As the OLPC laptop was getting ready to go into mass production in 2007, many executives approached me wanting the screen that I invented, and the laptop architecture that I co-invented, for their new laptops, cell phones, and other devices.
— Mary Lou Jepsen
All devices should just sip power and be charged like a calculator is, with a small solar cell. No power adaptors. It's easy to put a solar cell into a device, but it's not powerful enough to drive today's cell phones or laptops. They need too much power to run.
A lot of people get really seduced by demos of the next display technology. I myself fell under that spell for about 20 years.
For the devices we use... the funding models are completely screwed up. Angel funding isn't sufficient for hardware.
I was going blind, and I was in a wheelchair. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life living with my parents.
If you can make a lot more of something, you can make it much more inexpensive.
Every time I meet with the CEO of a big laptop company, they tell me they 'studied' my design.
I took on the math-intensive art form of holography and, in my early 20s, traveled the world, living on university fellowships to pursue this esoteric craft. I didn't date much, really - perhaps because I didn't have many hormones, though I didn't know that at the time.
You see very senior women leaving technology and the men stay, mostly because they feel quite isolated and are isolated by the very systems.
I left Google X. All the senior women have left Google X. I was the last to make it - I was, to be fair, the last there. Megan Smith left, Claire Hughes Johnson, vice presidents at Google left.
I have decided to leave Facebook and Oculus to work on curing diseases using some new imaging technologies I've been incubating for awhile.
If I throw you into an MRI machine right now, I can tell you what words you're about to say.
I can tell you what images are in your head. I can tell what music you're thinking of. I can tell if you're listening to me or not. That's possible with an MRI now.
Could you imagine if we could leapfrog language and communicate directly with human thought? What would we be capable of then? And how will we learn to deal with the truths of unfiltered human thought? You think the Internet was big. These are huge questions.
I started a company called Pixel Qi and the principal of as we're going, smartphones were happening, but as we go forward, the predictions were five devices per person. Do you want to charge each one of those every night to try to get them on a full charge when you're walking around? Smartphones don't even last a day without a recharge now.
I designed a system to project video on the moon for all of humanity to see. I did this sort of as therapy as I was doing my Ph.D. in device physics.
The future of screens isn't about the iPad. It's much, much bigger.
You can get really great reflective screens that rival e-paper at really amazing price points and with fantastic ultra-low-power capabilities.
One of the technology lessons was to work inside the cost envelope of the developing world to lower costs overall. What's even more important and useful is dramatically lowering power consumption. Everyone wants batteries that can last 10 times longer.
There's no more silicon in Silicon Valley. It's all iPhone apps.
I didn't want to be an electrical engineer. But I did want to go to college. And they said they'd help me pay for it if I'd major in electrical engineering.
I've found that people who design computers don't know a lot about displays.
More of us may be affected by variant hormone levels than we realize.
In my early 30s, for a few months, I altered my body chemistry and hormones so that I was closer to a man in his early 20s. I was blown away by how dramatically my thoughts changed.
It's exciting to be able to be part of the block and tackle of building a company from a smaller base.
My system uses the speed of components in cameras and cell phones to get four inches of depth through the brain.
Elon Musk is talking about silicon nanoparticles pulsing through our veins to make us sort of semi-cyborg computers. But why not take a noninvasive approach? I've been working and trying to think and invent a way to do this for a number of years and finally happened upon it and left Facebook to do it.
If we could communicate at the speed of thought, we can augment our creativity with the low-level stuff that AI and robots and 3-D printers and fab labs and all that do.
I'm actually an engineer.
After my neurosurgery, part of my brain was missing, and I had to deal with that. It wasn't the grey matter, but it was the gooey part dead center that makes key hormones and neurotransmitters.
I feel in love with holography, which is that you don't have to wear anything or carry anything. It is augmented reality, if you will.
Screens can work wirelessly and run on the amount of power supplied from a small solar panel and room light.
I worked on heads-up displays, virtual-reality technology, and holographic displays - all sorts of really cool technology.
These days, the manufacturing is controlled by a small number of countries, primarily Taiwan and South Korea.
My health used to limit me, but now it's sort of an advantage.
The future of reading is screens. Books are toast.
The world's information is digital. The web, the news, all of that is digital. And now... we have ten million books scanned. That was the last bastion of what was offline; it's now online and accessible.
I worked as an artist, played in a band, met Andy Warhol, Christo, Lou Reed, and David Byrne. I had fun.
My central thesis is that combining increased temporal and spatial resolution in MRI techniques with increasingly powerful data correlation techniques will allow the derivation of interpreted meanings from neural signals. I observed, further, that the techniques that exist already allow some correlations.
When I joined Google, it was a 1,500-person company, which I thought was huge, since I don't think of myself as a corporate person.
I think that's the point of what we all should all be doing: trying to make the impossible possible.
I figured out how to put basically the functionality of an M.R.I. machine - a multimillion-dollar M.R.I. machine - into a wearable in the form of a ski hat.
Our brains are way, way more complex than any computer we know how to make. They're way more creative. The input's pretty good, but the output is constrained by our tongues and jaws moving and us typing.
Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking.
I never stopped dreaming of how to create a wearable to communicate with our thoughts, how to do this at consumer electronics pricing.
Redirecting sunlight on the earth to the moon gives you enough light so that all of humanity can see.
