Tomás B.'s Shortform

Tomás B.

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I am a strong believer that nanotechnology is possible, which seems to be a sort of antimeme. And tons of people who should really know better seem to consider the acknowledgement of the physical possibility of Drexlerish nanotech as evidence someone is crazy - it is amusing to look at the AGI takes of these same people five years ago. They are mostly using the exact same idiotic intuitions in exactly the same way for the exact same reasons.

But maybe this being an antimeme is good? Perhaps its best people are holding the idiot ball on the topic? On one hand, I don't think lying is good, even by omission. And to the extent denying nanotech is load-bearing in their claims that takeoff will be slow (by the Christiano definition) then getting them to see through the antimeme is useful - as an aside I think people do forget that we have seen little evidence so far, at least in terms of economic growth, that we are living in Christiano's predicted world. I get the impression, sometimes, some people think we have.

But also, we are getting very powerful tools that makes a Drexlarian project more and more plausible, which has its own risks and even indirect risks of increasing available compute. So perhaps we are fortunate nanotechnology is so incredibly low status? As Sama would probably just try to do it if it were not.

17Mitchell_Porter1y

There is a journal called Nanotechnology. It reports a steady stream of developments pertaining to nanoscale and single-molecule design and synthesis. So that keeps happening. What has not happened, is the convergence of all these capabilities in the kind of universal nanosynthesis device that Drexler called an assembler, and the consequent construction of devices that only it could make, such as various "nanobots". It is similar to the fate of one of his mentors, Gerard O'Neill, who in the 1970s, led all kinds of research into the construction of space colonies and the logistics of space industrialization. Engineering calculations were done, supply chains were proposed; one presumes that some version of all that is physically possible, but no version of it was ever actually carried out. In that case, one reason why is because of the enormous budgets involved. But another reason is political and cultural. American civilization was visionary enough to conceive of such projects, but not visionary enough to carry them out. Space remained the domain of science, comsats, spysats, and a token human presence at the international space station, but even returning to the moon was too much. In the case of Drexler's nanotechnology, I'm sure that lack of broad visionary support within the culture, has been a crucial factor in nothing happening. But I suspect another issue here was the caution with which the nanotech-aware community approached its own concept. Drexler's 1986 book on the subject emphasized throughout that nanotechnology is an extinction risk, and yet the people who undertook to do the design research (Ralph Merkle, Robert Freitas, Drexler himself) also came from that community. I don't know the sociology of how it all unfolded, but the doomsday fears of gray goo and aerovores must have inhibited them in seeking support. If only they had known how things would work in 2025, a time when having an extinction risk associated with your product is just part of

@Eric Drexler you were mentioned in the parent comment.

2Vladimir_Nesov1y

Not developing nanotech is like not advancing semiconductor fabs, a compute governance intervention. If ASI actually is dangerous and too hard to manage in the foreseeable future, and many reasonable people notice this, then early AGIs will start noticing it too, and seek to prevent an overly fast takeoff. If there is no software-only singularity and much more compute really is necessary for ASI, not developing nanotech sounds like a useful thing to do. Gradual disempowerment dynamics might make the world largely run by AGIs more coordinated, so that technological determinism will lose a lot of its power, and the things that actually happen will be decided rather than follow inevitably from what's feasible. It's not enough to ask what's technologically feasible at that point.