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This is really a straw man argument. If you go read Drexler's blog(e.g. this series: http://metamodern.com/2009/12/19/molecular-manufacturing-whe...), he is very explicit that the path forward is studying natural self-assembly from DNA and then tearing that apart, finding how it works, and modularizing/modifying it for our own purposes. None of this appears to be a "crazy idea" or something out of humanity's reach til long after we're all dead, as this author claims

Drexler's egotistical to be sure. It doesn't make him wrong



That's the main problem with this piece, it attacks a Drexler that no longer exists, his views have shifted quite a bit from back then.


I think it attacks a Drexler that never existed; the chapter in Nanosystems on ways forward outlined similar ideas to that more recent post. Just because the bulk of Nanosystems explores a class of systems that's easier to analyze and currently impossible to build, he wasn't ever saying "Let's try to build this class of systems! Right now!" The OP was a total caricature.




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