My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an unstable arms race.
My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development.
On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works at computer speeds.
The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don't have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things simpler.
I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.
