[ExI] My prediction

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Jan 4, 2026 at 7:10 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> WRT the singularity, it is not as we envisioned.  Molecular
> nanotechnology is lagging behind AI.  We might use AI to bootstrap
> nanotech.  Has anyone asked them how to do it?

ChatGPT says, "yes—this has been asked explicitly for at least a
decade, and it’s now an active research program rather than a
speculative one', and then goes on to how it's mostly going through
biology instead of straight to hard nanotech.

Claude says, "Yes, people have definitely asked AIs (including me)
about using AI to accelerate molecular nanotechnology!", and then
gives much the same answer.

Both of these are pretty much what I understood to be the case.  And
in both cases, they went on to explain how the problem isn't simply
"just ask AI how to do it": even if you know how, actually doing it
requires quite a lot of work, and some parts of finding out how are
ones that AI can't handle well.  (Which ones?  Ask them.)