Chris Phoenix on Nanotech Fast Takeoff
Posted on April 1st, 2009 by miron
Chris Phoenix is writing an interesting series of articles over at CRN about the dynamics of the development of molecular engineering.
His thesis, as far as I understand it after the first three articles, is that we’re likely to see a fast takeoff, because it’s easy to achieve excellent results after you’ve achieved good enough.
One example is error rate – going past an adequate error rate to a superlative one just requires additional purification / error correcting steps. Other things that may improve very quickly once a workable solution is found are reaction rates – which are exponentially dependent on positional accuracy / stiffness.