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Stuart_Armstrong comments on Assessing Kurzweil: the results - Less Wrong
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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.