K. Eric Drexler

to the extent Elon is now starting to get interested in geoengineering, I think this is a return to form and we're trying to put these 50 years of waste behind us.

Drexler promised us diamond-oid assemblers 40 years ago and they never arrived.

What is it we actually want instead?

I don't think, Peter, you actually want diamond-oid assemblers.

I do buy that you want assemblers, but I think, you know, I've had this discussion with Eric Drexler and others.

I don't think you actually want diamond-oid assemblers because they're covalently bonded.

And the energies are pretty high for doing that.

Do you have a comment, researcher?

And that's why I threw out the like cure cancer thing, because when nanotechnology was proposed by Eric Drexler, it was in an aspirational sense.

It was like, oh, if we could control matter at the atomic scale, we could do all these amazing things.

Like we could have nanobots go into your bloodstream and cure you of all disease.

And that explosion of imagination led to one of the most intense, highly publicized scientific clashes in recent history, the great nano debate.

The Drexler versus Smalley debate.

This wasn't just an academic disagreement.

It was a fundamental dispute about the literal physical limits of manufacturing, and it played out across the pages of major journals like Scientific American.

Let's set the stage for this fight.

On one side, you have K. Eric Drexler.

In the 1980s, he proposed a concept he called molecular nanotechnology, or MNT.

Right.

You see the universe as a video game, right? It's just a mathematical system, and you have an AI that understands that mathematical system, and it's just charting a course, right? How do I ri- run the best business? How do I have the most efficient machinery for my business or my online business? Wouldn't it be nice if my online business had a warehouse that runs 50,000 times more efficiently than Amazon's warehouse? What should I build for that? Um, and the answer is nanotechnology.

So Eric Drexler wrote a, a couple really compelling books just saying, "Look, this is possible.

You just put the atoms exactly where they need to be, and you get these nanomachines, and they're, and they're really efficient." And some evidence of that is if you look at biology, right? So biological organisms are like little nanomachines.

One difference is that they're not really good nanomachines because, like, the proteins are held together by van der Waals forces, which is, like, a weak type of force.

Another thing that, that our friend, just getting back to my childhood, you know, mentor from the dead, uh, well, he wasn't dead at the time, Isaac Asimov, and, and your BU connections, uh, were the laws of robotics.

And, and now we hear so much about robotics and na- uh, we, we hear less about, you know, kinda the Eric Drexler nano- nanobot, uh, than we did previously.

We're now hearing about macrobots, you know, that are gonna fold my laundry and, you know, probably grade papers in the future.

They can never replace professors, though.

Our job security.

I mean, if we survive COVID, AI.

The point being, these nanobots kind of, they were the hot thing, as I said, Eric Drexler's thing, you know.

Feynman, you know, my, my, one of my heroes, right? There's plenty of room at the bottom.