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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on How probable is Molecular Nanotech? - Less Wrong
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Drexler's latest book goes to a lot of length to discuss the "Modelling is hard" problem. The key insight is that we do not need a means to model an arbitrary system; we only need to be able to model some systems, such that there's an overlap with useful systems that we can build. And the models don't have to be perfectly accurate; it suffices if the tolerances built into the design are enough to cover the known inaccuracies of the model.
Which one's the latest book?
Radical Abundance, came out this past month.
Added: The most relevant things in the book for this post (which I've only skimmed):
There's been lots of progress in molecular-scale engineering and science that isn't called nanotechnology. This progress has been pretty much along the lines Drexler sketched in his 1981 paper and in the how-can-we-get-there sections of Nanosystems, though. This matches what I saw sitting in on Caltech courses in biomolecular engineering last year. Drexler believes the biggest remaining holdup on the engineering work is how it's organized: when diverse scientists study nature their work adds up because nature is a whole, but when they work on bits and pieces of technology infrastructure in the same way, their work can't be expected to coalesce on its own into useful systems.
He gives his latest refinement of the arguments at a lay level.