Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us there. — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share Image
An international race in the relevant technologies is getting under way at this point, not necessarily with an understanding of where that race leads in the long run, but strongly motivated by the short-term payoffs. — 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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
In a sense, artificial intelligence will be the ultimate tool because it will help us build all possible tools. — K. Eric Drexler Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
