🎇🔬 The super AI-nanotech parallel

The comparison isn't completely wrong, just mostly

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

An “oneiric” technology, writes Philip Ball in the new Aeon essay “Techno-pipe dreams,” is not some plausible but far-distant breakthrough, but rather “a chimera … like the philosophers’ stone of the alchemists: magic dressed in the science of its time, by means of which almost anything becomes possible.”

He argues that today’s Silicon Valley obsession with achieving artificial superintelligence echoes American engineer Eric Drexler’s dreamy nanotechnology vision of the 1980s and 1990s. Drexler’s theoretical “molecular assemblers” — tiny, programmable machines that could build anything atom by atom — were touted as a route to immortality and infinite abundance.