Neri Oxman is a designer, engineer, scientist, and artist working on computational design, synthetic biology and digital fabrication, previously at MIT, and now at OXMAN. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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TRANSCRIPT:
https://lexfridman.com/neri-oxman-transcript

EPISODE LINKS:
Neri's Twitter: https://twitter.com/nerioxman
OXMAN Website: https://oxman.com/
OXMAN Instagram: https://instagram.com/oxmanofficial

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:49 - Biomass vs anthropomass
16:10 - Computational templates
36:25 - Biological hero organisms
47:25 - Engineering with bacteria
55:42 - Plant communication
1:09:05 - Albert Einstein letter
1:12:27 - Beauty
1:17:23 - Faith
1:27:09 - Flaws
1:46:58 - Extinction
1:58:05 - Alien life
2:01:55 - Music
2:03:22 - Movies
2:07:54 - Advice for young people

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Whenever we start a new project, it has to have these ingredients of simultaneous complexity.

It has to be novel in terms of the synthetic biology, material science, robotics, engineering, all of these elements that are discipline based or rooted must be novel.

If you can combine novelty in synthetic biology with a novelty in robotics, with a novelty in material science, with a novelty in computational design, you are bound to create something novel.

The following is a conversation with Neri Oxman, an engineer, scientist, designer, architect, artist, and 1 of the kindest, most thoughtful, and brilliant human beings I've ever gotten to know.

For a long time, she led the mediated matter group at MIT that did research and built incredible stuff at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, material science, and synthetic biology, doing so at all scales, from the micro scale to the building scale.

Now, she's continuing this work at a very new company, for now called Oxman, looking to revolutionize how humans design and build products, working with nature, not against it.

On a personal note, let me say that Neri has for a long time been a friend and someone who in my darker moments has always been there with a note of kindness and support.

She's a brilliant and a beautiful human being.

Oh, and she also brought me a present, War and Peace by Tolstoy and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Neri Oxman.

Do you ever think of the universe as a kind of machine that designs beautiful things at multiple scales?

And I think of nature in that way, in general.

In the context of design, specifically, I think of nature as everything that isn't anthropomass, everything that is not produced by humankind.

The birds and the rocks and everything in between, fungi, elephants, whales.

Do you think there's an intricate ways in which there's a connection between humans and nature?

I think that from, let's say, from the beginning of mankind, going back 200, 000 years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature.

And it's ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind, those are exactly the things that separated us.

Before that, we were totally and completely connected.

But bring the tools of engineering and computation to it.

I absolutely believe that there is so much to nature that we still have not leveraged, and we still have not understood and we still haven't.

And so much of our work is design, but a lot of it is science, is unveiling and finding new truths about the natural world that we were not aware of before.

Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has a kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence.

And it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology.

If you think about humans versus nature, at least in the realm, at least in the context of definition of Nature is everything but anthropomass.

And I'm using Ron Milow, who is an incredible professor from the Weizmann Institute who came up with this definition of anthropomass in 2020, when he identified that 2020 was the crossover year when anthropomass exceeded biomass on the planet.

So all of the design goods that we have created and brought into the world now outweigh all of the biomass, including of course all plastics and wearables, building cities, but also asphalt and concrete, all outweigh the scale of the biomass.

And actually that was a moment, you know how in life there are moments that, maybe a handful of moments that get you to course correct.

It was a Zoom conversation with Ron, and that was a moment for me when I realized that imbalance, now we've superseded the biomass on the planet.

And you've heard the expression more phones than bones and the anthropomass and the anthropocene and the technosphere sort of outweighing the biosphere.

But now we are really trying to look at, is there a way in which all things technosphere are designed as if they are part of the biosphere?

Meaning if you could today grow instead of build everything and anything?

If you could grow an iPhone, if you could grow a car, what would that world look like?

Where the Turing test for sort of this kind of, I call this material ecology approach, but this notion that everything material, everything that you design in the physical universe can be read and written to as or thought of or perceived of as nature grown.

That's sort of the Turing test for the company, or at least that's how I started.

And if we grow everything, is there a world in which driving a car is better for nature than a world in which there are no cars?

Is there, is it possible that a world in which you build buildings and cities, that those buildings and cities actually augment and heal nature as opposed to their absence.

Is there a world in which we now go back to that kind of synergy between nature and humans where you cannot separate between grown and made?

Is there a good term for the intersection between biomass and entropomass?

Yes, in 2005 I called this material ecology.

I thought, well, what if all things materials would be considered part of the ecology and would have a positive impact on the ecology, where we work together to help each other, all things nature, all things human.

And again, you can say that that wisdom in nature exists in fungi.

Many mushroom lovers always contest my thesis here and saying, well, we have the mushroom network and we have the mother trees and they're all connected and why don't we just simply hack into mushrooms?

Well, first of all, yes, they're connected, but that network stops when there is a physical gap, that network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel to connect with a weeping willow in Montana.

And that's sort of a world that I'm dreaming about.

What does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud?

The kind of bandwidth that we're talking about, sort of think Neuralink for nature, you know, since the first computer, And you know this by heart probably better than I do, but we're both MIT lifers.

We today have computational power that is 1 trillion times the power that we had in those times.

We have 26.5 trillion times the bandwidth and 11.5 quintillion times the memory, which is incredible.

So humankind, since the first computer, has approached and accessed such incredible bandwidth.

And we're asking, well, what if nature had that bandwidth?

So beyond genes and evolution, if there was a way to augment nature and allow it access to the world of bits.

And can nature make decisions for herself as opposed to being guided and guarded and abused by humankind?

So nature has this inherent wisdom that you spoke to, but you're also referring to augmenting that inherent wisdom with something like a large language model.

So compress human knowledge, but also maintain whatever is that intricate wisdom that allows plants, bacteria, fungi to grow incredible things at arbitrary scales, adapting to whatever environment and just surviving and thriving, no matter where, no matter how.

Exactly, So I think of it as large molecule models.

And those large molecule models, of course, large language models are based on Google and search engines and so on and so forth.

And part of our mission is to do just that, trying to quantify and understand the language that exists across all kingdoms of life, across all 5 kingdoms of life.

And if we can understand that language, is there a way for us to first make sense of it, find logic in it, and then generate certain computational tools that empower nature to build better crops, to increase the level of biodiversity?

In the company, we're constantly asking, what does nature want?

Like, what does nature want from a compute view?

If it knew it, what could aid it in whatever the heck it's wanting to do?

Yeah, so we keep coming back to this answer of nature wants to increase information, but decrease entropy, right?

So find order, but constantly increase the information scale.

And this is true for what our work also tries to do, because we're constantly trying to fight against the dimensional mismatch between things made and things grown, right?

And as designers, we are educated to think in X, Y, and Z, and that's pretty much where architectural education ends and biological education begins.

So in reducing that dimensional mismatch, we're missing out on opportunities to create things made as if grown.

But in the natural environment, we're asking, can we provide nature with these extra dimensions?

And again, I'm not sure what nature wants, but I'm curious as to what happens when you provide these tools to the natural environments, obviously with responsibility, obviously with control, obviously with ethics and moral code.

But is there a world in which nature can help fix itself using those tools?

And by the way, we're talking about a company called Oxman.

Yeah, what kind of humans work at a place like this?

They're trying to figure out what nature wants.

You know, I think they're first like you, they're humanist first.

They come from different disciplines and different disciplinary backgrounds.

And just as an example, we have a brilliant designer who is just a mathematical genius and a computer scientist and a mechanical engineer who is trained as a synthetic biologist and now we're hiring a microbiologist and a chemist, architects of course and designers, roboticist.

And always dancing between this line of the artificial, the synthetic, and the real.

Yeah, the built and the grown, nature and culture, technology and biology, but we're constantly seeking to ask how can we build, design, and deploy products in 3 scales, The molecular scale, which I briefly hinted to, and there, in the molecular scale, we're really looking to understand whether there's a universal language to nature and what that language is, and then build a tool that I think and dream of it is the iPhone for nature.

If nature had an iPhone, what would that iPhone look like?

Does that mean creating an interface between nature and the computational tools we have?

Exactly, it goes back to that 11.5 quintillion times the bandwidth that humans have now arrived at and giving that to nature and seeing what happens there.

Can animals actually use this interface to know that they need to run away from fire?

Can plants use this interface to increase the rate of photosynthesis in the presence of a smoke cloud?

Can they do this quote unquote automatically without a kind of a top-down brute force policy-based method that's authored and deployed by humans?

And so this work really relates to that interface with the natural world.

And then there's a second area in the company which focuses on growing products.

And here we're focusing on a single product that starts from CO2.

It becomes a product, it's consumed, it's used, it's worn by a human, and then it goes back to the soil and it grows an edible fruit plant.

So we're talking about from CO2 to fruit.

Yeah, it starts from CO2 and it ends with something that you can literally eat.

So the world's first entirely biodegradable, biocompatible, biorenewable product.

Yes, either using plant matter or using bacteria.

But we are really looking at carbon recycling technologies that start with methane or wastewater and end with this wonderful reincarnation of a thing that doesn't need to end up in a composting site, but can just be thrown into the ground and grow olive and find peace.

And there's a lot of textile-based work out there that is focused on 1 single element in this long chain, like, oh, let's create, you know, leather out of mycelium or let's create textile out of cellulose, but then it stops there and you get to assembling the shoe or the wearable and you need a little bit of glue and you need a little bit of this material and a little bit of that material to make it water resistant and then it's over.

So that's 1 thing that we're trying to solve for is how to create a product that is materially, computationally, robotically novel and goes through all of these phases from the creation, from this carbon recycling technology to the product, to literally how do you think about reinventing an industry that is focused on assembly and putting things together and using humans to do that.

Can that happen just using robots and microbes?

I would love to see what this factory looks like.

In October, we'll share first renditions of some of this work, and in February we'll invite you to the lab.

I've already applied, I can't even hurt back.

Okay, just before we get to number 3, it'd be amazing to just talk about what it takes with robotic arms or in general, the whole process of how to build the life form, stuff you've done in the past, maybe stuff you're doing now, how to use bacteria, it's kind of synthetic biology, how to grow stuff by leveraging bacteria.

Yes, and just take a step back over the 10 years of the Mediated Matter Group, which was my group at MIT, has sort of dedicated itself to, bio-based design would be a suitcase word, but sort of thinking about that synergy between nature and culture, biology and technology.

And we attempted to build a suite of embodiments, let's say, that they ended up in amazing museums and amazing shows, and we wrote patents and papers on them, but they were still N of ones.

Again, the challenge, as you say, was to grow them.

And we classified them into fibers, cellular solids, biopolymers, pigments, and in each of the examples, although the material was different, Sometimes we used fibers, sometimes we used silk with silkworms and honey with bees or comb as the structural material.

With vespers, we used synthetically engineered bacteria to produce pigments.

Although the materials were different and the hero organisms were different, the philosophy was always the same.

The approach was really an approach of computational templating.

That templating allowed us to create templates for the natural environment where nature and technology could duet, could dance together to create these products.

So just a few examples with a silk pavilion.

We've had a couple of pavilions made of silk and the second 1, which was the bigger 1, which ended up at the Museum of Modern Art with my friend and incredible mentor, Paolo Antonelli, that pavilion was 6 meter tall and it was produced by silkworms.

And there we had different types of templates.

There were physical templates that were basically just these water-soluble meshes upon which the silkworms were spinning.

And then there were environmental templates, which was a robot basically applying a variation of environmental conditions such as heat and light to guide the movement of the silkworm.

You're saying so many amazing things, and I'm trying not to interrupt you, but 1 of the things you've learned by observing, by doing science on these is that the environment defines the shape that they create, or contributes or intricately plays with the shape they create, and so, and you get to, that's 1 of the ways you can get to guide their work is by defining the environment.

By the way, you said hero organism, which is an epic term.

That means like, it's whatever is the biological living system that's doing the creation.

And that's what's happening in pharma and biomaterials and by the way, precision ag and food, new food design technologies as people are betting on a hero organism is the sort of how I think of it.

And the hero organism is sometimes it's the palm oil or it's the mycelium.

There's a lot of mushrooms around for good and bad and it's cellulose or it's fake bananas or the workhorse E.

But these hero organisms are being betted on as like the, what's the 1 answer that solves everything?

These are sort of the 42s of the enchanted new universe.

And back at MIT, we said, instead of betting on all of these organisms, let's approach them as almost like movement in a symphony and let's kind of lean into what we can learn from each of these organisms in the context of building a project in an architectural scale.

And then the computational templating is the way you guide the work of this.

So each of these silkworms threads are about 1 mile in distance and they're beautiful.

And just thinking about the amount of material, it's a bit like thinking about the length of capillary vessels that grow in your belly when you're pregnant to feed that incredible new life form.

But back to the silkworms, I think I had 3 months to build this incredible pavilion, but we couldn't figure out how, we were thinking of emulating the process of how a silkworm goes about building its incredible architecture, this cocoon over the period of 24 to 72 hours.

And It builds a cocoon basically to protect itself.

And it uses pretty much just 2 materials, 2 chemical compounds, sericin and fibrin.

The sericin is sort of the glue of the cocoon.

The fibrin is the fiber-based material of the cocoon, and through fibers and glue, and that's true for so many systems in nature, lots of fiber and glue, and that architecture allows them to metamorphosize.

And in the process, they vary the properties of that silk thread.

So it's stiffer or softer depending on where it is in the section of the cocoon.

And so we were trying to emulate this robotically with a 3D printer that was a six-axis KUKA arm, 1 of these baby KUKAs.

And we were trying to emulate that process computationally and build something very large.

When 1 of my students now, a brilliant industrial engineer roboticist on my team, Marcus, said, well, you know, we were just playing with those silkworms and enjoying their presence when we realize that if they're placed on a desk or a horizontal surface, they will go about creating their cocoon, only the cocoon would be flat.

Because they're constantly looking for a vertical post in order to use that post as an anchor to spin the cocoon.

But in the absence of that post, on surfaces that are less than 21 millimeters and flat, they will spin flat patches.

And we say, aha, let's work with them to produce this dome as a set of flat patches.

And a silkworm, mind you, is quite an egocentric creature.

And actually, the furthest you go, you move forward in evolution by natural selection, the more egoism you find in creatures.

So when you think about termites, right, Their material sophistication is actually very primitive, but they have incredible ability to communicate and connect with each other.

So if you think about the entire, all of nature, let's say all of living systems as like a matrix that runs across 2 axes.

1 is material sophistication, which is terribly irrelevant for designers, and the other is communication.

The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap, right?

It's just saliva and feces and some soil particles that are built to create these incredible termite mounds at the scale that, when compared to human skyscrapers, transcend all of buildable scales at least in terms of what we have today in architectural practice, just relative to the size of the termite.

But when you look at the silkworm, the silkworm has 0 connection and communication across silkworms.

They were not designed to connect and communicate with each other.

They're sort of a human-designed species because the domesticated silk moth creates the cocoon.

We then produce the silk of it and then it dies.

And that's another problem that the sericulture industry has, is why did we in the first place author this organism 4, 000 years ago that is unable to fly and is just there to basically live as, to serve a human need, which is textiles.

And so here we were fascinated by the computational kind of biology dimension of silkworms, but along the way, by the way, this is great, I never get to tell the full story.

I always, I'm always, like people say, I always speak in Nietzschean paragraphs.

They're way too long, and this is wonderful.

But really, those silkworms are not, yes, they're not designed to be like humans, right?

They're not designed to connect, communicate, and build things that are bigger than themselves through connection and communication.

So what happens when you had 17, 000 of them communicating effectively?

What happens is that at some point, the templating strategies, and as you said correctly, there were geometrical templating, material templating, environmental templating, chemical templating, if you're using pheromones to guide the movement of bees in the absence of a queen, where you have a robotic queen.

But whenever you have these templating strategies, you have sort of control over nature, right?

But the question is, is there a world in which we can move from templating, from providing these computational material and immaterial physical and molecular platforms that guide nature, almost guiding a product, almost like a gardener, to a problem or an opportunity of emergence where that biological organism assumes agency by virtue of accessing the robotic code and saying, now I own the code, I get to do what I want with this code.

Let me show you what this pavilion may look like or this product may look like.

And I think 1 of the exciting moments for us is when we realized that these robotic platforms that were designed initially as templates actually inspired, if I may, a kind of a collaboration and cooperation between silkworms that are not a swarm-based organism.

They're not like the bees and the termites.

They don't work together and they don't have social orders amongst them, the queen and the drones, et cetera, they're all the same in a way, right?

And here, what was so exciting for us is that these computational and fabrication technologies enable the silkworm to sort of to kind of hop from the branch in ecology of worms to the branch in ecology of maybe human-like intelligence where they could connect and communicate by virtue of feeling or rubbing against each other in an area that was hotter or colder.

And they were so the product that we got at the end, the variation of density of fiber and the distribution of the fiber and the transparency, the product at the end seems Like it was produced by a swarm silk community,

It's a bunch of biological agents working together to assemble this thing.

How can technology augment or enable a swarm-like behavior in creatures that have not been designed to work as swarms.

So how do you construct a computational template from which a certain kind of thing emerges?

So how can you predict what emerges, I suppose?

So if you can predict it, it doesn't count as emergence.

It's a bit like to confess it doesn't count.

Speaking of emergence, and empowerment, because we're constantly moving between those as if they're equals on the team.

And 1 of them, Christoph, shared with me a mathematical equation for what does it mean to empower nature?

And what does empowerment in nature look like?

And that relates to emergence, and we can go back to emergence in a few moments, but I want to say it so that I know that I've learned it.

And if I've learned it, I can use it later.

And maybe you'll figure something out as you say

Of course, Christoph is the master here, but really we were thinking, again, what does nature want?

Nature wants to increase the information dimension and reduce entropy.

And this goes back to your conversation with Yosha about stochastic versus deterministic languages or processes.

His definition or the definition he found was that an agent is empowered if the entropy of the distribution of all of its states it's high, while the entropy of the distribution of a single state given a choice, given an action, is low.

Meaning it's that kind of duality between opportunity, like starting like this and going like this.

And this really, I think, is analogous to human empowerment.

Given an infinite, wide array of choices, what is the choice that you make to enable, to empower, to provide you with the agency that you need.

And how much does that, making that choice, actually control the trajectory of the system?

So this applies to all the kinds of systems you're talking about.

Yeah, and the cool thing is it can apply to a human on an individual basis, but or a silkworm or a bee or a microbe, a microbe that has agency or by virtue of a template, but it also applies to a community of organisms like the bees.

And so we've done a lot of work sort of moving from, you've asked how to grow things.

So we've grown things using co-fabrication, where we're digitally fabricating with other organisms that live across the various kingdoms of life and those were silkworms and bees.

And with bees, which we've sent to outer space and returned healthily and they were reproductive.

about the robotic queen and the pheromones, come on.

So we've built what we called a synthetic apiary.

And the synthetic apiary was designed as an environment that was a perpetual spring environment for the bees of Massachusetts.

They go in hibernation, of course, during the winter season and then we lose 80% of them or more during that period.

We're thinking, okay, what if we created this environment where before you template, right, before you can design with, you have to design for, right?

You have to create this space of mutualism, space of sort of shared connection between you and the organism.

And with bees, it started as the synthetic apiary.

And we have proven that that curated environment where we designed the space with high levels of control of temperature, humidity, and light, and we've proven that they were reproductive and alive, and we realized, wow, this environment that we created can help augment bees in the winter season in any city around the world where bees survive and thrive in the summer and spring seasons.

And could this be a kind of a new urban typology, an architectural typology of symbiosis, of mutualism between organisms and humans, where these are, by the way, the synthetic apiary was in a co-op in, you know, nearby Somerville.

We had, you know, we had robots, our team, you know, schlepped there every day with our tools and machines, and we made it happen.

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Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #394