It's hard to take an argument seriously that claims that the "physics [of Drexler-style nanotech] is sound". As beautiful as those drawings are, atoms and molec

It's hard to take an argument seriously that claims that the "physics [of Drexler-style nanotech] is sound". As beautiful as those drawings are, atoms and molecules simply don't behave that way. As for the "Stagnation" narrative: I don't see it. It seems to me that "Stagnation" is proclaimed by Dark Enlightenment types who measure progress by the height of the phallic buildings a civilization builds (ah, right, of course "a set of towers a hundred kilometers tall with a magnetic accelerator to shoot payloads" is not phallic imagery at all...), by the use of energy (most emblematic in proof of work cryptocurrencies, where value is created through the expenditure of energy for expenditure's sake), etc. I measure progress by ingenuity. I see a world where a wristwatch has more computing power than the a supercomputer had a generation ago; where in-ear headphones or hearing aids can perform highly sophisticated signal processing on the fly, and where neural network based algorithms are currently improving performance by leaps and bounds.