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Engines of Creation begins with the insight that what we can do depends on what we can
build. This leads to a careful analysis of possible ways to stack atoms. Then Drexler asks,
“What could we build with those atom-stacking mechanisms?.” For one thing, we could
manufacture assembly machines much smaller even than living cells, and make materials
stronger and lighter than any available today. Hence, better spacecraft. Hence, tiny devices
that can travel along capillaries to enter and repair living cells. Hence, the ability to heal
disease, reverse the ravages of age, or make our bodies speedier or stronger than before.
And we could make machines down to the size of viruses, machines that would work at
speeds which none of us can yet appreciate. And then, once we learned how to do it, we
would have the option of assembling these myriads of tiny parts into intelligent machines,
perhaps based on the use of trillions of nanoscopic parallel-processing devices which make
descriptions, compare them to recorded patterns, and then exploit the memories of all their
previous experiments. Thus those new technologies could change not merely the materials
and means we use to shape our physical environment, but also the activities we would then
be able to pursue inside whichever kind of world we make.
...
It seems to me, in spite of all we hear about modern technological revolutions, they
really haven't made such large differences in our lives over the past half century. Did
television really change our world? Surely less than radio did, and even less than the
telephone did. What about airplanes? They merely reduced travel times from days to
hours—whereas the railroad and automobile had already made a larger change by short-
ening those travel times from weeks to days! But Engines of Creation sets us on the
threshold of genuinely significant changes; nanotechnology could have more effect on
our material existence than those last two great inventions in that domain—the replacement
of sticks and stones by metals and cements and the harnessing of electricity. Similarly, we
can compare the possible effects of artificial intelligence on how we think—and on how we
might come to think about ourselves—with only two earlier inventions: those of language
and of writing.
We'll soon have to face some of these prospects and options. How should we proceed to
deal with them? Engines of Creation explains how these new alternatives could be directed
toward many of our most vital human concerns: toward wealth or poverty, health or
sickness, peace or war. And Drexler offers no mere neutral catalog of possibilities, but a
multitude of ideas and proposals for how one might start to evaluate them. Engines of
Creation is the best attempt so far to prepare us to think of what we might become, should
we persist in making new technologies.
Eric Drexler widely advocated the ideas of creating molecular machines in a
large number of journal articles and topics. One of the most popular among them is
the topic entitled
Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Com-
putation
. In order to give a more vivid picture of the opportunities offered by the
implementation of Drexler's ideas, let us consider some examples. Figure
1.4
shows simple variants of a molecular transmission gear and some more complex
similar devices. A molecular implementation of the bearing is also depicted.
In fact, despite the detailed discussion of the possibilities for creating molecular
devices, everything that Eric Drexler considered is reminiscent of Jules Verne-type
science fiction rather than technically sound specification for the development.
Marvin Minsky wrote about it in the foreword to the topic
Engines of Creation
,
drawing an analogy between Drexler's suggestions and the ideas of Jules Verne,
HG Wells, Frederick Paul, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.
Drexler conceptually designed analogues of macroscopic devices, using as “build-
ing material” nanoscale components, including single atoms and molecules. But at
the same time, being bound at the level of ideas of the 1960s and 1970s, he could
