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leplen comments on For FAI: Is "Molecular Nanotechnology" putting our best foot forward? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Technically the blindfold was intended to refer to the fact that you can't make measurements on the system while you're shaking the box because your measuring device will tend to perturb the atoms you're manipulating.
The walls of the box that you're using to push the legos around was intended to refer to our ability to only manipulate atoms using clumsy tools and several layers of indirection, but we're basically on the same page.
This is also wrong. The actual proposals for MNT involve creating a system that is very stable, so you can measure it safely. The actual machinery is a bunch of parts that are as strong as they can possibly be made (this is why the usual proposals involve covalent bonded carbon aka diamond) so they are stable and you can poke them with a probe. You keep the box as cold as practical.
It's true that even if you set everything up perfectly, there are some events that can't be observed directly, such as bonding and rearrangements that could destroy the machine. In addition, practical MNT systems would be 3d mazes of machinery stacked on top of each other, so it would be very difficult to diagnose failures. To summarize : in a world with working MNT, there's still lots of work that has to be done.