This is getting off-topic but... I don't think it's just underestimating the rate. The problem is that they're just way off, and their hype has a defocusing eff

This is getting off-topic but... I don't think it's just underestimating the rate. The problem is that they're just way off, and their hype has a defocusing effect. I don't think it's harmless. If you look into where real innovation happens, it always happens where people are engaged with the world. It happens where people are trying to solve real rubber-meets-the-road problems. You don't get innovation by speculating in a vacuum and then throwing around ivory-tower abstractions. Take the old Bell Labs for instance... it was so phenomenally innovative because they had a good supply of hard real-world problems coming from the telecom buildout. Problems are just as valuable as solutions... maybe more valuable. Problems are the fuel of engineering. The closer you get to the expanding wave-front of real applied technology, the meatier the problems become. If Drexler-esque nanotech ever starts to happen, it won't be because of hand-wavy speculation about consciousness uploading. It will be because someone somewhere has a hard problem that demands a nanotech solution. As an example I can think of one currently very relevant candidate: cleaning up nuclear contamination. (Of course, bio-remediation coupled with genetic engineering or selective breeding might work there too...) There seems to be an epidemic of defocus in engineering right now. I keep seeing press releases from certain well-respected universities like "Scientists develop method of using viral particles to harness (tiny amounts of) energy from the vibrations of bull testicles on Wednesdays." A lot of people seem to have no intuition for practicality. ... which brings us back to the topic at hand in a meandering way ... This is one of the reasons I love the space program. It's an endeavor that supplies us with an ample supply of hard real problems.