[ExI] not yet nanobots, but micro-bots

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
Sent: Thursday, 18 December, 2025 5:19 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: spike at rainier66.com; BillK <pharos at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] not yet nanobots, but micro-bots

 

On Wed, Dec 17, 2025 at 11:22 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

 

> Regarding nanobotty, the very critical distinction is in how they are made.  Drexler’s vision on nanobots changed the way I see everything.  I came upon his Engines of Creation in the 1980s on the shelf in a bookstore (back when those still existed.)  I thought it was misplaced and started carrying it back to where I thought it belonged, reading it along the way.  I stopped walking, continued reading, realized it was in the right place, turned around while continuing to read but veered off pi/2 toward the cash register, bought the book,

 

That's amazing because almost exactly the same thing happened to me in 1986! …

 

> took it home, changed my life.

 

>…Same with me. I don't think any book has influenced me more. The only other books I would put in the same category as it are Gödel Escher Bach, The Selfish Gene, and Arthur C Clarke's Profiles Of The Future which I read when I was 12.

  

John K Clark

 

 

 

John here’s a crazy mind blower: I would put Gödel Escher Bach as the most influential book I ever read.  It beats Drexler’s Engines only because I read it earlier, sampling it in 1980 when I was in college but had no time to read it at the time, then reading it cover to cover in 1984.  I was age 23 then.  I was about 26 when I read Engines of Creation.

 

I also read Clarke’s Profiles of the Future and the Selfish Gene, both really good influential books, but it was the two in the previous paragraph which opened my mind.  More later on Clarke’s Profiles, for it influenced me differently.  I read that one in my late teens.

 

I had the privilege of meeting both Drexler and Hofstadter.  The latter was a speaker at what I called the Nerdfest on 1 April 2000 at Stanford.  We met briefly.  But I became a regular on Drexler’s lecture circuit in the late 80s.  He was less famous then, and some of his lectures were giving in a forum of 30 people or less.  

 

A coupla years later, I was at a Foresight event, carrying a book of bound technical papers about space colonization.  The K Eric himself walked up to me and just started chatting like I was his old fishing buddy.  He knew that book well, and asked me to let him show me something.  He turned to a specific page and pointed out in that book an idea which sounded like a reference to an M-Brain, kinda: it was a constellation of orbiting processors which communicated with each other.  It wasn’t an M-Brain really, just a circular string of processors orbiting the sun or earth.

 

Another coupla years went by.  I was at one of the Extrocons, in the 1990s, the one at Berkeley, mighta been Extro 3.  Greg Burch gave me an address, be there or be square.  I went up there on a motorcycle, but Berkeley is a scary place (or definitely was then (if you locals know what I mean.))  It was a very high crime area.  I went up there after work so I was on a motorcycle wearing a business suit.  Once again, the K Eric himself strolled up to me and started yakking like I was his old buddy.  Christine Peterson came up and the three of us were talking (Christine knew me by then because I was part of the homeful debris who soiled the carpet at the Foresight events (and I was volunteer proofreading Foresight’s newsletters by then.))  Note: we homeful debris are hangers on who have actual homes.

 

Anyway, the party.  The K Eric is a kind of a somber guy, certainly compared to me.  Clarification: everyone is somber and serious when compared to me, but the three of us were there and I had to traverse the dangerous neighborhood on foot on the south side of the Berkely campus at night, get on a motorcycle if it was still there.  The K Eric had his Alcor bracelet.  I said “Hey Eric, we should swap: I give you my ID, take your Alcor bracelet, then if I get killed by the locals on the way back to my bike, I get Alcored under your ID, then you contact my widow and she will pay to get you into the dewar, decades or centuries go by, they reanimate the both of us with switched identities!  Oh the gags could play with THAT!

 

The K Eric and Christine were kinda unaccustomed to that kind of proletariat cutting up, and they laughed like a coupla elementary school kids.  They weren’t even drinking, none of were.  But they were from serious schools and were solving serious problems, while I was just a homeful normie spot of carpet debris, interested in the kinds of things they write about.  After that party, I was so in awe of myself, I begged me for my own autograph.

 

spike 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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