You can read the book on nanosyste.ms.
The book won the 1992 Award for Best Computer Science Book. The AI safety community often references it, as it describes a lower bound on what intelligence should probably be able to achieve.
Previously, you could only physically buy the book or read a PDF scan.
(Thanks to MIRI and Internet Archive for their scans.)
I believe Nanosystems is mostly valid physics (though I am still unsure about this) and in the far future, after GDP has doubled ten or twenty times, we will think of it like current rocket scientists think of Tsiolkovsky’s writing: speculative science that gave a glimpse surprisingly far into the future through an understanding of the timeless basic principles at play, though misses many implementation details. And just like the sense of perspective by knowing in 1914 it’s theoretically possible to send people to Mars on a ship with airlocks, fueled by hydrogen-oxygen engines and steered by cold gas thrusters, I think we gain an enormously valuable perspective on the universe by knowing that it is (probably) theoretically possible to perform most chemical reactions and many molecular assembly tasks with 99% efficiency using machines that precisely place atoms, self-replicate once an hour, and require only ultrapure gases, various trace metals, and electricity as input.
Yooo this is sick! Thank you!
Worth following for his take (and YouTube videos he is creating): https://x.com/jacobrintamaki
[he’s creating something around this]
This is not the type of post that fits a top 50 list, but Nanosystems was still relevant in 2024 and is still relevant in 2025. The nanosystems of 2060 will not look exactly like in Drexler’s books, but we are heading for a nanotechnology future of which Drexler was very prescient. The online version is very usable and fast.