Perhaps the reason is that the ideas we’re used to nowadays—like reconfiguring matter to make dirt and water into food or repair microcellular damage (for example, to selectively destroy cancer tumors) - were absolutely radical and totally unheard of when they were first proposed. As far as I know, Feynman was the first to seriously suggest that such a thing was possible, and most reactions to him at the time were basically either confusion, disbelief, or dismissal. Consider the average technologist in 1950. Hand-wound computer memories were state of the art, no one knew what DNA looked like, famines seemed a natural part of the order of things, and as far as everyone knew, the only major technological difference between the present and the future was maybe going to be space travel. Now someone comes along and tells you that there could be this new technology that allows you to store the library of congress in the head of a pin and carry out any chemical reaction just by writing down the formula—including the chemical reactions of life. The consequences would be, for instance, the ability to feed everyone on the planet at basically free. To you, such a technology would seem “Indistinguishable from magic.” Would it be a dramatic inferential step to then say that it could do stuff that literally is magic?
Nanotechnology never promised magic, of course. All it promises is the ability to rearrange atoms into a subset of those structures allowed by physics (a subset that is far larger than our current technology can do, but a subset nonetheless). It promised nothing more, nothing less. This is in itself dramatic enough, and it would allow all sorts of things that we probably couldn’t imagine today.
Perhaps the reason is that the ideas we’re used to nowadays—like reconfiguring matter to make dirt and water into food or repair microcellular damage (for example, to selectively destroy cancer tumors) - were absolutely radical and totally unheard of when they were first proposed. As far as I know, Feynman was the first to seriously suggest that such a thing was possible, and most reactions to him at the time were basically either confusion, disbelief, or dismissal. Consider the average technologist in 1950. Hand-wound computer memories were state of the art, no one knew what DNA looked like, famines seemed a natural part of the order of things, and as far as everyone knew, the only major technological difference between the present and the future was maybe going to be space travel. Now someone comes along and tells you that there could be this new technology that allows you to store the library of congress in the head of a pin and carry out any chemical reaction just by writing down the formula—including the chemical reactions of life. The consequences would be, for instance, the ability to feed everyone on the planet at basically free. To you, such a technology would seem “Indistinguishable from magic.” Would it be a dramatic inferential step to then say that it could do stuff that literally is magic?
Nanotechnology never promised magic, of course. All it promises is the ability to rearrange atoms into a subset of those structures allowed by physics (a subset that is far larger than our current technology can do, but a subset nonetheless). It promised nothing more, nothing less. This is in itself dramatic enough, and it would allow all sorts of things that we probably couldn’t imagine today.