I am a strong believer that nanotechnology is possible, which seems to be a sort of antimeme. And tons of people who should really know better seem to consider the acknowledgement of the physical possibility of Drexlerish nanotech as evidence someone is crazy—it is amusing to look at the AGI takes of these same people five years ago. They are mostly using the exact same idiotic intuitions in exactly the same way for the exact same reasons.
But maybe this being an antimeme is good? Perhaps its best people are holding the idiot ball on the topic? On one hand, I don’t think lying is good, even by omission. And to the extent denying nanotech is load-bearing in their claims that takeoff will be slow (by the Christiano definition) then getting them to see through the antimeme is useful—as an aside I think people do forget that we have seen little evidence so far, at least in terms of economic growth, that we are living in Christiano’s predicted world. I get the impression, sometimes, some people think we have.
But also, we are getting very powerful tools that makes a Drexlarian project more and more plausible, which has its own risks and even indirect risks of increasing available compute. So perhaps we are fortunate nanotechnology is so incredibly low status? As Sama would probably just try to do it if it were not.
There is a journal called Nanotechnology. It reports a steady stream of developments pertaining to nanoscale and single-molecule design and synthesis. So that keeps happening.
What has not happened, is the convergence of all these capabilities in the kind of universal nanosynthesis device that Drexler called an assembler, and the consequent construction of devices that only it could make, such as various “nanobots”.
It is similar to the fate of one of his mentors, Gerard O’Neill, who in the 1970s, led all kinds of research into the construction of space colonies and the logistics of space industrialization. Engineering calculations were done, supply chains were proposed; one presumes that some version of all that is physically possible, but no version of it was ever actually carried out.
In that case, one reason why is because of the enormous budgets involved. But another reason is political and cultural. American civilization was visionary enough to conceive of such projects, but not visionary enough to carry them out. Space remained the domain of science, comsats, spysats, and a token human presence at the international space station, but even returning to the moon was too much.
In the case of Drexler’s nanotechnology, I’m sure that lack of broad visionary support within the culture, has been a crucial factor in nothing happening. But I suspect another issue here was the caution with which the nanotech-aware community approached its own concept. Drexler’s 1986 book on the subject emphasized throughout that nanotechnology is an extinction risk, and yet the people who undertook to do the design research (Ralph Merkle, Robert Freitas, Drexler himself) also came from that community. I don’t know the sociology of how it all unfolded, but the doomsday fears of gray goo and aerovores must have inhibited them in seeking support. If only they had known how things would work in 2025, a time when having an extinction risk associated with your product is just part of the price of doing business!
Here in 2025, the closest thing to nanotech big business is probably everything to do with nanotubes and graphene. For example, the 1990s Texan nanotech startup Zyvex, which was genuinely interested in the assembler concept, seems to have been bought out by a big Luxembourg company that specializes in nanotube applications. As for people working on the assembler vision itself, I think the stalwarts from Drexler’s circle have kept it up, and they even continue to submit patents. The last I heard, they were being backed by a Canadian banknote authentication company, which is a peculiar arrangement and must involve either an odd story or a stealth strategic investment or both.
Apart from them, I believe there’s one and maybe two (and maybe more) West Coast startups that are pursuing something like the old dream of “molecular manufacturing”. It’s interesting that they exist but are overshadowed by current dreams like crypto, AI, quantum computing, and reusable rockets. Also interesting is the similarity between how nanotechnology as envisioned by Drexler, and friendly AI as envisioned by Yudkowsky, unfolded—except that, rather than fade into the background the way that nano dreams and nightmares were displaced by the more routine scientific-industrial interest in graphene and nanotubes, AI has become one of the sensations of the age, on every desktop and never far from the headlines.
I see potential for a serious historical study here, for example tracing the arc from O’Neill to Drexler to Yudkowsky (and maybe you could throw in Dyson’s Project Orion and Ettinger’s cryonics, but I’d make those three the backbone of the story), and trying to trace what was dreamed, what was possible but never happened, what did actually happen, and the evolving cultural, political, and economic context. (Maybe some of the people in “progress studies” could work on this.)
I think this might be what Peter Thiel’s stagnation thesis is really about (before he dressed it up in theology). It’s not that nothing has been happening in technology or science, but there are specific momentous paths that were not taken. AI has really been the exception. Having personally lived through the second half of that arc (Drexler to Yudkowsky), I am interested in making sense of that historical experience, even as we now race forward. I think there must be lessons to be learnt.
P.S. Let me also note that @Eric Drexler has been known to post here, I would welcome any comment he has on this history.
Slow takeoff in the sense of Christiano is a far steeper climb up to far higher capabilities than what the “nanotechnology is impossible” folks are expecting.
Not developing nanotech is like not advancing semiconductor fabs, a compute governance intervention. If ASI actually is dangerous and too hard to manage in the foreseeable future, and many reasonable people notice this, then early AGIs will start noticing it too, and seek to prevent an overly fast takeoff.
If there is no software-only singularity and much more compute really is necessary for ASI, not developing nanotech sounds like a useful thing to do. Gradual disempowerment dynamics might make the world largely run by AGIs more coordinated, so that technological determinism will lose a lot of its power, and the things that actually happen will be decided rather than follow inevitably from what’s feasible. It’s not enough to ask what’s technologically feasible at that point.
I am a strong believer that nanotechnology is possible, which seems to be a sort of antimeme. And tons of people who should really know better seem to consider the acknowledgement of the physical possibility of Drexlerish nanotech as evidence someone is crazy—it is amusing to look at the AGI takes of these same people five years ago. They are mostly using the exact same idiotic intuitions in exactly the same way for the exact same reasons.
But maybe this being an antimeme is good? Perhaps its best people are holding the idiot ball on the topic? On one hand, I don’t think lying is good, even by omission. And to the extent denying nanotech is load-bearing in their claims that takeoff will be slow (by the Christiano definition) then getting them to see through the antimeme is useful—as an aside I think people do forget that we have seen little evidence so far, at least in terms of economic growth, that we are living in Christiano’s predicted world. I get the impression, sometimes, some people think we have.
But also, we are getting very powerful tools that makes a Drexlarian project more and more plausible, which has its own risks and even indirect risks of increasing available compute. So perhaps we are fortunate nanotechnology is so incredibly low status? As Sama would probably just try to do it if it were not.
There is a journal called Nanotechnology. It reports a steady stream of developments pertaining to nanoscale and single-molecule design and synthesis. So that keeps happening.
What has not happened, is the convergence of all these capabilities in the kind of universal nanosynthesis device that Drexler called an assembler, and the consequent construction of devices that only it could make, such as various “nanobots”.
It is similar to the fate of one of his mentors, Gerard O’Neill, who in the 1970s, led all kinds of research into the construction of space colonies and the logistics of space industrialization. Engineering calculations were done, supply chains were proposed; one presumes that some version of all that is physically possible, but no version of it was ever actually carried out.
In that case, one reason why is because of the enormous budgets involved. But another reason is political and cultural. American civilization was visionary enough to conceive of such projects, but not visionary enough to carry them out. Space remained the domain of science, comsats, spysats, and a token human presence at the international space station, but even returning to the moon was too much.
In the case of Drexler’s nanotechnology, I’m sure that lack of broad visionary support within the culture, has been a crucial factor in nothing happening. But I suspect another issue here was the caution with which the nanotech-aware community approached its own concept. Drexler’s 1986 book on the subject emphasized throughout that nanotechnology is an extinction risk, and yet the people who undertook to do the design research (Ralph Merkle, Robert Freitas, Drexler himself) also came from that community. I don’t know the sociology of how it all unfolded, but the doomsday fears of gray goo and aerovores must have inhibited them in seeking support. If only they had known how things would work in 2025, a time when having an extinction risk associated with your product is just part of the price of doing business!
Here in 2025, the closest thing to nanotech big business is probably everything to do with nanotubes and graphene. For example, the 1990s Texan nanotech startup Zyvex, which was genuinely interested in the assembler concept, seems to have been bought out by a big Luxembourg company that specializes in nanotube applications. As for people working on the assembler vision itself, I think the stalwarts from Drexler’s circle have kept it up, and they even continue to submit patents. The last I heard, they were being backed by a Canadian banknote authentication company, which is a peculiar arrangement and must involve either an odd story or a stealth strategic investment or both.
Apart from them, I believe there’s one and maybe two (and maybe more) West Coast startups that are pursuing something like the old dream of “molecular manufacturing”. It’s interesting that they exist but are overshadowed by current dreams like crypto, AI, quantum computing, and reusable rockets. Also interesting is the similarity between how nanotechnology as envisioned by Drexler, and friendly AI as envisioned by Yudkowsky, unfolded—except that, rather than fade into the background the way that nano dreams and nightmares were displaced by the more routine scientific-industrial interest in graphene and nanotubes, AI has become one of the sensations of the age, on every desktop and never far from the headlines.
I see potential for a serious historical study here, for example tracing the arc from O’Neill to Drexler to Yudkowsky (and maybe you could throw in Dyson’s Project Orion and Ettinger’s cryonics, but I’d make those three the backbone of the story), and trying to trace what was dreamed, what was possible but never happened, what did actually happen, and the evolving cultural, political, and economic context. (Maybe some of the people in “progress studies” could work on this.)
I think this might be what Peter Thiel’s stagnation thesis is really about (before he dressed it up in theology). It’s not that nothing has been happening in technology or science, but there are specific momentous paths that were not taken. AI has really been the exception. Having personally lived through the second half of that arc (Drexler to Yudkowsky), I am interested in making sense of that historical experience, even as we now race forward. I think there must be lessons to be learnt.
P.S. Let me also note that @Eric Drexler has been known to post here, I would welcome any comment he has on this history.
@Eric Drexler you were mentioned in the parent comment.
Does synthetic cell biology count as “nanotech”? There seems to be plenty of progress on that front.
Slow takeoff in the sense of Christiano is a far steeper climb up to far higher capabilities than what the “nanotechnology is impossible” folks are expecting.
Not developing nanotech is like not advancing semiconductor fabs, a compute governance intervention. If ASI actually is dangerous and too hard to manage in the foreseeable future, and many reasonable people notice this, then early AGIs will start noticing it too, and seek to prevent an overly fast takeoff.
If there is no software-only singularity and much more compute really is necessary for ASI, not developing nanotech sounds like a useful thing to do. Gradual disempowerment dynamics might make the world largely run by AGIs more coordinated, so that technological determinism will lose a lot of its power, and the things that actually happen will be decided rather than follow inevitably from what’s feasible. It’s not enough to ask what’s technologically feasible at that point.