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Well, Drexler has always, or at least with the publication of his Engines of Creation, used analogies like the nanomachines known as sperm and egg was an existe
by hga 11y ago
Well, Drexler has always, or at least with the publication of his Engines of Creation, used analogies like the nanomachines known as sperm and egg was an existence proof that at some level his style of nanotech was demonstrably possible (or something like this, not sure I've re-read it since it came out in the '80s).
His take on Smalley's "fat fingers" criticism was that it was a straw man, something he never proposed, and the ribosome proved that Smalley's general approach contradicted it.
This all should be in the context of Drexler's claim that the chemistry community co-opted the publicity he created with his expositions on his style of nanotech to get/keep almost all the funding it might attract, especially from them. Plenty of people, including at least some conventional chemists, also feared grey goo and other possible threats from Drexler style nanotech, no doubt including the macro ones, famously Bill Joy in the programming community, and are quite determined to suppress research in it. So without the right background, which I only started to get, it's hard to judge their claims of it being "impossible" or the like.
- mannykannot 11y agoI agree that Drexler won the debate (or at least that aspect of it), mainly because Smalley overstated his case. I think the grey goo argument was directed against Drexler not because of his 'mechanical' approach to nanotechnology, but because of his claims that it would produce replicators that are far faster and more efficient than biological ones.
- hga 11y agoErrr, I don't know who came up with the concept, but it was prominently featured in Engines of Creation by that name. It is a legitimate concern, but a few years later, when the nanotech conference was at MIT, I remember him saying that it looked easily solvable for the good guys, e.g. make assemblers depend one or more chemicals not found in nature in significant quantities. The problems of bad actors, well, no one has any better solution to them than we've ever had. That's one of the problems I see with the chemistry etc. community's suppression of nanotech development. The first entity that both develops nanotech and decides to take over the world will do so unless we get our act together (something he's mentioned as well, I think in Engines).