There sure is nanotech. It's called biology, and it's five billion years old.
There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
111–117 of 117 posts
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the same reason, it's "machine learning" rather than "non parametric statistics".
love that! I'm so going to be using that as a jargon buster in the next corporate symantic symposium navel gazing event.
non parametric statistics isnt Machine Learning.
Only few methods such as K nearest neighbors are non parametric, rest all methods such as SVM's, decision trees are all parametric.
So using it as a jargon is a bad idea.
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is really a straw man argument. If you go read Drexler's blog(e.g. this series: http://metamodern.com/2009/12/19/molecular-manufacturing-whe... ), he is very explicit that the path forward is studying natural self-assembly from DNA and then tearing that apart, finding how it works, and modularizing/modifying it for our own purposes. None of this appears to be a "crazy idea" or something out of humanity's reach t…
That's the main problem with this piece, it attacks a Drexler that no longer exists, his views have shifted quite a bit from back then.
I think it attacks a Drexler that never existed; the chapter in Nanosystems on ways forward outlined similar ideas to that more recent post. Just because the bulk of Nanosystems explores a class of systems that's easier to analyze and currently impossible to build, he wasn't ever saying "Let's try to build this class of systems! Right now!" The OP was a total caricature.
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#114Is this guy actually talking about _Nanosystems_? I don't think he read the same book I did. I want my 60 seconds back.
I've read Nanosystems, and had the same reaction to this post.
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#115If you follow Drexler's blog and see what he actually says, you'll see plenty of realistic near-term topics like http://metamodern.com/2010/08/13/progress-in-peptoid-toolkit... http://metamodern.com/2010/05/20/a-programmable-nanoscale-as... http://metamodern.com/2010/03/12/the-molecular-approach-to-a... http://metamodern.com/2010/03/01/ribo-q1-genetic-manufacturi...
You can test the OP's picture of Drexler this way considerably more easily than by studying _Nanosystems_ yourself (which is hard).
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Evolution wasn't trying to engineer the ribosome. Evolution isn't purposeless. Sure, it is a random process but it has a purpose. And that's of survival of the organism (or if you like Dawkins, genes that encode the organism). > The biological forms that have come out of that are completely random. Wow, biological forms are NOT random. They are what they are because of the environment they are habituated in. The ex…
> Evolution isn't purposeless. Sure, it is a random process but it has a purpose. And that's of survival of the organism (or if you like Dawkins, genes that encode the organism). Is survival a "purpose" or is it just the consequence that is selected for? (Survival isn't a property like length or color.)
Good point.
As long as we're quibbling/clarifying, it seems we're mixing up natural selection and evolution here.
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#117You did not fund molecular nanotech and let billions of funding go to buying new buildings at universities and for chemistry research. Molecular nanotech has been excluded from funding since the 2003 start of major funding. When you buy your Ford SUV, do you send your complaints about it to Ferrari when you did not buy a race car?
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/09/eric-drexler-ralph-merkle-o...