The Foresight Workshops in 2022 and 2023 had talks that discuss to make progress in improving molecular nanotechnology.
There is a team working on making a lattice of DNA origami and creating attachment points.
There is work with molecular printers and with improved molecular nanotechnology software.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Brian, I saw Drexler’s MSEP video when it came out last year, but have never heard anything about progress on it since then. Do you know anything about where the project is now? Is it continuing? Any chance they’ll release working software at some point?
I hope that software like that might draw more people into working in the field.
It may seem that advanced, practical nanotechnology is very far away, but thanks to AI we will make 1 000 000x more progress in the next few years than in the last 50.
ASI will design and help us build nanoreplicator, and many say ASI will be there soon after AGI, which can be here as soon as 2024-2025.
My prediction is that we will have both ASI and nanoreplicator by 2030.
I was at one of the early Foresight conferences in the 1990’s and remember Eric Drexler, a bit frustrated at being asked the question so much, responding to when the Nanotechnology revolution would occur, waving his hands and saying “2027” and expanding a bit saying he didn’t see any barriers that would take much longer to overcome than that.
That was more than 30 years ago so it’s not the case that he or the people around him were “wrong” about their expectations. They expected some things like the Protein folding problem to be solved sooner – but AI has finally passed that point on the roadmap.
Yeah, I was in on the original effort to pre-purchase copies of Engines of Creation, so that he could get a larger first print run; I’ve been following nano-tech research since the 80’s. It seemed like the progress was really slow, but really, it’s just your typical exponential curve, at first it seems gradual, then you hit that “knee”. Yeah, I know, the “knee” is entirely subjective, that’s the point: Things *seem* slow for a very long time, then “wham”. But it’s just exponential growth the whole while.
His 2027 prediction might even actually turn out right. There’s a point in the advance of this sort of technology where suddenly your capabilities vastly expand, once you have the ability to build nanotech scale devices USING nanotech scale devices.