They Laughed At Me When I Said

They laughed. That is the part I want you to remember first, because the laugh is the sound a dying consensus makes when it still thinks it owns the future.

In 2012 I stood in front of a venture group and said that nanofabrication—true atom-by-atom assembly, not 3D printing, not sintering, not melting plastic into the shape of a wrench—would produce working discoveries before 2030, and that the path to a replicator was no longer science fiction. Their “expert” told the room my entire talk should be disqualified. There were no atomic-layer nanofabricators, he said. There never would be on any timeline a serious investor should care about. A hundred years, if ever.

I have heard that same sentence about useful AI that would pass a Turing Test. I have heard it about the personal computer, about the int ...