Eric Drexler

This is like religious people who independently re-derive fallacious arguments for the existence of God (or the necessity to believe in him), and then present them to skeptics as if they were incontrovertible---things like the First Mover argument, the argument from design, or Pascal's Wager. Any agnostic/atheist worth his salt has heard every one of those arguments ad nauseam, and has definitive rebuttals to counter them.

And so it goes; your arguments are as old as cryonics. Here are the answers offered by the Alcor FAQ, in order:

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#evidence

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq05.html#met

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq07.html#overpopulation

To those interested in more detail, I recommend the Alcor FAQ (http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/), Chapter 9 of Engines of Creation (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_9.html), and the World Transhumanist Association FAQ (http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html; search for the question "What is cryonics? Isn’t the probability of success too small?").

N.B. I am one of the signatories of the "Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics" (http://www.imminst.org/cryonics_letter/) mentioned by Eliezer in the post.

The relationship between Szabo and Finney goes back way further than that. They were both on the cypherpunks list in the 90's. See this paranoid rant [0] from the 90's about Hal Finney, Szabo and others being fake personas invented by Tim May (author of the Cyphernomicon).

Additionally, Szabo was an employee of Agoric Systems, publisher of the Agoric Papers [1], a treatise on market based systems. He was also an employee of Digicash [2], a failed electronic money startup created by David Chaum.

However, Szabo has released a bit of code [3], which is very different than code I would expect Satoshi Nakamoto to have written.

That said, for someone who was a professor at GWU law school, there is a remarkably small amount of public information about Nick Szabo.

[0] - http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Folklore/Humor/squish.hoax

[1] - http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash

[3] - https://github.com/nicksz/jTime

I had a networked account in the later 80s. I also read Ted Nelson (Literary Machines) and Eric Drexler (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_14.html) predicting something like the web but in important ways better -- there are ideas there worth returning to for today's fights about "fake news" and open-access science. Drexler was right about the timing, too.

Those guys were on the futuristic fringe, but their ideas looked good to me. So why didn't I believe Pournelle? I was like, sure, someday, but his scenario seemed practically AI-complete. I did not foresee it coming so soon out of a little bit of the right sort of natural language processing plus some great engineering.

I'm sure there were people with a better imagination! But hindsight really is way too easy.

My bet on this subject is a combination of evolutionary computing, agorics[1], deep learning style feedback and language learning.

I've got a repo[2] for a vm where the programs can act in that way. But I am at the early stages of programming initial programs with economic/learning strategies. So I don't know how promising it is. More details can be found spread out on my blog [3]

[1] https://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html

[2] https://github.com/eb4890/agorint/

[3] https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/2017/08/13/introduction-to-agorint-part-1

A better reference for the non-nanotech stuff you mention is his "Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge"[1] (which clearly cites the prior work of Bush in 1945 and Nelson in 1978).

Discussion forums as we know them today have been around since about 1978 and ad-supported publishing predates the 1800's.

I can't seem to find any specific mention of what we today know as pagerank (i.e. the cumulative probability that a given user will arrive at a given page) at all in either work.

[1] http://www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Hypertext/HPEK1.html

If someone is interested in real technical description of molecular manufacturing, you may read Eric Drexler's "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation".
Most parts of this book can be read on the author's website http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Nanosystems/toc.html , and if you know how to google you can find the whole book.

The book contains a careful physical analysis of molecular machines. The technical material is unchallenged to the present day.