What is noticeably different between these 2 worlds, the world where that kind of nanotech is just a fairly tricky engineering problem, and the world where nanotech is impossible? In both worlds, you struggled to get a handful of atoms to behave, just in one world you are battling the limitations of the crude current tools, and in the other world, what you are battling is a mixture of current technical limits and fundamental limits.
“Iron is an inherently lumpy material. When a bloom comes out a bloomery its made of loads of lumps all stuck together. And each batch is a bit different. You can try to hammer it into shape, but the more you hammer it, the more grit comes off your hammer and the more the iron forms an ore-like layer on its surface. The only thing that can hammer iron is rocks, and most rocks can’t be made into a sharp point. Flint can, but if you hit it too hard it will flake off. These gear things are impossible, you can never make them precise enough to actually fit together. Do you have any idea how hard it is to make iron into any usable tool at all. These aren’t just engineering details, these are fundamental limitations of the building material.”
Sure. But us humans are never guaranteed an “aha” moment that lets us distinguish the two. If you have no physics-level guarantee that your technology idea will be useful, and no physics-level argument for why it won’t, then you may for a long time occupy the epistemic state of “I’m sure that almost this exact idea is good, it just has all these inconvenient engineering-type problems that make our current designs fail to work. But surely we’ll figure out how to bypass all these mere engineering problems without reevaluating the basic design.”
In this case, we face a situation of uncertainty. Two biases here dominate our thinking on tech:
Optimism bias. We are unduly optimistic about when certain things will happen, especially in the short term. Pessimists are usually right that timelines to technology take longer than you think. At this point, the evidence is telling us that nanotechnology is not a simple trick or will happen easily, but it doesn’t mean that it’s outright impossible. The most we can say is that it’s difficult to make progress.
Conjunction fallacy. People imagine routes to technology as conjunctive, when they are usually disjunctive. This is where pessimists around possibilities are usually wrong. In order to prove Drexler wrong, you’d have to show why any path to nanotechnology has fundamental problems, and you didn’t do this. At best you’ve shown STM has massive problems. (And maybe not even that.)
So my prior is that Nanotechnology is possible, but it will take much longer than people think.
What is noticeably different between these 2 worlds, the world where that kind of nanotech is just a fairly tricky engineering problem, and the world where nanotech is impossible? In both worlds, you struggled to get a handful of atoms to behave, just in one world you are battling the limitations of the crude current tools, and in the other world, what you are battling is a mixture of current technical limits and fundamental limits.
“Iron is an inherently lumpy material. When a bloom comes out a bloomery its made of loads of lumps all stuck together. And each batch is a bit different. You can try to hammer it into shape, but the more you hammer it, the more grit comes off your hammer and the more the iron forms an ore-like layer on its surface. The only thing that can hammer iron is rocks, and most rocks can’t be made into a sharp point. Flint can, but if you hit it too hard it will flake off. These gear things are impossible, you can never make them precise enough to actually fit together. Do you have any idea how hard it is to make iron into any usable tool at all. These aren’t just engineering details, these are fundamental limitations of the building material.”
Sure. But us humans are never guaranteed an “aha” moment that lets us distinguish the two. If you have no physics-level guarantee that your technology idea will be useful, and no physics-level argument for why it won’t, then you may for a long time occupy the epistemic state of “I’m sure that almost this exact idea is good, it just has all these inconvenient engineering-type problems that make our current designs fail to work. But surely we’ll figure out how to bypass all these mere engineering problems without reevaluating the basic design.”
In this case, we face a situation of uncertainty. Two biases here dominate our thinking on tech:
Optimism bias. We are unduly optimistic about when certain things will happen, especially in the short term. Pessimists are usually right that timelines to technology take longer than you think. At this point, the evidence is telling us that nanotechnology is not a simple trick or will happen easily, but it doesn’t mean that it’s outright impossible. The most we can say is that it’s difficult to make progress.
Conjunction fallacy. People imagine routes to technology as conjunctive, when they are usually disjunctive. This is where pessimists around possibilities are usually wrong. In order to prove Drexler wrong, you’d have to show why any path to nanotechnology has fundamental problems, and you didn’t do this. At best you’ve shown STM has massive problems. (And maybe not even that.)
So my prior is that Nanotechnology is possible, but it will take much longer than people think.