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Exlpore more Ability quotes

"If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored."

"Talent can be a nice thing to have sometimes. You look good, attract attention, and if you're lucky, you make some money. Women flock to you. In that sense, having talent's preferable to having none. But talent only functions when it's supported by a tough, unyielding physical and mental focus. All it takes is one screw in your brain to come loose and fall off, or some connection in your body to break down, and your concentration vanishes, like the dew at dawn. If talent's the foundation you rely on, and yet it's so unreliable that you have no idea what's going to happen to it the next minute, what meaning does it have?"

"We all have ability. The difference is how we use it."
Explore more quotes by K. Eric Drexler

"If you take all the factories in the world today, they could make all the parts necessary to build more factories like themselves. So, in a sense, we have a self-replicating industrial system today, but it would take a tremendous effort to copy what we already have."

"My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an unstable arms race."

"I've encountered a lot of people who sound like critics but very few who have substantive criticisms. There is a lot of skepticism, but it seems to be more a matter of inertia than it is of people having some real reason for thinking something else."

"You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we're third."

"My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development."

"In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough."

"Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise."

"On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works at computer speeds."

"It's a lot easier to see, at least in some cases, what the long-term limits of the possible will be, because they depend on natural law. But it's much harder to see just what path we will follow in heading toward those limits."

"The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don't have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things simpler."
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