Mary Lou Jepsen

There's no more silicon in Silicon Valley. It's all iPhone apps.

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.

I worked as an artist, played in a band, met Andy Warhol, Christo, Lou Reed, and David Byrne. I had fun.

More of us may be affected by variant hormone levels than we realize.

Every time I meet with the CEO of a big laptop company, they tell me they 'studied' my design.

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've found that people who design computers don't know a lot about displays.

If you can make a lot more of something, you can make it much more inexpensive.

The future of reading is screens. Books are toast.

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 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.

My health used to limit me, but now it's sort of an advantage.

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.

For the devices we use... the funding models are completely screwed up. Angel funding isn't sufficient for hardware.

These days, the manufacturing is controlled by a small number of countries, primarily Taiwan and South Korea.

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.

A lot of people get really seduced by demos of the next display technology. I myself fell under that spell for about 20 years.

I worked on heads-up displays, virtual-reality technology, and holographic displays - all sorts of really cool technology.

You can get really great reflective screens that rival e-paper at really amazing price points and with fantastic ultra-low-power capabilities.

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.

Screens can work wirelessly and run on the amount of power supplied from a small solar panel and room light.

The future of screens isn't about the iPad. It's much, much bigger.

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.

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 think that's the point of what we all should all be doing: trying to make the impossible possible.