"Engines of Creation - Challenges and Choices of the Last
Technological Revolution." 
by K. Eric Drexler, 
Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y. 1986 $17.95

A review...
By: Bill Boas

K. Eric Drexler's book, Engines of Creation, is a "meme".

A meme is a high-tech thinking process that draws from precedent
and advocates a thesis that takes on a life of its own as it is
discussed and developed.

Drexler's thesis is that within the lifetime of most of his
current readers, the unrelenting progress of global molecular
research and technology will breakthrough to the threshold of
creation.

This breakthrough will allow mankind to produce sub-micron
machines, assemblers, replicators, and computers that will
profoundly impact the thinking and approaches to managing
materials, resources, civilization, and life as we know it.

Operating at one-billionth of the scale of apples, oranges, and
transistors, "nanotechnology" is currently analyzing and
manipulating molecular proteins, RNA, DNA, and non-organic elements
to discern basic patterns and bonding at the level of the atom.

This knowledge will permit scientists to use artificial
intelligence to design nanocomputers containing only a few billions
of atoms. Incomparably small, they will operate mechanically like
Charles Babbage's 19th Century computer, and still be able to
process data many times faster and more efficiently than today's
multi-processor super-computers operating electronically.

In turn, nanocomputers will design and help build new
molecular-sized systems that will dramatically transform how people
eat, treat disease, build products, colonize space, and provide for
military defense.

Like any technological breakthrough, nanotechnology promises both
blessings and dangers.

On the plus side, Drexler writes, "...the ill, the old, and the
injured all suffer from misarranged patterns of atoms, whether
misarranged by invading viruses, passing time, or swerving cars.
Devices able to rearrange atoms will be able to set them right.
Assemblers will be able to make virtually anything from common
materials without labor..."

According to Drexler, biostasis, the arresting of life processes
for later revival, becomes an option for seriously ill people who
are banking on medical breakthroughs to cure their condition in the
near or distant future.

Like molecular machines able to repair cells, others can be built
and programmed to repair the planet by removing toxins that
industrial society has intruded into the biosphere.

On the minus side, nanotechnology in the hands of the military
portends weapons of destruction infinitely more powerful than
today's combined nuclear arsenals, but packaged as inobtrusive
little molecular machines.

Even a non-military nanotechnology laboratory experiment run amok
could create what cognoscente refer to as the "gray goo syndrome"
where a strange substance created accidentally could replicate
unchecked to snuff out the planet's life in a few weeks. Doing it
by design could be even more selective and insidious.

For good or ill, management of nanotechnology will require new
memes and will challenge the premises of all entrenched political
and social institutions.

With machines capable of producing food and all the creature
comforts of life, what happens to labor in the conventional sense?
What do non-technological people do with their lives?

That, Drexler submits, is a critical question beyond the ken of
the amoral technology.

Only knowledge of what is happening with the technology can help
answer the unprecedented moral questions that will be manifest,
according to Drexler.

That process will be abetted by "hypertext", a computer-based
information system capable of high speed retrieval of references to
both past and present research which will provide researchers,
planners, politicians, and pundits with the means to interrelate
the facts about developing nanotechology globally and
instantaneously.

Specialized and inter-disciplinary regional and international "fact
forums" will be held to identify the progress of technological
realities and through a mechanism of scientific due process,
provide the means and consensus to determine direction and
political policy as research unfolds.

Less Drexler, an MIT graduate, be accused of creating a
science-fiction world of nanotechnology and its consequences, be
assured that his thesis is based on present research trends.
No less than Marvin Minsky, the pioneering MIT professor in
artificial intelligence penned the book's forward.

Wrote Mr. Minsky about the book, "It is ambitious and imaginative
and, best of all, the thinking is technically sound."

While many will argue about the timing of the nanotechnology
breakthrough, or even whether it should proceed at all in view of
its dangers, few in the know will argue about its inevitability.

In government and private laboratories all over the world it is
proceeding faster than the social and political awareness of its
consequences.

As there are the JPLs, MITs, IBMs, Hitachis, European, and East
Bloc groups working in nanotechnology, so could there be the
proverbial Dr. Strangeloves working the field for parochial or
nefarious ends? Under such circumstances, Drexler submits
international understanding and cooperation becomes a technological
and moral necessity.

The shock of Drexler's book is that the technology he describes is
real and coming. The utopia and unreality of Drexler's hope, is
whether man and his political and social institutions will ever be
ready to cope with the technological breakthrough when it occurs.

Drexler hints that the proverbial "lion must learn to dwell with
the lamb." The problem and reality of the world is that human
nature seems rooted in primitive imperatives where lambs are still
good meals for lions.

The 289 page book containing glossary, and extensive references,
requires concentration from a lay reader of the sciences.

Foregoing a broad preliminary outline, the opening chapter forces
the reader to think "atomistically" through a concise course on
atomic structure before expanding to the consequences of a mind set
programmed to "think small".

The effort to follow the book's early groundwork is worth it, as
Drexler's presentation is readable and blueprints the scope, and
directions of the breakthroughs coming from current molecular and
artificial intelligence research.

Engines of Creation is sure to become part of the new hypertext
Drexler describes.

After intelligent digestion and rumination, a reader will be able
to understand media reports about isolated artificial intelligence
and molecular research breakthroughs and relate them to the coming
nanotechnology revolution with its awesome promise, dangers, and
challenges.

-end-

Note: This was written in 1987, well before the publically-released
`internet' and its `hypertext' World-Wide-Web.