K. Eric Drexler Quotes

20 quotes in 447 categories

• 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 could…
• The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don't have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things…
• I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these…
• Any powerful technology can be abused.
• Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, diffuse…
• If you take all the factories in the world today, they could make all the parts necessary to build more factories like themselves. So, in…
• I've encountered a lot of people who sound like critics but very few who have substantive criticisms. There is a lot of skepticism, but it…
• After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I…
• 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…
• And that because the moving parts are a million times smaller than the ones we're familiar with, they move a million times faster, just as…
• 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…
• 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 believe…
• In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough.
• 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…
• My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And…
• 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 at…
• Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area…
• The really big difference is that what you make with a molecular machine can be completely precise, down to the tiniest degree of detail that…
• The other advantage is that in conventional manufacturing processes, it takes a long time for a factory to produce an amount of product equal to…
• My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an unstable arms race.

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