[ Thanks to Barbara I.
Irwin for this link. ]
“Neil Gershenfeld has been known to make some bold
predictions about the future. But even by his standards, this one
was a doozy.“”Twenty years from now,” he told a 2006 conference in Berkeley,
“we’ll have Star Trek replicators that can make anything.”“You remember the replicator — the one that provided Captain
Picard with his cup of “tea, Earl Grey, hot,” with a simple verbal
prompt? It might sound like jet-age fantasy, but Gershenfeld was
absolutely serious with his reference.”