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"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."
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"I've been thinking about the record since I reached the fifty plateau. But you think about it and then you let it go because you can't waste many brain cells on hours thinking about it."
"It is not enough to call yourself a 'free thinker' just because you can change your beliefs. A whole mess of people change their beliefs based on what is fashionable rather than what is factual, which, by always following the crowd, would be the complete opposite of the beauty of a free thinker."
"I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking."
"I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs."
"We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne."
"I'm never a person who likes anything I've done. It's just the way it is. Twenty years later, I can look at something I did, and I'm still thinking, 'You know, that could have been better if you had done it this way or that way."
Explore more quotes by K. Eric Drexler
"The really big difference is that what you make with a molecular machine can be completely precise, down to the tiniest degree of detail that can exist in the world."
"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."
"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."
"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 had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things."
"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."
"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."
"But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth."
"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."
"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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