Science Quote by K. Eric Drexler

Drexler smuggles a sci-fi premise into a sober, engineering register: the industrial world already behaves like a crude organism. “Self-replicating” is the loaded phrase. It yanks the conversation out of GDP graphs and into biology, where replication is power, threat, and inevitability. But he immediately handcuffs the metaphor with friction: “in a sense,” and then the kicker that it would take “a tremendous effort.” That hedge is the point. He’s not pitching magic; he’s measuring the distance between theoretical capability and practical coordination.

The intent is to reframe technological abundance as a systems problem. Factories aren’t scarce because steel is scarce; they’re scarce because replication at civilizational scale requires choreography: supply chains, standards, energy, skilled labor, logistics, governance, and time. Drexler’s subtext is a critique of naive futurism and naive skepticism at once. Yes, we already possess the physical means to “copy what we already have.” No, that doesn’t mean we can press a button and get a second industrial world.

Context matters: Drexler is a central figure in molecular nanotechnology, often associated (fairly or not) with runaway replication fantasies. Here he flips that narrative. The real drama isn’t tiny machines eating the planet; it’s that even our existing, visible replicator is sluggish because it’s distributed across institutions and incentives. The line reads like a warning shot about bottlenecks: the frontier isn’t invention alone, it’s the political and organizational capacity to scale.