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.
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.