I was also confused about why no one has written something more extensive on nanotech. My guess would be that, it might be rather hard to have a catastrophe ‘by accident’ as the gray goo failure mode is rather obviously undesirable. From the Wikipedia article on gray goo I gathered that Erik Drexler thinks it’s totally possible to develop safe nanotechnology. That distinguishes it from AI which he seems to have shifted his focus to. See also this report, I found through this question
My guess a big reason is there doesn’t really seem to be any framework to go about working on it, except perhaps on the policy side. Testing out various forms of nanotechnology to see if they’re dangerous might be very bad. Even hypothetically doing that might create information hazards. I imagine we would have to see a few daring EAs blaze the trail for others to follow in. There’s also the obvious skill and knowledge gap. You can’t easily jump into something like nanotech the way you could for something like animal welfare.
I was also confused about why no one has written something more extensive on nanotech. My guess would be that, it might be rather hard to have a catastrophe ‘by accident’ as the gray goo failure mode is rather obviously undesirable. From the Wikipedia article on gray goo I gathered that Erik Drexler thinks it’s totally possible to develop safe nanotechnology. That distinguishes it from AI which he seems to have shifted his focus to. See also this report, I found through this question
My guess a big reason is there doesn’t really seem to be any framework to go about working on it, except perhaps on the policy side. Testing out various forms of nanotechnology to see if they’re dangerous might be very bad. Even hypothetically doing that might create information hazards. I imagine we would have to see a few daring EAs blaze the trail for others to follow in. There’s also the obvious skill and knowledge gap. You can’t easily jump into something like nanotech the way you could for something like animal welfare.