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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Scientists study physical things, then describe them; engineers describe physical things, then build them.