Via Instapundit and Foundation for Economic Education:
…more than 25 years after the publication of Engines, Drexler returns to the subject of nanotechnology with Radical Abundance. Eschewing as tainted both by hype and bureaucratic mismanagement the word he introduced to the world, Drexler refers in his new work to “atomically precise manufacturing” (APM), which he says reflects the concepts he originally introduced.
Click the link to see more: The Reluctant Visionary : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education
Points:
- “Today’s assembly lines can produce a finished car from premanufactured parts in a relatively compact space and in an impressively short period of time, but where did those parts come from? How long did it take to make them, and the materials they were made from? And what is the origin of those materials?”
- “…Drexler’s APM factory produces a finished car directly from raw materials, cutting years down to minutes and shrinking a globe-spanning supply chain to the size of the (remarkably small) factory.”
- “In Drexler’s vision of atomically precise manufacturing, the production of material goods becomes an instance of information technology: The finished car is a digital product comparable to a movie burned onto a DVD. All of the know-how required to turn a few basic materials into a working automobile is written into the software that governs the operation of the APM factory, which begins its assembly process by quite literally putting molecules together.”
Ponder: Is 3D printing a step toward turning physical objects into information?