Eric Drexler just pinged me to point out that what I usually refer to as “Drexlerians” do not speak for him. It reminds me of the scene in the Life of Brian where trying to dissuade his growing band of disciples from following him, Brian shouts “You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got …
Taking a Black & White View of a Technicolour World
Following on from the recent spat of name calling, there do seem to be opposing camps in the nanotech world, let’s call them the super optimists and the super pessimists. The super optimists, and here I include the folks at Foresight, Institute of Molecular Manufacturing etc, tend to be people who spend a lot of time sitting in front of …
The Nanotech Taliban Claim “Dexter Johnson is an ignoramus whose ignorance leads him to view optimists with contempt.”
My estwhile colleague Dexter Johnson who also blogs for IEEE Spectrum received a number of plaudits from readers of the Foresight Institutes Nanodot blog after daring to suggest that the sunny optimism of current President J Storrs Hall might be rather displaced and that the assertion nanobots will save us may be rather missing the point. Illustrating the difficullty of …
Father 2.0 Recontructed Using Nanobots?
Is this nanobot week? Ray Kurzweil appears to be planning to use nanobots to bring his dead (since 1970) father to life according to this extract from a recent Rolling Stone interview reproduced at RoughType…. Using technology, he plans to bring his dead father back to life. Kurzweil reveals this to me near the end of our conversation … In …
What’s In A Word?
One of the oddest arguments of the molecular manufacturing community (the bunch that believe that nanofactories will lead to eternal life. personal freedom, and do away with the need for money, government, clothes and apparently, good manners or common sense) is their possessiveness of the term nanotechnology.This extract from a recent tirade is typical: By appropriating the term nanotechnology for …
Drexlerians and Saudi Arabia’s Nanotech
One of the presumed characteristics of those who are adherents to molecular nanotechnology (MNT) as proposed by Eric Drexler is their ability to keep an open mind, while simultaneously pointing out that the rest of us are “too conservative” or “close-minded,” but their open-minded qualities seem to run aground when faced with the prospect of a Saudi Arabian nanotechnology initiative. …