Back in the dot-com bubble, I had some contact with VCs who had a decent vision of how valuable nanotech could be (and also some lesser VCs who struggled to imagine it being worth a few billion). AFAICT, the best VCs rejected nanotech startups because nanotech was well over 5 years away. It’s somewhat plausible that that kind of VC can be persuaded that nanotech now could be profitable with less than 10 years of effort. Those VCs could influence some other world leaders to think about contingency plans related to nanotech.
VCs have definitely been investing in various forms of nanotech, just not Drexlerian nanotech. They focused on much more specific aims like particular nanoparticles or structured thin films for particular purposes (nanowires and other forms, too, but less so). And those technically have had large benefits over the last few decades, while also catalyzing development of better design software and macro-scale production tools. Only once they work, we stop caring about whether they’re nano. We stop advertising them that way. So for most people “nano” just becomes a buzzword of stuff that doesn’t work, with no mentally available referent for “commercially successful nanotech.” Ditto things like “smart materials” and “metamaterials.”
Basically I think a big part of the problem is that the word nanotech has been so diluted from its roots by people with good but narrower goals wanting to look more ambitious and futuristic than they were, that we either need to find a way to reclaim it (in the minds of the target audience) or else acknowledge it’s no longer a useful category word. My mental short handle for this is that, for similar reasons, we don’t have a word for “centitech.” Centitech is great: there’s so many things you can do with objects that are between 1cm and 100cm in at least one dimension, including build humans, who can do everything else, even self-replicate! It’s just not useful, as a word, for a class of technologies.
VCs have definitely been investing in various forms of nanotech, just not Drexlerian nanotech. They focused on much more specific aims like particular nanoparticles or structured thin films for particular purposes (nanowires and other forms, too, but less so). And those technically have had large benefits over the last few decades, while also catalyzing development of better design software and macro-scale production tools. Only once they work, we stop caring about whether they’re nano. We stop advertising them that way. So for most people “nano” just becomes a buzzword of stuff that doesn’t work, with no mentally available referent for “commercially successful nanotech.” Ditto things like “smart materials” and “metamaterials.”
Basically I think a big part of the problem is that the word nanotech has been so diluted from its roots by people with good but narrower goals wanting to look more ambitious and futuristic than they were, that we either need to find a way to reclaim it (in the minds of the target audience) or else acknowledge it’s no longer a useful category word. My mental short handle for this is that, for similar reasons, we don’t have a word for “centitech.” Centitech is great: there’s so many things you can do with objects that are between 1cm and 100cm in at least one dimension, including build humans, who can do everything else, even self-replicate! It’s just not useful, as a word, for a class of technologies.