I'm all for figuring out how to use the nanobots we have (aka biology).

Advantage: they self-replicate royalty free, something the nanobot company would never allow.

> "Advantage: they self-replicate royalty free, something the nanobot company would never allow."

Such restrictions, or similar, might be a good idea in general. A gray-goo excursion would not be fun. Algae blooms cause enough damage as it is, and at least there are things that eat algae.

Just evolve to eat metal. Easy. There. All is fixed.

You just need a DRM server which each nanobot must obtain a proper license key from every cycle.

Monsanto disagrees.

How about not fucking things up in the first place? It's stupid to cause an unnecessary problem because one day we might have a solution.

That was never an option. Why do you hate America?

I know you're being facetious but some people actually do think this way. I witnessed a discussion a few days ago where a person took a positive pro-change position regarding something and people literally started saying things like "Why do you hate freedom? Why do you hate our constitution?".

A lot of people aren't willing to stand up for what's right and good and feel that attacking you is an appropriate response when you criticize their feudal overlords. It's really depressing and disheartening.

It's a side effect of American Exceptionalism.

Kurzweil believes that being very very small allows you to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics. There's no physics to back this up...

Sure there is. The second law of thermodynamics (which I am assuming you are referring to) only applies to an isolated system and describes its tendency toward thermal equilibrium -- it doesn't apply when you are able to add energy to the system.

Am I misunderstanding you?

Simply that nanotech can accomplish miracles. You have to power your nanobots somehow, and you have to dump the heat they create by doing work.

So why is that a big deal? There are trillions of nano-machines being powered and dumping their waste heat in you right now. Or rather, they are you.

Sure, and when they work hard, it can kill you (that's what a fever is). So how can you do healing better than the body can? Where does the power come from, and where does the heat go?

If you harvest solar energy you can do a whole lot of work without worrying about any new heat.

Harvesting a tiny fraction of the total solar energy available (on Earth) would look an awful lot like a miracle.

He's not talking about climate change; he's talking about heat sinks so your nanobots don't literally vibrate themselves apart before doing anything useful.

Open systems still obey thermodynamics, it's just that there's an energy flux (and an entropy gradient).

Look up Ilya Prigogine, self-organizing systems, and dissipative systems.

Humans and their societies (and other artifacts) are one such.

You're then both saying the same thing. S has to go up somewhere.

What do you mean? I can't find anything about that and Kurzweil on google.

Got a specific pointer / reference on this?