The other advantage is that in conventional manufacturing processes, it takes a long time for a factory to produce an amount of product equal to its own weight. With molecular machines, the time required would be something more like a minute.

In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough.

The really big difference is that what you make with a molecular machine can be completely precise, down to the tiniest degree of detail that can exist in the world.

On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works at computer speeds.

And that because the moving parts are a million times smaller than the ones we're familiar with, they move a million times faster, just as a smaller tuning fork produces a higher pitch than a large one.

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.

Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, diffuse around and interfere with things as best they can. At present, medicine is unable to heal anything.

After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.

You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we're third.

It's a lot easier to see, at least in some cases, what the long-term limits of the possible will be, because they depend on natural law. But it's much harder to see just what path we will follow in heading toward those limits.

The other advantage is that in conventional manufacturing processes, it takes a long time for a factory to produce an amount of product equal to its own weight. With molecular machines, the time required would be something more like a minute.

Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us there.

But if we can manage it so people don't have things forced on them that they don't want, I think there's every reason to believe things can settle out in a situation that is recognizably better than the one we're stuck in today.

My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development.

My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an unstable arms race.

If you take all the factories in the world today, they could make all the parts necessary to build more factories like themselves. So, in a sense, we have a self-replicating industrial system today, but it would take a tremendous effort to copy what we already have.

I've encountered a lot of people who sound like critics but very few who have substantive criticisms. There is a lot of skepticism, but it seems to be more a matter of inertia than it is of people having some real reason for thinking something else.

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.

An international race in the relevant technologies is getting under way at this point, not necessarily with an understanding of where that race leads in the long run, but strongly motivated by the short-term payoffs.

The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don't have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things simpler.

Any powerful technology can be abused.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

In a sense, artificial intelligence will be the ultimate tool because it will help us build all possible tools.

I have problems with machines which aren't gestural.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

In Hell all the messages you ever left on answering machines will be played back to you.

Italy in the first years got food, for the first year or the first periods got food. Then we got raw materials and then we got tool machines, let's say, instruments for working.

Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can't help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom.

When ATM machines came out and people were prosecuted for robbing ATM machines, I don't think anybody thought the banks were against technology because they didn't want their ATM machines lifted.

Red Carpet Enterprise has been really well received since one guy can install it in about an hour, and it makes it trivial to deal with software management issues like deploying updates and creating standard package sets for your various machines.

There are a lot of people who've been able to ditch their Windows machines and switch over to Linux because they can now use their Exchange server for calendaring and collaboration from their Linux desktop.

The biggest challenge has been simulating a tornado with wind machines and dirt and debris. Right when you walk on the set, you feel the energy of a tornado. But the hardest thing is trying to get dialogue out in all of that.

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

Let the machine take care of the machines, and I'll go spend more time with my family, or golf.

I learned the business in about two months, and then made as much as the others, and was consequently doing quite well when the factory burned down, destroying all our machines - 150 of them. This was very hard on the girls who had paid for their machines.

Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart?

There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still.

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

Women are nothing but machines for producing children.

To be honest, I think we should find first the possibility to make it. Research is first - if you're not interested, you never can find something. Many things happen from forgotten machines - ones that are no longer used.

And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth.

The chips are in production, the machines aren't. So we've got a little bit of work left to do.

I was 17 and just learning what high fidelity was, what good sound was, and learning the mechanics of tape machines. It was a real education, going right from the consumer end to the record factory.

I think IT projects are about supporting social systems-about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.

The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

Research is four things: brains with which to think, eyes with which to see, machines with which to measure and, fourth, money.