Limits of nanotech, have you seen this argument?

From: David Picon Alvarez (eleuteri@myrealbox.com)
Date: Thu Jun 01 2006 - 10:09:03 MDT


Hello,

I was wondering if you have seen this website before:
http://www.geniebusters.org/00_contents.htm

It belongs to some Lyle Burkhead which seems otherwise to produce some
seriously out of calibration rants, but the source of an argument should not
influence too much the way we assess it except as a heuristic for things
we're not willing to spend time fact-checking.

I'm not sure if his argument is right. I think the analogies he uses
(universal assembler must equal in complexity the world economy, for
example) are suspect, though. Likewise, the argument that automation isn't
free because you have to pay programmers is trivially true in that writing
code has cost in time and energy, but can later be trivially replicated...
I'm not sure.

--David.



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