article about Nanotechnology on rationalwiki

[chris0033547]

While I don't disagree that Drexler's vision may not turn out to accurate or exactly what we actually end up with in terms of nanotechnology, I would point out that the same could be said of Leonardo da Vinci's ideas about flight and various other things. While it took centuries for anything like his ideas to be achieved and the actual functionality of the technologies don't operate much like what he envisioned - we still acknowledge that he came up with the basic idea and attempted to imagine how it might work. We don't call him names, nor do we denigrate him for not getting it exactly right.

Don't disagree with you there.

Thanks for your opinions, everyone! After reading through the discussion the quotes above are my opinion on the whole issue as well. Who knows, maybe a medical nanoimmune system consisting of autonomous microscale bots won't even be necessary; For example I really liked the idea in this article here from Ryan:

http://www.orionsarm.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1440

Autonomous microbots might be difficult to program and control but attaching an external device to the patient's body, which injects tiny flexible tendrils into the body, which can then seek out the source of an ailment and fix it or be used for diagnostics, seems to make some of these problems a little simpler. The "command & control" - problem is outsourced to an external device of arbitrary size and complexity instead of trying to "cram" all this complexity into a tiny bot.

Who knows, maybe medical devices like this will be developed first before anything like what Drexler or Freitas (e.g. microbivore) suggest, will (or could) be developed.