K. Eric Drexler
K. Eric Drexler
Kim Eric Drexleris an American engineer best known for popularizing the potential of molecular nanotechnology, from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was revised and published as the book Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation, which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992...
built concerned looking technology tools
For many years I'd been concerned about technology and the future, and had been looking at what could be built with tools that we didn't have yet.
real thinking people
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 seems to be more a matter of inertia than it is of people having some real reason for thinking something else.
tools helping artificial-intelligence
In a sense, artificial intelligence will be the ultimate tool because it will help us build all possible tools.
study scientist physical-things
Scientists study physical things, then describe them; engineers describe physical things, then build them.
lines draws rationality
Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.
use way steps
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.
space mit development
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 this led to various sorts of work in space development.
machines steps doe
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 computer speeds.
technology engineering issues
Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.
molecules abundance process
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 simpler.
learning design machines
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 sorts of things.
powerful technology
Any powerful technology can be abused.
stupid intelligent medicine
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 around and interfere with things as best they can. At present, medicine is unable to heal anything.
self effort world
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 a sense, we have a self-replicating industrial system today, but it would take a tremendous effort to copy what we already have.