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. K. Eric Drexler Read Quote
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. K. Eric Drexler Read Quote
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. K. Eric Drexler Read Quote
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 can exist in the world. K. Eric Drexler Read Quote
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 its own weight. With molecular machines, the time required would be something more like a minute. K. Eric Drexler Read Quote
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. K. Eric Drexler Read Quote
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 a smaller tuning fork produces a higher pitch than a large one. K. Eric Drexler Read Quote
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. K. Eric Drexler Read Quote
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. K. Eric Drexler Read Quote
