It's a lot easier to see, at least in some cases, what the long-term limits of the possible will be, because they depend on natural law. But it's much harder to see just what path we will follow in heading… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share Image
Plants with leaves no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous bacteria… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
“The Chemical Abstracts Service of the American Chemical Society maintains a registry that includes (at the moment) descriptions of 67,883,986 “commercially available chemicals” (many… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an unstable arms… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
In a sense, artificial intelligence will be the ultimate tool because it will help us build all possible tools. — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect,… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit.… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
“Within the microblock-size range, larger blocks enable faster assembly, while smaller blocks enable finer-grained customization, and there’s no reason to limit choices to a… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body,… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
“Tsiolkovsky had no need for a lathe or a drill because he produced his results using the traditional tools of design engineering: pen and… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
“Deep in the nanoscale-size range, however, engineering encounters ultimate, atomic constraints on the size of even the simplest devices. Gears, shafts, and bearings, for… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
But if we can manage it so people don't have things forced on them that they don't want, I think there's every reason to… — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share
