One of the contentions of this post is that life has thoroughly explored the space of nanotech possibilities. This hypothesis makes the failures of novel nanotech proposals non independent. That said, I don’t think the post offers enough evidence to be highly confident in this proposition (the author might privately know enough to be more confident, but if so it’s not all in the post).
Separately, I can see myself thinking, when all is said and done, that Yudkowsky and Drexler are less reliable about nanotech than I previously thought (which was a modest level of reliability to begin with), even if there are some possibilities for novel nanotech missed or dismissed by this post. Though I think not everything has been said yet.
All life runs on DNA in particular. Scientists have added extra base pairs and made life forms that work fine. Evolution didn’t. DNA is a fairly arbitrary molecule amongst a larger set of similar double chain organics.
I think this post is just dismissing everything with weak reasons. I don’t think this post is evidence at all, by conservation of expected evidence, we should take an unusually bad argument against a position as evidence for that position.
If nanotech really was impossible, it’s likely that better impossibility arguments would exist.
One of the contentions of this post is that life has thoroughly explored the space of nanotech possibilities. This hypothesis makes the failures of novel nanotech proposals non independent. That said, I don’t think the post offers enough evidence to be highly confident in this proposition (the author might privately know enough to be more confident, but if so it’s not all in the post).
Separately, I can see myself thinking, when all is said and done, that Yudkowsky and Drexler are less reliable about nanotech than I previously thought (which was a modest level of reliability to begin with), even if there are some possibilities for novel nanotech missed or dismissed by this post. Though I think not everything has been said yet.
All life runs on DNA in particular. Scientists have added extra base pairs and made life forms that work fine. Evolution didn’t. DNA is a fairly arbitrary molecule amongst a larger set of similar double chain organics.
I think this post is just dismissing everything with weak reasons. I don’t think this post is evidence at all, by conservation of expected evidence, we should take an unusually bad argument against a position as evidence for that position.
If nanotech really was impossible, it’s likely that better impossibility arguments would exist.