we're still working on and actually we just recently published a study by one of our researchers about the ethics around how self-driving cars will make decisions and things like that so we continue to be interested in both mobility and its relationship to data and its interface to human beings I'm very fond of telling people I've been to the future I've been to the future dozens of times partly because so many times I said well in 10 years this will happen and then of course the 10 years things do happen I think each of the innovations are important but I think more important than anything is we're creating a new way of thinking about innovation and a new way of thinking about designing things we don't do things that other people would do we find a lot of opportunity in these spaces either between or beyond existing disciplines and I think that that's going to be tremendously important as we get into a world that's very complex and where everything is connected together these sorts of creative people are really important so it's the DNA of the lab I think is more important than any specific technology that's come out

Channel: WIRED

Views: 77,975

Keywords: Joi Ito, Nicholas Negroponte, programming languages, computer programming, prosthetics, robotics, touchscreens, wearables, gadgets, design, science, technology, mit media lab, guitar hero, gps, e-reader, kindle, e-ink, e ink, new, news, Wired App, Wired Magazine, Wired.com, Wired

Id: F_ci1Yb6MCA

Length: 3min 38sec (218 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2015