Last night I attended a talk by Neil Gershenfeld of the “Bits and Atoms” center (CBA) at MIT. He described the “fab lab” that the CBA has been hosting for about a decade as a sort of standardization of maker spaces. There is an analogy to how IP (internet protocol) replaced all the one-off protocols for communicating among machines, and led to a communications revolution.

Part of the idea is that these spaces/labs will be self-sufficient small-scale manufactories in communities --- one element of what they're doing is making fab-lab elements that can be used to build more fab-labs. The initial project at MIT spun off a lab in Ghana, and then one in Barcelona (where the mayor saw the fab-lab as a way to address 50% youth unemployment in Catalonia). And things have been growing from there.

Lass's law: It turns out that the number of fab labs has been doubling every year or so for the past decade. I think there's one at the Cambridge Public Library!

Gershenfeld speculated that maybe we're at the Altair 8800 stage of fab-labification. Hobbyists and enthusiasts at play, creating the tools that more and more people will use to create and invent.

This seems way cool. Admittedly, I've been bitten and burned by the techno-hobbyist-utopian bug before (cf. Ted Nelson's *Dream Machines*).
#bitsToAtoms #fabLab