[continuation of previous screenshot's tweet, scrolled down]
...So I don't mean that planning is entirely useless. Rather, what I mean that the people who spend a lot of their time on grand messianic or dystopian visions about the far future usually get everything wrong, including details and impacts. They also usually cause enormous damage (see people like the Marxists who continue to do untold harm, Paul Erlich or the Club of Rome, who did vast harm to society, or more recently, the EA/"Rationalist" cult people, who are doing insane harm right now).
If you want what's best for yourself and those around you, you're better off just focusing on the next two or three or five years and flexibly adapting to the world as it comes. If you want what's best for the world, well, tend your own garden first, you're not likely to be able to plan the lives of others better than they will for themselves and you're very likely to harm them.
Another example, and I'm sorry to bring it up because I'm extremely fond of the people involved: when Eric Drexler decided that nanotechnology would be so transformative that rather than working on nanotechnology he should worry about nanotechnology *policy*, many years in advance of any nanotechnology at all existing, he more or less wrecked his own field and rendered it irrelevant for decades instead of (as he imagined he was doing) helping mankind guide itself into a smooth transition.
You can't actually plan "smooth transitions" for a giant society, there isn't even a way to do it in principle, you don't have the knowledge or predictive capability to do it no matter how smart you are, and you certainly can't make decisions for or predict the behavior of eight billion people with their deeply different interests, desires, cultures, etc.
When you're young, you imagine someone is in charge of the world, and you're either angry with what they're doing or comforted by the illusion that [cut off]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Continuation of Perry E. Metzger's tweet (same thread as previous screenshot), now discussing Eric Drexler's shift from nanotechnology research to nanotechnology policy as an example of harmful long-range planning.
ai safetyfuturismnanotechnologyeric drexlerrationalist communityeffective altruismtwitter
Dr Singularity ✓ @Dr_Singularity
I just asked Fable 5 to help design a functional molecular assembler (replicator) from the ground up.
A complete engineering blueprint: architecture, subsystems, components, manufacturing methods, assembly process, control software, and detailed diagrams.
[Embedded document images, four panels visible, containing diagrams and text such as:]
"This document specifies a positional-mechanosynthesis nanofactory in the tradition of Drexler, Merkle, and Freitas: a machine that builds objects by placing atoms and molecular fragments under mechanical control, the resulting parts joined by convergent assembly. It is not a matter-from-energy replicator (that violates physics). The core reaction was first demonstrated in the lab in 2025-2026; the full machine has never been built. Claims are tagged [DEMONSTRATED], [NEAR-TERM], or [THEORETICAL]."
Contents: 0. Purpose and scope; 1. Design philosophy and system architecture; 2. Physical layout and subsystems; 3. Core operation: positional mechanosynthesis; 4. Component catalogue (bill of materials); 5. Manufacturing methods (how to build the machine)
"1. Design philosophy and system architecture — The nanofactory is organised as a directed pipeline wrapped in two crossing-service layers. Feedstock flows left to right through the functional stages; a control and computation layer drives the active stages from below, and a metrology and error-correction layer watches them from above. Power and a shared clock are distributed underneath everything."
Diagram: "Assembler module — UHV enclosure, 4 K, vibration-isolated" with boxes: Intake and purifier, Assembler bay (arm array + tool turret), Convergent assembly (part stacking), Control unit, Feedstock buffer, Egress port.
1:39 PM · Jul 1, 2026 · 20.6K Views
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Dr Singularity ✓ @Dr_Singularity · Jul 1
[Further embedded diagram panels, partially cut off at bottom of screenshot, showing "2.2 Tooltips and the tool library", a "Build cycle (per unit placed)" table with columns Component/Role/Material/Approx. count, "2.5 Metrology and error correction", "3. Core operation: positional mechanosynthesis", a "BOOTSTRAP" callout box, and "6. Assembly process and scaling"]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet showing AI-generated (Fable 5) engineering blueprint diagrams for a theoretical molecular nanofactory/assembler, explicitly caveated in its own text as largely theoretical/undemonstrated. Multiple technical diagram panels embedded as images, most text small and partially illegible at this resolution.
nanotechnologymolecular assemblerclaude fablespeculative engineeringdrexler