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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.