Science & Tech Quote by K. Eric Drexler

Drexler’s line reads like a calm disclaimer, but it’s really a pressure valve for techno-optimism. “Any powerful technology” widens the net so far that the statement becomes almost tautological, and that’s the point: he’s stripping away the comforting fantasy that risk is an exception reserved for “bad” inventions. Power is the ingredient that invites misuse, whether the tool is nuclear fission, cryptography, gene editing, or nanotechnology. The sentence is a reminder that capability is morally promiscuous.

The subtext is strategic. Drexler, long associated with visionary (and controversial) ideas about molecular nanotechnology, is speaking to two audiences at once: boosters who want to treat innovation as an unqualified good, and skeptics who want to halt entire fields because they can imagine dystopian endpoints. By choosing “can be abused” rather than “will be abused,” he avoids fatalism while still insisting on seriousness. It’s a scientist’s form of persuasion: minimal, restrained, hard to argue with, and therefore hard to ignore.

Context matters because “abuse” isn’t just rogue villains in a Hollywood plot. It includes banal incentives: governments seeking advantage, corporations pursuing margins, individuals weaponizing access, and systems that turn tools into leverage. The line quietly shifts responsibility from the artifact to the ecosystem around it. If power guarantees temptation, then governance, design constraints, monitoring, and norms aren’t optional add-ons; they’re part of the technology’s real specification.