Engines of Creation - The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
K. Eric DrexlerHow could one build a sounder case? First, the foundations must be very firm - and Drexler has built on the soundest areas of present-day technical knowledge. Next, one must support each important conclusion step in several different ways, before one starts the next. This is because no single reason can be robust enough to stand before so many unknowns. Accordingly, Drexler gives us multiple supports for each important argument. Finally, it is never entirely safe to trust one's own judgments in such matters, since all of us have wishes and fears which bias how we think - without our knowing it. But, unlike most iconoclasts, Drexler has for many years courageously and openly exposed these ideas to both the most conservative skeptics and the most wishful-thinking dreamers among serious scientific communities like the one around MIT. He has always listened carefully to what the others said, and sometimes changed his views accordingly.
We'll soon have to face some of these prospects and options. How should we proceed to deal with them? Engines of Creation explains how these new alternatives could be directed toward many of our most vital human concerns: toward wealth or poverty, health or sickness, peace or war. And Drexler offers no mere neutral catalog of possibilities, but a multitude of ideas and proposals for how one might start to evaluate them. Engines of Creation is the best attempt so far to prepare us to think of what we might become, should we persist in making new technologies.