“[Among portable computers,] Memory is completely electronic, and most portable computers do not have keyboards.”
Is that actually true? Notebooks have keyboards and hard disks, many also have optical drives. Tablets still sale less than notebooks ( I found a prediction of tablet sales topping notebooks by 2016 ). I suppose that you can consider Kurzweil’s prediction true if you count smartphones as portable computers, but I don’t think that’s appropriate since they are typically not used as notebook replacements.
“However, nanoengineering is not yet considered a practical technology.”
“China has also emerged as a powerful economic player.”
These two seem quite obvious. Why do you think they were impressive predictions?
“China has also emerged as a powerful economic player.”
China could, at any point, have collapsed into a Japan-style lost decade(s), and there are commentators like Pettis right now who are predicting such a collapse soon; Pettis in particular has an active bet with Economist that it will happen.
Of course in hindsight Chinese growth seems obvious. Why would anyone think that corruption would not strangle growth or that the Communist Party would not collapse or urban rioting and warfare not break out? After all just look at how China managed 7%+ for the last decade and more! Isn’t it obvious that China would just keep growing and not stall out or collapse?
But then again, people used to praise the wisdom of MITI (Communist Party) in guiding Japanese (Chinese) growth and speculate about when the Japanese economy would surpass the American economy to become the largest in the world and explain how sky-high property prices in Tokyo (Beijing) were perfectly justified.
If you think it’s really that “quite obvious”, perhaps you should go wager a thousand bucks with Pettis or on Long Bets or something on whether Chinese growth will exceed, say, 5% for the next decade...
China could, at any point, have collapsed into a Japan-style lost decade(s)
Japan is a powerful economic player, and China has more than ten times its population. If China “collapsed” to Japan’s per capita GDP it would be by far the largest world economy.
If you think it’s really that “quite obvious”, perhaps you should go wager a thousand bucks with Pettis or on Long Bets or something on whether Chinese growth will exceed, say, 5% for the next decade...
Next decade is another story.
EDIT:
According to Wikipedia, in 1999 China was already the seventh world economy by nominal GDP.
Japan is a powerful economic player, and China has more than ten times its population. If China “collapsed” to Japan’s per capita GDP it would be by far the largest world economy.
Of course it is. I’m sure you would in 1998/1999 have said ‘it’s obvious that China would grow like gangbusters up to 2013, but 2013-2023 - well, I just don’t know!‘, right? You’ll pardon me if this looks more like hindsight bias + excuse-making for why you won’t extend the ‘obvious’ prediction out another decade.
And where are the manufacturing jobs going to go? Africa is still to much behind in terms of infrastructures and political stability.
Of course it is. I’m sure you would in 1998/1999 have said ‘it’s obvious that China would grow like gangbusters up to 2013, but 2013-2023 - well, I just don’t know!‘, right? You’ll pardon me if this looks more like hindsight bias + excuse-making for why you won’t extend the ‘obvious’ prediction out another decade.
Well, think what you want. In 1999 China was the 7th world economy by GDP, and had the highest GDP growth of the seven. Pretty much every consumer product was already “made in China”. Was it so difficult to predict that China would have kept growing through the decade?
For the next decade, I expect China to become the world largest economy by total GDP, though I’m not betting on the exact growth rate.
Any poorer or more reliable country; so maybe Africa—but maybe the USA or Germany.
(And of course, we’ve all heard about Foxconn investing heavily in robotics, which is the sort of trend that might preserve some manufacturing-based GDP growth—at the price of increased economic inequality and through that trend, increase various low but catastrophic risks like war or revolution.)
In 1999 China was the 7th world economy by GDP, and had the highest GDP growth of the seven.
Making it the most likely to regress to the mean or fail to turn in continued exceptional performance. When you’re growing that fast, there’s not much your growth rate can do but go down at some point.
Pretty much every consumer product was already “made in China”. Was it so difficult to predict that China would have kept growing through the decade?
Any poorer or more reliable country; so maybe Africa—but maybe the USA or Germany.
The Chinese government seems highly reliable, and before Americans or German workers have lower salaries than Chinese workers, China would be the world’s largest economy.
(And of course, we’ve all heard about Foxconn investing heavily in robotics, which is the sort of trend that might preserve some manufacturing-based GDP growth—at the price of increased economic inequality and through that trend, increase various low but catastrophic risks like war or revolution.)
Just like industrial automation increased the risks of war and revolution in first world countries?
Making it the most likely to regress to the mean or fail to turn in continued exceptional performance. When you’re growing that fast, there’s not much your growth rate can do but go down at some point.
These trends usually don’t change abruptly. You can’t extrapolate them to 50 years, but 10 years seems reasonable. Moreover, as I answered to Vaniver, there were more fundamental reason for why China was expected to grow more than Japan or other first world countries.
It sure isn’t in hindsight.
Whatever. Pick your favorite Bayesian-Solomonoffian-Yudkowskyian-Muehlhauserian-ian method and make your best predicion about the size of the Chinese economy in 2009 using only data available up to 1999. Let’s see if your techniques pay rent.
Pick your favorite Bayesian-Solomonoffian-Yudkowskyian-Muehlhauserian-ian method and make your best predicion about the size of the Chinese economy in 2009 using only data available up to 1999. Let’s see if your techniques pay rent.
There is a certain temptation here, to pick and choose data that was available in 1999 that leads to a correct conclusion about 2009. This may be unintentional—the result of noting that the result is correct and then not bothering to double-check the sources, or of noting that the result is incorrect and then ruthlessly double-checking the sources and eliminating or updating some, or possibly altering some parts of the predictive model used, until such time as the result is correct.
I would therefore, personally, be more impressed about a correct prediction, made now, with regards to the size of the Chinese economy in 2023, than by a correct prediction, made now, with regards to the size of the Chinese economy in 2009, regardless of what information is used to make the prediction.
There is a certain temptation here, to pick and choose data that was available in 1999 that leads to a correct conclusion about 2009.
There’s far more than just a temptation. How do you even reconstruct the dataset one would’ve been working with in 1999? So many media sources or websites have disappeared or are completely inaccessible (enjoy 14 years of link rot), or the print versions are extremely time-consuming to access (public libraries keep only a few years of periodicals). In addition, people who turned out wrong about China will not be mentioning, citing, or linking their old 1999 pieces or projections even though they were drawing on plenty of germane information, so there’s a double whammy of both references disappearing and knowledge of the disappeared materials itself disappearing.
One could pick a publication which has survived to the present and invested heavily in making its materials accessible, like the Economist, but what would such an exercise boot you? ‘A hypothetical person like the 2013 me, inextricably contaminated by more than a decade of knowledge & experience, who read only everything mentioning “China” in the Economist up to 1999 and not any critics or dissenters or commentary, would estimate X% for China growing such-and-such.’ Well, uh, ok...
Surely you’re kidding? This is the same Chinese government that went through an internal power struggle over Bao during the just past decadal transfer of power, which is almost as opaque as North Korea, and which just yesterday was revealed to have hacked the NYT’s entire internal network as retaliation for reporting on the premier’s relatives accumulating billions in suspiciously-obtained wealth and to obtain the names of anyone who helped the NYT investigation? This is the image of a reliable government?
These trends usually don’t change abruptly.
How abruptly did the Japanese trend change? Feel free to look it up.
Pick your favorite Bayesian-Solomonoffian-Yudkowskyian-Muehlhauserian-ian method and make your best predicion about the size of the Chinese economy in 2009 using only data available up to 1999.
You want someone who is pointing out hindsight bias to go and engage in a worthless exercise one knows in advance will be contaminated by hindsight bias? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here.
GDP grew linearly from 1990 to 1995, then it oscillated approximately around the 1993 value. It seems the typical pattern that one would expect when you converge to a steady state economy. It may have started to grow again in 2009, or maybe that’s just another oscillation.
Convergence to an approximate steady state is what I’d expect in a “full”, technologically advanced country.
You want someone who is pointing out hindsight bias to go and engage in a worthless exercise one knows in advance will be contaminated by hindsight bias? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here.
So you are saying that Kurzweil prediction was not obvious. Which means that it was surprising. So, what did the unsurprising scenario look like? You refuse to answer.
Whether you will be hacked and your trade secrets leaked to a competitor is not irrelevant. Whether you’ll be forced to bribe officials to do business is not irrelevant. Whether you can count on them to stay bribed and not be imprisoned is not irrelevant. Whether you have to worry, ala Rio Tinto, that your executives will be imprisoned is not irrelevant. Whether the succession of power will be smooth and not descend into coups or other infighting is not irrelevant. Politics matters; a company might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in the company.
GDP grew linearly from 1990 to 1995, then it oscillated approximately around the 1993 value. It seems the typical pattern that one would expect when you converge to a steady state economy. It may have started to grow again in 2009, or maybe that’s just another oscillation.
And if you look at the growth rate, you see that not only was the growth rate leading to exponential growth (4% a year compounding), the growth rate itself grew to 7.15%, after which it fell a percentage point or two a year until in 1998 it was actually negative 2%, whereupon it hovers around 0% with occasional small periods of growth counterbalanced by disasters like negative 5.5% in 2009 (‘may have started to grow again’?).
A flat real GDP contradicts your previous claims that a stable economy should then grow at the rate of technological improvements; or has there been no such improvements since 1989?
The GDP at Purchase Power Parity curve is much less wavy
So, what did the unsurprising scenario look like? You refuse to answer.
Refused? I already answered: it looks like the middle-income trap which has affected many countries. The country just stops growing significantly, or actually declines in real terms, due to any of the potential problems already listed.
Whether you will be hacked and your trade secrets leaked to a competitor is not irrelevant. Whether you’ll be forced to bribe officials to do business is not irrelevant. Whether you can count on them to stay bribed and not be imprisoned is not irrelevant. Whether you have to worry, ala Rio Tinto, that your executives will be imprisoned is not irrelevant.
China is known to have a fairly predictable patterns for bribery. Predictable bribey becomes de facto just another tax. Of course there can be occasional exceptions.
Whether the succession of power will be smooth and not descend into coups or other infighting is not irrelevant.
The last one was the Chinese Revolution in 1949.
And if you look at the growth rate, you see that not only was the growth rate leading to exponential growth (4% a year compounding), the growth rate itself grew to 7.15%, after which it fell a percentage point or two a year until in 1998 it was actually negative 2%, whereupon it hovers around 0% with occasional small periods of growth counterbalanced by disasters like negative 5.5% in 2009 (‘may have started to grow again’?).
Derivatives magnify noise. Compute a 5 years average.
A flat real GDP contradicts your previous claims that a stable economy should then grow at the rate of technological improvements; or has there been no such improvements since 1989?
Japan current GDP, both nominal and PPP, are higher today than in 1989.
Refused? I already answered: it looks like the middle-income trap which has affected many countries. The country just stops growing significantly, or actually declines in real terms, due to any of the potential problems already listed.
The middle-income trap that didn’t happen in Japan, or South Korea, or many other countries.
China is known to have a fairly predictable patterns for bribery. Predictable bribey becomes de facto just another tax. Of course there can be occasional exceptions.
Handwaving away just one of the examples.
The last one was the Chinese Revolution in 1949.
Yes, minus some minor events like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Russia & China nearly going to nuclear war in 1969, Tienanmen Square… Gosh, there’s no reason to think that China is at the slightest risk of war or revolution; it’d be like worrying about nuclear warfare when the last nuclear bomb used in a war was back in 1946!
Derivatives magnify noise. Compute a 5 years average.
Better yet, let’s look at 1989-2011 using the FRED data on real GDP. Over 23 years, the economy increased in size by 26%, for an annualized growth rate of ~1%. This in a time period which saw, among other things, the Internet revolution start and reach maturity. Did technology really improve only by 1% Is this really consistent with your claim that Japan hit the limits of what is possible?
Japan current GDP, both nominal and PPP, are higher today than in 1989.
Use real figures. Inflation has not been 0% the entire period, and your chosen graphs aren’t even being reported in yen.
The middle-income trap that didn’t happen in Japan, or South Korea, or many other countries.
‘Many’? Look at a ranking of real PPP, there’s a great many countries well below South Korea. Above SK, it’s basically oil countries, European/American countries, and tiny outliers like Singapore.
If China “collapsed” to Japan’s per capita GDP it would be by far the largest world economy.
He is referring to the Lost Decade), a period of slow GDP growth in Japan following an asset price bubble; it’s not clear to me why you are referring to absolute per capita GDP values.
Japan is a country with high per-capita GDP, very high HDI, high population density (home to the world largest megalopolis ), cutting edge technology, low natural resources. It’s economy can’t grow by implementing already existing technologies, or increasing the population, or using more land, or exploiting more domestic natural resources. It can only grow by technological development, which, in many core areas, is quite slow: a modern car may have all kinds of digital gizmos, but it’s only marginally more efficient than a car made 10 or 20 years ago, both in terms of fuel consumption and material costs.
China is far from that point, and was ever further in 1999. It’s population is more or less artificially capped, but it has lots of usable land, natural resources, lot of room for technological improvement using already existing technologies, room for increase in internal consumption. Maybe it will never reach Japan-level per capita wealth, maybe in the long run Japan and other first world countries’ wealth will fall and they will equalize with China at some intermediate point, maybe they will keep oscillating, maybe world economy will collapse.
I can’t make long-term predictions (other than world economy will probably not keep growing for more than 50-100 years), but I expect that China will keep growing through the next decade. Fourteen years ago, that prediction would have been even stronger.
“However, nanoengineering is not yet considered a practical technology.”
Maybe it’s because I share an office with Eric Drexler, but I get the definite impression that nanotech was expected to be something huge, back in 1999 - and maybe could have done, had the funding not been diverted to classical material science.
Enthusiasts certaily expected it, but I’m under the impression that professional chemists didn’t share that view. Drexler was sharply criticized by Richard Smalley, one of the Nobel prize recipient for the discovery of buckminsterfullerene.
While Kurzweil sided with Drexler, he wasn’t so far fetched to believe that nanotech was imminent.
Drexler has his own view on that criticism (claiming that it myopically criticised a particular type of nanotech manipulation that nobody was actually proposing to do).
But I don’t have the technical ability to sort out the truth of these matters.
Is that actually true? Notebooks have keyboards and hard disks, many also have optical drives. Tablets still sale less than notebooks ( I found a prediction of tablet sales topping notebooks by 2016 ). I suppose that you can consider Kurzweil’s prediction true if you count smartphones as portable computers, but I don’t think that’s appropriate since they are typically not used as notebook replacements.
These two seem quite obvious. Why do you think they were impressive predictions?
China could, at any point, have collapsed into a Japan-style lost decade(s), and there are commentators like Pettis right now who are predicting such a collapse soon; Pettis in particular has an active bet with Economist that it will happen.
Of course in hindsight Chinese growth seems obvious. Why would anyone think that corruption would not strangle growth or that the Communist Party would not collapse or urban rioting and warfare not break out? After all just look at how China managed 7%+ for the last decade and more! Isn’t it obvious that China would just keep growing and not stall out or collapse?
But then again, people used to praise the wisdom of MITI (Communist Party) in guiding Japanese (Chinese) growth and speculate about when the Japanese economy would surpass the American economy to become the largest in the world and explain how sky-high property prices in Tokyo (Beijing) were perfectly justified.
If you think it’s really that “quite obvious”, perhaps you should go wager a thousand bucks with Pettis or on Long Bets or something on whether Chinese growth will exceed, say, 5% for the next decade...
Japan is a powerful economic player, and China has more than ten times its population. If China “collapsed” to Japan’s per capita GDP it would be by far the largest world economy.
Next decade is another story.
EDIT:
According to Wikipedia, in 1999 China was already the seventh world economy by nominal GDP.
You can stagnate/collapse without having reached Japan’s per capita GDP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap
Of course it is. I’m sure you would in 1998/1999 have said ‘it’s obvious that China would grow like gangbusters up to 2013, but 2013-2023 - well, I just don’t know!‘, right? You’ll pardon me if this looks more like hindsight bias + excuse-making for why you won’t extend the ‘obvious’ prediction out another decade.
And where are the manufacturing jobs going to go? Africa is still to much behind in terms of infrastructures and political stability.
Well, think what you want. In 1999 China was the 7th world economy by GDP, and had the highest GDP growth of the seven. Pretty much every consumer product was already “made in China”. Was it so difficult to predict that China would have kept growing through the decade?
For the next decade, I expect China to become the world largest economy by total GDP, though I’m not betting on the exact growth rate.
Any poorer or more reliable country; so maybe Africa—but maybe the USA or Germany.
(And of course, we’ve all heard about Foxconn investing heavily in robotics, which is the sort of trend that might preserve some manufacturing-based GDP growth—at the price of increased economic inequality and through that trend, increase various low but catastrophic risks like war or revolution.)
Making it the most likely to regress to the mean or fail to turn in continued exceptional performance. When you’re growing that fast, there’s not much your growth rate can do but go down at some point.
It sure isn’t in hindsight.
The Chinese government seems highly reliable, and before Americans or German workers have lower salaries than Chinese workers, China would be the world’s largest economy.
Just like industrial automation increased the risks of war and revolution in first world countries?
These trends usually don’t change abruptly. You can’t extrapolate them to 50 years, but 10 years seems reasonable. Moreover, as I answered to Vaniver, there were more fundamental reason for why China was expected to grow more than Japan or other first world countries.
Whatever.
Pick your favorite Bayesian-Solomonoffian-Yudkowskyian-Muehlhauserian-ian method and make your best predicion about the size of the Chinese economy in 2009 using only data available up to 1999. Let’s see if your techniques pay rent.
There is a certain temptation here, to pick and choose data that was available in 1999 that leads to a correct conclusion about 2009. This may be unintentional—the result of noting that the result is correct and then not bothering to double-check the sources, or of noting that the result is incorrect and then ruthlessly double-checking the sources and eliminating or updating some, or possibly altering some parts of the predictive model used, until such time as the result is correct.
I would therefore, personally, be more impressed about a correct prediction, made now, with regards to the size of the Chinese economy in 2023, than by a correct prediction, made now, with regards to the size of the Chinese economy in 2009, regardless of what information is used to make the prediction.
There’s far more than just a temptation. How do you even reconstruct the dataset one would’ve been working with in 1999? So many media sources or websites have disappeared or are completely inaccessible (enjoy 14 years of link rot), or the print versions are extremely time-consuming to access (public libraries keep only a few years of periodicals). In addition, people who turned out wrong about China will not be mentioning, citing, or linking their old 1999 pieces or projections even though they were drawing on plenty of germane information, so there’s a double whammy of both references disappearing and knowledge of the disappeared materials itself disappearing.
One could pick a publication which has survived to the present and invested heavily in making its materials accessible, like the Economist, but what would such an exercise boot you? ‘A hypothetical person like the 2013 me, inextricably contaminated by more than a decade of knowledge & experience, who read only everything mentioning “China” in the Economist up to 1999 and not any critics or dissenters or commentary, would estimate X% for China growing such-and-such.’ Well, uh, ok...
Surely you’re kidding? This is the same Chinese government that went through an internal power struggle over Bao during the just past decadal transfer of power, which is almost as opaque as North Korea, and which just yesterday was revealed to have hacked the NYT’s entire internal network as retaliation for reporting on the premier’s relatives accumulating billions in suspiciously-obtained wealth and to obtain the names of anyone who helped the NYT investigation? This is the image of a reliable government?
How abruptly did the Japanese trend change? Feel free to look it up.
You want someone who is pointing out hindsight bias to go and engage in a worthless exercise one knows in advance will be contaminated by hindsight bias? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here.
That’s irrelevant from a business point of view.
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=k3s92bru78li6_&ctype=l&met_y=pppgdp#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=ngdpd&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=world&idim=country:JP&ifdim=world&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false
GDP grew linearly from 1990 to 1995, then it oscillated approximately around the 1993 value. It seems the typical pattern that one would expect when you converge to a steady state economy. It may have started to grow again in 2009, or maybe that’s just another oscillation.
The GDP at Purchase Power Parity curve is much less wavy: http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=k3s92bru78li6_&ctype=l&met_y=pppgdp#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=pppgdp&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=world&idim=country:JP&ifdim=world&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false
Convergence to an approximate steady state is what I’d expect in a “full”, technologically advanced country.
So you are saying that Kurzweil prediction was not obvious. Which means that it was surprising. So, what did the unsurprising scenario look like? You refuse to answer.
Whether you will be hacked and your trade secrets leaked to a competitor is not irrelevant. Whether you’ll be forced to bribe officials to do business is not irrelevant. Whether you can count on them to stay bribed and not be imprisoned is not irrelevant. Whether you have to worry, ala Rio Tinto, that your executives will be imprisoned is not irrelevant. Whether the succession of power will be smooth and not descend into coups or other infighting is not irrelevant. Politics matters; a company might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in the company.
And if you look at the growth rate, you see that not only was the growth rate leading to exponential growth (4% a year compounding), the growth rate itself grew to 7.15%, after which it fell a percentage point or two a year until in 1998 it was actually negative 2%, whereupon it hovers around 0% with occasional small periods of growth counterbalanced by disasters like negative 5.5% in 2009 (‘may have started to grow again’?).
A flat real GDP contradicts your previous claims that a stable economy should then grow at the rate of technological improvements; or has there been no such improvements since 1989?
It’s also misleading since it’s not real GDP PPP. If you look at a graph of real GDP like http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/JPNRGDPR or real GDP PPP http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/JPNRGDPC , you see the abrupt break at 1989; if the ’80s trend had continued, the real GDP would be off the chart.
Refused? I already answered: it looks like the middle-income trap which has affected many countries. The country just stops growing significantly, or actually declines in real terms, due to any of the potential problems already listed.
China is known to have a fairly predictable patterns for bribery. Predictable bribey becomes de facto just another tax. Of course there can be occasional exceptions.
The last one was the Chinese Revolution in 1949.
Derivatives magnify noise. Compute a 5 years average.
Japan current GDP, both nominal and PPP, are higher today than in 1989.
The middle-income trap that didn’t happen in Japan, or South Korea, or many other countries.
Handwaving away just one of the examples.
Yes, minus some minor events like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Russia & China nearly going to nuclear war in 1969, Tienanmen Square… Gosh, there’s no reason to think that China is at the slightest risk of war or revolution; it’d be like worrying about nuclear warfare when the last nuclear bomb used in a war was back in 1946!
Better yet, let’s look at 1989-2011 using the FRED data on real GDP. Over 23 years, the economy increased in size by 26%, for an annualized growth rate of ~1%. This in a time period which saw, among other things, the Internet revolution start and reach maturity. Did technology really improve only by 1% Is this really consistent with your claim that Japan hit the limits of what is possible?
Use real figures. Inflation has not been 0% the entire period, and your chosen graphs aren’t even being reported in yen.
‘Many’? Look at a ranking of real PPP, there’s a great many countries well below South Korea. Above SK, it’s basically oil countries, European/American countries, and tiny outliers like Singapore.
Biting sarcasm rarely improves one’s point, though it’s a great way to signal.
Biting sarcasm rarely improves one’s point, though it’s a great way to signal.
He is referring to the Lost Decade), a period of slow GDP growth in Japan following an asset price bubble; it’s not clear to me why you are referring to absolute per capita GDP values.
Japan is a country with high per-capita GDP, very high HDI, high population density (home to the world largest megalopolis ), cutting edge technology, low natural resources.
It’s economy can’t grow by implementing already existing technologies, or increasing the population, or using more land, or exploiting more domestic natural resources. It can only grow by technological development, which, in many core areas, is quite slow: a modern car may have all kinds of digital gizmos, but it’s only marginally more efficient than a car made 10 or 20 years ago, both in terms of fuel consumption and material costs.
China is far from that point, and was ever further in 1999. It’s population is more or less artificially capped, but it has lots of usable land, natural resources, lot of room for technological improvement using already existing technologies, room for increase in internal consumption.
Maybe it will never reach Japan-level per capita wealth, maybe in the long run Japan and other first world countries’ wealth will fall and they will equalize with China at some intermediate point, maybe they will keep oscillating, maybe world economy will collapse.
I can’t make long-term predictions (other than world economy will probably not keep growing for more than 50-100 years), but I expect that China will keep growing through the next decade. Fourteen years ago, that prediction would have been even stronger.
Maybe it’s because I share an office with Eric Drexler, but I get the definite impression that nanotech was expected to be something huge, back in 1999 - and maybe could have done, had the funding not been diverted to classical material science.
Enthusiasts certaily expected it, but I’m under the impression that professional chemists didn’t share that view. Drexler was sharply criticized by Richard Smalley, one of the Nobel prize recipient for the discovery of buckminsterfullerene.
While Kurzweil sided with Drexler, he wasn’t so far fetched to believe that nanotech was imminent.
Drexler has his own view on that criticism (claiming that it myopically criticised a particular type of nanotech manipulation that nobody was actually proposing to do).
But I don’t have the technical ability to sort out the truth of these matters.
I suppose that for a sufficiently broad definition nanotechnology includes biochemistry.