Nor do I know of any person in history who looks to have been “95% of Eric Drexler”, ready to step into Drexler’s place and create 95% of the same ideas and institutions.
For what it’s worth when I was doing the research for 100 Years Of Existential Risk I noticed the same thing. Of all the people in that story Drexler seems like the most unique contribution with the least antecedent or precedent. As far as I can tell it’s Feynman giving his talk on plenty of room at the bottom and then Eric Drexler, which is a wild leap in sophistication going from just the roughest sketch of the basic idea to Nanosystems.
EDIT: Realizing that at the time I researched that I didn’t have access to LLMs, I just asked Astra about this and it pointed out something funny (along with a handful of extremely marginal less developed precursors to Drexler), Drexler actually came up with the idea before finding the Feynman talk:
The most interesting finding actually strengthens the case for Drexler’s originality. In Nanosystems, he dates the beginning of his research to 1977, stimulated by research on biological molecular machines. He subsequently told historian Chris Toumey that he discovered Feynman’s talk while researching references for his 1981 paper. So the causal story wasn’t simply Drexler reading Feynman and deciding to execute his programme.
Yeah, Drexler was obviously-to-a-polymath on a separate track from Feynman, and Feynman was the distant prestigious person who said a thing helpful to Drexler but wasn’t remotely being Drexler about it.
For what it’s worth when I was doing the research for 100 Years Of Existential Risk I noticed the same thing. Of all the people in that story Drexler seems like the most unique contribution with the least antecedent or precedent. As far as I can tell it’s Feynman giving his talk on plenty of room at the bottom and then Eric Drexler, which is a wild leap in sophistication going from just the roughest sketch of the basic idea to Nanosystems.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kFRn77GkKdFvccAFf/100-years-of-existential-risk
EDIT: Realizing that at the time I researched that I didn’t have access to LLMs, I just asked Astra about this and it pointed out something funny (along with a handful of extremely marginal less developed precursors to Drexler), Drexler actually came up with the idea before finding the Feynman talk:
Yeah, Drexler was obviously-to-a-polymath on a separate track from Feynman, and Feynman was the distant prestigious person who said a thing helpful to Drexler but wasn’t remotely being Drexler about it.