An international race in the relevant technologies is getting under way at this point, not necessarily with an understanding of where that race leads….

It's a lot easier to see, at least in some cases, what the long-term limits of the possible will be, because they depend on natural law. But it's muc….

Nature draws no line between living and nonliving..

Any powerful technology can be abused..

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 o….

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 s….

If you take all the factories in the world today, they could make all the parts necessary to build more factories like themselves. So, in a sense, we….

But if we can manage it so people don't have things forced on them that they don't want, I think there's every reason to believe things can settle ou….

And that because the moving parts are a million times smaller than the ones we're familiar with, they move a million times faster, just as a smaller ….

After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I….

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 thi….

Scientists study physical things, then describe them; engineers describe physical things, then build them..

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that al….

In a sense, artificial intelligence will be the ultimate tool because it will help us build all possible tools..

...Local prohibitions cannot block advances in military and commercial technology... Democratic movements for local restraint can only restrain the w….

Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, dif….

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 ….

In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the ….

Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us ….

I've encountered a lot of people who sound like critics but very few who have substantive criticisms. There is a lot of skepticism, but it seems to b….

Plants with leaves no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough o….