Engines of Creation

Kids Should *Not* Use Chatbots! (You Should Be Wary, Too…)

Deep Questions with Cal Newport, 28 September 2026. The book comes up at 1 hr 2 min in. Said by Cal Newport.

Cal Newport mentions a nanotechnology book by Eric Drexler—no title given—that inspired 1990s extropian futurists. He paraphrases its core idea: that nanobots creating other, ever-more-sophisticated nanobots gave futurists a vague but appealing path to utopian futures without requiring them to specify technical details of how such systems would actually work.

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