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"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."
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Exlpore more Work quotes
"The job description, like most, used complicated words that made job-hopefuls hesitant to apply because it may be out of their range of capability."
"We are so used to working that not working is the new hard work."
"And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain."
"A salary is a tax employers pay, every four weeks, for putting an employee's dream on hold."
"Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don't complain."
"Work is a vehicle with which man chases some fleeting destination called a full tummy."
"To some women, a job plays the role of a man. To most women, a man plays the role of a job."
"A specialist's mind is a slave to his specialization."
"When I worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, we would routinely be engulfed in cold clouds of helium and nitrogen gas as we discharged it into the video camera systems daily. The management team never warned us that we were in a hazardous oxygen deprived environment during this activity that was known for its ability to adversely affect physical and mental health, and possibly bring on death by asphyxiation."
Explore more quotes by K. Eric Drexler
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, diffuse around and interfere with things as best they can. At present, medicine is unable to heal anything."
"An international race in the relevant technologies is getting under way at this point, not necessarily with an understanding of where that race leads in the long run, but strongly motivated by the short-term payoffs."
"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."
"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."
"Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us there."
"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."
"After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that."
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