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eli_sennesh comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Think about it: it's the intelligence that makes things dangerous. Try and engineer a nanoscale robot that's going to be able to unintelligently disassemble all living matter without getting eaten by a bacterium. Unintelligently, mind you: no invoking superintelligence as your fallback explanation.
Humans aren't superintelligent, and are still able to design macroscale technology that can wipe out biospheres and that can be deployed and propagated with less intelligence than it took to design. I'm not taking the bet that you can't shrink down the scale of the technology and the amount of intelligence needed to deploy it while keeping around the at least human level designer. That sounds too much like the "I can't think of a way to do this right now, so it's obviously impossible" play.
It seems that very few people considered the bad nanotech scenario obviously impossible, merely less likely to cause a near extinction event than uFAI.
In addition, to my best knowledge, trained scientists believe it impossible to turn the sky green and have all humans sprout spider legs. Mostly, they believe these things are impossible because they're impossible, not because scientists merely lack the leap of superintelligence or superdetermination necessary to kick logic out and do the impossible.
If I wanted to turn the sky green for some reason (and had an infinite budget to work with), then one way to do it would be to release a fine, translucent green powder in the upper atmosphere in large quantities. (This might cause problems when it began to drift down far enough that it can be breathed in, of course). Alternatively, I could encase the planet Earth in a solid shell of green glass.
Make it out of antimatter? Say, a nanoscale amount of anticarbon - just an unintelligent lump?
Dump enough of those on any (matter) biosphere and all the living matter will be very thoroughly disassembled.
That's not a nanoscale robot, is it? It's antimatter: it annihilates matter, because that's what physics says it does. You're walking around the problem I handed you and just solving the "destroy lots of stuff" problem. Yes, it's easy to destroy lots of stuff: we knew that already. And yet if I ask you to invent grey goo in specific, you don't seem able to come up with a feasible design.
How is it not a nanoscale robot? It is a nanoscale device that performs the assigned task. What does a robot have that the nanoscale anticarbon lump doesn't?
I admit that it's not the sort of thing one thinks of when one thinks of the word 'robot' (to be fair, though, what I think of when I think of the word 'robot' is not nanoscale either). But I have found that, often, a simple solution to a problem can be found by, as you put it, 'walking around' it to get to the desired outcome.