I think a MEMS engineer would be better suited to evaluate whether the engineering problems are feasible than a computer scientist / futurist author. Maybe futurists could outdo ML engineers on AI forecasting. But I think the author doesn’t have nearly as detailed an inside view about nanotech as futurists on AI. There’s no good answer in the book to the “attention bottleneck” objection JBlack just made, and no good story for why the market is so inefficient.
developed several ideas such as the utility fog, the space pier, a weather control system called The Weather Machine
These are all ideas of the form “If we could make fully general nanotechnology, then we could do X”. Gives me the same vibe as this. Saying “nuclear reactor. . . you have hydrogen go through the thing. . . Zoom! it’s a rocket” doesn’t mean you can evaluate whether a nuclear reactor is feasible at 194X tech level, and thinking of the utility fog doesn’t mean you can evaluate whether MEMS can be developed into general nanotech at 202X tech level.
I think a MEMS engineer would be better suited to evaluate whether the engineering problems are feasible than a computer scientist / futurist author. Maybe futurists could outdo ML engineers on AI forecasting. But I think the author doesn’t have nearly as detailed an inside view about nanotech as futurists on AI. There’s no good answer in the book to the “attention bottleneck” objection JBlack just made, and no good story for why the market is so inefficient.
These are all ideas of the form “If we could make fully general nanotechnology, then we could do X”. Gives me the same vibe as this. Saying “nuclear reactor. . . you have hydrogen go through the thing. . . Zoom! it’s a rocket” doesn’t mean you can evaluate whether a nuclear reactor is feasible at 194X tech level, and thinking of the utility fog doesn’t mean you can evaluate whether MEMS can be developed into general nanotech at 202X tech level.