Nick Szabo  🔑

It's true that of the potentially transformative technologies of the late 20th century, nanotech has been one of the slowest to materialize. But then, one could say the same of nuclear fusion, for which I still hold out high hopes.

I tend to side with Kurzweil regarding his analysis of this debate, though Smalley's argument were useful insofar as they forced more precise articulations of Drexler's vision. Additionally, my guess is that the "industrial" mode of thinking remains incongruent with this scale.

Meaning that we require a deeper understanding of complex atomic and molecular dynamics in order to generate systems capable of precise electro-magnetic or bio-chemical nudging in service of complex self-assembly. Here, tools like DeepMind are useful. Are we close? Hard to say.

And it's in this sense that Smalley's use of metaphors like "falling in love" at the molecular scale are relevant, as such complex processes of self-assembly are precisely that: complex processes which are more similar to people falling in love than to building a car.

Metaphors about love and fat fingers are fun but the real problem AFAIK is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Atoms and molecules are not hard sand or diamond particles writ small, they are wave functions describing the probability events will happen.

Those are the concepts we presently use to describe them for certain purposes, yes. To more clearly conceptualize what I'm trying to get at, consider the difference between Drexler's "molecular machines" and the molecular dynamics selected by evolution...

If complex molecular assembly were not possible, we would not exist. But this is why I say the industrial understanding of crystalline / rationalized systems is the wrong way to think about molecular assembly. Rather, we require a kind of system's intelligence capable of...

Exploring possibility space in a manner that balances "blind" evolution with the intentionality and time scales of industrial production. I do believe it's possible to make significant progress as constrained by the tension between these two approaches.