K. Eric Drexler > Quotes

“A radically unconventional future cannot be accommodated within the framework of plans made for a different world.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Standard engineering delivers artifacts; exploratory engineering delivers knowledge.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“The view from the top of scientific inquiry is widely understood, in a general way. Theorists seek and test precise explanations of observations of the natural world, and successful theories are, in a sense, predetermined by nature. The view from the top of engineering design is radically different and less often discussed. When engineers architect systems, they make abstract choices constrained by natural law, yet not fully specified and in no sense predetermined by nature.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“one finds that those familiar products are made with the aid of machines built by means of machines that were built by means of yet other machines—tools used to build tools in an unbroken chain that leads first to distant factories, and then deep into time.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“The Baker group at the University of Washington has packaged computer-aided protein fold prediction as a game, Foldit, which has been a remarkable success as measured not only by participation (many players, no scientific background required), but also by results and scientific papers. Foldit makes protein folding fun—it’s a kind of puzzle-solving problem—and proposed solutions earn scores in an international competition.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Within the microblock-size range, larger blocks enable faster assembly, while smaller blocks enable finer-grained customization, and there’s no reason to limit choices to a single size.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“In scientific inquiry information flows from matter to mind, but in engineering design information flows from mind to matter: •​Inquiry extracts information through instruments; design applies information through tools. •​Inquiry shapes its descriptions to fit the physical world; design shapes the physical world to fit its descriptions.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Advances since the takeoff of industrial society (which took hold in Britain around 1800) have multiplied the developed world’s productive capacity by a factor of one hundred or more, if one can compare products as different as wagons and aircraft, or books and computers.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“The bottom line: The labor required for APM is external to the production process, with no labor cost incurred by the process itself.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“The pace of innovation continues to increase, and the Information Revolution holds a hint of what may lie ahead. Taken together, the parallels between APM-based production and digital information systems suggest that change in an APM era could be swift indeed—not stretched out over millennia, like the spread of agriculture, nor over centuries, like the rise of industry, nor even over decades, like the spread of the Internet’s physical infrastructure. The prospect this time is a revolution without a manufacturing bottleneck, with production methods akin to sharing a video file. In other words, APM holds the potential for a physical revolution that, if unconstrained, could unfold at the speed of new digital media.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Studies of Earth’s chemical and geophysical cycles indicate that temperatures and CO2 levels would remain high for centuries even if emissions were cut to zero today; thus, it seems that only atmospheric carbon capture technologies can provide a large enough drain to lower CO2 levels quickly and deeply.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Today, a radical abundance of symphony and song—and words, and images, and more—has brought luxuries that once had required the wealth of a king to the ears and eyes of ordinary people in billions of households. It seems that our future holds a comparable technology-driven transformation, enabled by nanoscale devices, but this time with atoms in place of bits. The revolution that follows can bring a radical abundance beyond the dreams of any king, a post-industrial material abundance that reaches the ends of the Earth and lightens its burden.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Accuracy can only be judged with respect to a purpose and engineers often can choose to ask questions for which models give good-enough answers.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“The Industrial Revolution had its most profound effect on human life by enabling food production to outpace population growth.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“There’s an engineering principle here, by the way: Phenomena that can’t be observed—despite the most strenuous efforts—are extremely unlikely to either impede or enable accessible technologies.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“SCIENCE ASKS, “How can we discover new knowledge?” Engineering asks, “How can we deliver new products?”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Adding Up Costs Summing the two major costs above—raw materials and energy—while absorbing the smaller costs into the large rounding error yields a typical, estimated, physical cost of about twenty cents per effective, structural mass–adjusted kilogram.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Tsiolkovsky had no need for a lathe or a drill because he produced his results using the traditional tools of design engineering: pen and ink. He didn’t develop rockets; instead, he developed the rocket equation. He didn’t build liquid-fuel rocket engines; instead, he showed that liquid fuels would offer the highest performance.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“It should go without saying that proposing an unworkable approach (and then rejecting it and saying nothing more) is worse than useless when a good solution is already known.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Exploratory engineering, however, asks a different, less familiar question: “How can we apply existing knowledge to explore the scope of potential products that cannot yet be delivered?”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“ASKING THREE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS “What can be made?” “What can it do?” “How much will it cost to produce?”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“The essence of science is inquiry; the essence of engineering is design. Scientific inquiry expands the scope of human perception and understanding; engineering design expands the scope of human plans and results.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“And if you wanted to bring the sound of a symphony orchestra into your home, you would have needed a palace and the wealth of a king.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Scientists seek unique, correct theories, and if several theories seem plausible, all but one must be wrong, while engineers seek options for working designs, and if several options will work, success is assured. •​Scientists seek theories that apply across the widest possible range (the Standard Model applies to everything), while engineers seek concepts well-suited to particular domains (liquid-cooled nozzles for engines in liquid-fueled rockets). •​Scientists seek theories that make precise, hence brittle predictions (like Newton’s), while engineers seek designs that provide a robust margin of safety. •​In science a single failed prediction can disprove a theory, no matter how many previous tests it has passed, while in engineering one successful design can validate a concept, no matter how many previous versions have failed.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Conventional engineering aims to provide competitive products, exploratory engineering aims to provide confident knowledge, and these radically different objectives call for different methods.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“The first stored-program computers were built in the United Kingdom in 1948 and 1949 at the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge. These early machines used vacuum tubes to build digital systems; the first fully transistorized computer went operational in 1955, the year I was born.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Systems-level engineering is a discipline radically different from science, though it must conform to the same physical reality.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“Today, a small box can fill a room in your home with the sound of a violin or of a symphony orchestra—drawing on a library of sound to provide symphony and song in radical abundance, an abundance of music delivered by a very different kind of instrument.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“On its information side, however, the Information Revolution provides humanity’s first example of radical abundance and how it can step beyond the usual economic framework.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

“NOT SO LONG AGO, if you wanted to bring the sound of a violin into your home, you would have needed a violin and a violinist to play the instrument.”
― K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization