K. Eric Drexler

Plants with leaves no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough…

— K. Eric Drexler

“The Chemical Abstracts Service of the American Chemical Society maintains a registry that includes (at the moment) descriptions of 67,883,986 “commercially available…

— K. Eric Drexler

My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an…

— K. Eric Drexler

In a sense, artificial intelligence will be the ultimate tool because it will help us build all possible tools.

— K. Eric Drexler

You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In…

— K. Eric Drexler

My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities…

— K. Eric Drexler

On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system…

— K. Eric Drexler

Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.

— K. Eric Drexler

“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…

— K. Eric Drexler

Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into…

— K. Eric Drexler

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design…

— K. Eric Drexler

“Tsiolkovsky had no need for a lathe or a drill because he produced his results using the traditional tools of design engineering:…

— K. Eric Drexler

“Deep in the nanoscale-size range, however, engineering encounters ultimate, atomic constraints on the size of even the simplest devices. Gears, shafts, and…

— K. Eric Drexler

Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and…

— K. Eric Drexler

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…

— K. Eric Drexler

In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the…

— K. Eric Drexler

I've encountered a lot of people who sound like critics but very few who have substantive criticisms. There is a lot of…

— K. Eric Drexler

The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don't have to be made by some elaborate process. That…

— K. Eric Drexler

Scientists study physical things, then describe them; engineers describe physical things, then build them.

— K. Eric Drexler

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes…

— K. Eric Drexler

The other advantage is that in conventional manufacturing processes, it takes a long time for a factory to produce an amount of…

— K. Eric Drexler

It's a lot easier to see, at least in some cases, what the long-term limits of the possible will be, because they…

— K. Eric Drexler

The really big difference is that what you make with a molecular machine can be completely precise, down to the tiniest degree…

— K. Eric Drexler

“The Baker group at the University of Washington has packaged computer-aided protein fold prediction as a game, Foldit, which has been a…

— K. Eric Drexler

Any powerful technology can be abused.

— K. Eric Drexler