For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork.

There is so much blandness and grayness out there, people want to be able to say "it's mine." They want to customize their cars like they customize a jeans jacket.

For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork.

Computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to either computers or to science.

The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems.