I spent some time in Gershenfeld's lab while at MIT. He's on to something in that the machinery and know-how needed to engineer a new kind of robot or sensor a

I spent some time in Gershenfeld's lab while at MIT. He's on to something in that the machinery and know-how needed to engineer a new kind of robot or sensor are ready to spread far and wide. The title is overly provocative, and brings to mind other discussions, some provoked by PG essays, about the role of universities, the efficacy or applicability to the real world of different levels of education as they're currently taught, the practical difference between a good school and a bad school, whether you should go to grad school, etc. Such discussions tend to bore me. Suffice it to say that without MIT, there would be no Fab Labs. Even viewing MIT as purely a place to educate students, or purely a place to do research, or purely a place to do engineering, none of which it is, MIT is not in danger of becoming obsolete any time soon, even with its curriculum publicly available and its technological resources becoming less scarce.