Is the Star Trek replicator about to become a reality? A machine which will build anything we request, molecule by molecule? Yes, according to Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. In this interview, first broadcast on Fareed Zakarias’ CNN show The Global Public Square, Gershenfeld explains the nature of the work he is doing and where it is taking us.

Note the last words of Gershenfeld, ” [I]t’s a real kind of reinvention. If anybody can make anything, how do you live, work and play. Sort of, how do you organize society?” This is an amazing (albeit, unintended) parallel of Marx’s famous statement, ” The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”