"The other advantage is that in conventional manufacturing processes, it takes a long time for a factory to produce an amount of product equal to its own weight. With molecular machines, the time required would be something more like a minute"
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A minute is doing a lot of rhetorical work here. Drexler isn’t merely describing a faster factory; he’s detonating the reader’s sense of scale. Conventional manufacturing is framed as plodding and weight-bound: a factory is a hulking object that slowly “earns” its mass back in output. By contrast, “molecular machines” collapse the familiar economics of production into something closer to biology, where replication is the baseline trick and time is measured in generations, not quarters.
The specific intent is persuasive and political as much as technical: to make nanotechnology feel not incremental but phase-changing, the kind of shift that forces new rules. The comparison to “its own weight” is slyly chosen because it’s intuitive and physical; you don’t need to understand chemistry to feel the punchline. Then comes the accelerant: “something more like a minute,” a colloquial, almost casual phrasing that smuggles in an outrageous claim while sounding reasonable. He’s inviting you to accept a science-fiction tempo as a near-future engineering parameter.
Subtext: if production can self-amplify at that rate, control becomes the central problem, not capability. Scarcity, supply chains, labor, even warfare start to look contingent. This is Drexler in the classic late-20th-century techno-futurist mode: take an abstract capability (atomic precision) and translate it into a vivid, unsettling metric that bypasses skepticism. The context is the long argument of Engines of Creation-era thinking, when “nanotech” wasn’t a product category yet but a wager that computation-like scaling could be applied to matter itself.
The specific intent is persuasive and political as much as technical: to make nanotechnology feel not incremental but phase-changing, the kind of shift that forces new rules. The comparison to “its own weight” is slyly chosen because it’s intuitive and physical; you don’t need to understand chemistry to feel the punchline. Then comes the accelerant: “something more like a minute,” a colloquial, almost casual phrasing that smuggles in an outrageous claim while sounding reasonable. He’s inviting you to accept a science-fiction tempo as a near-future engineering parameter.
Subtext: if production can self-amplify at that rate, control becomes the central problem, not capability. Scarcity, supply chains, labor, even warfare start to look contingent. This is Drexler in the classic late-20th-century techno-futurist mode: take an abstract capability (atomic precision) and translate it into a vivid, unsettling metric that bypasses skepticism. The context is the long argument of Engines of Creation-era thinking, when “nanotech” wasn’t a product category yet but a wager that computation-like scaling could be applied to matter itself.
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| Topic | Technology |
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