doubtlessly they will try to remove any possible margin of danger in their perspective, create some air-tight ideological box that will guarantee safety in any case. well, as the saying goes; the ‘perfect’ is the enemy of the good.

as we have seen, it is those very attempts to make totalised, universal systems that wrap being up in a neat bow, the lionization of some contingent concept as the meterstick by which all matters can be weighed, the creation of an automised framework to be all things to all people, useable by any class of being, that are the most obdurate and heinous intellectual abortions.

isint it just lovely, that very fear of destruction by ai, making it so much more certain.

There are two general rules which apply right now:

-There are way more jobs in academy than there are in industry, unless you are Chinese or South Korean.

(And I’d add: If you somehow find work in China, the hours shall be long, the conditions poor, and the pay generally quite low. You’ll also be working mostly on process-development related issues, e.g. how to scale-up production & find the easiest, cheapest ways to make basic nanomaterials. As for Korea, Samsung is where much of the really interesting applied-nanotech research is going on right now, but their main research center is somewhere near Seoul, they require “a master’s degree with at least 5 years of work experience or a doctoral degree”, and I hear that they do very little hiring of non-Korean nationals.)

-If you want an academic research job, the more credentialed you are, the better. A Ph.D. with solid postdoc experience would be best. You’d be hard-pressed to find an interesting job with only a bachelor’s degree. If you manage to find anything at all, it’ll involve drudgery like washing the glassware, running administrative errands for the research staff and postdocs, and making sure the dimethylformamide is stocked.

Chemjobber is a blog that does a pretty good job of tracking the chemistry job market. There are always some B.S.-level chem jobs out there, but they’re not very good, and they tend to have nothing to do with nanotechnology per se.

Ah, anyway, materials science and organic chemistry would definitely be a good background to have. Nanotechnology is a multidisciplinary field, but those are definitely two key components. In some ways, they’re the most integral and basic, so they’d make for a good foundation. Some other relevant disciplines might include optical engineering, microelectronic/computer engineering, bionics and biomimetics.

There’s a case to be made that explosion in the African population combined with unlimited immigration and low white birthrates could lead to the extinction of whites, possibly humanity if the post-white regimes get their hands on a substantial number of nukes (although I’m sure the Chinese would prevent that from happening).

Thinking out loud: I don’t think that these bots would be a “complex molecule” as such. They’d be more machine-like. They’d probably have a shell, a minuscule pump or motor, and a simple central processing nucleus attached to extremely small integrated sensors of various limited capabilities. All of these components would presumably be manufactured of hard carbon — e.g. nanotubes, graphene, diamondoid materials — or from a different abundant hard material, such as silicon carbide or perhaps aluminium oxynitride. They presumably wouldn’t be manufactured out of useful, but scarcer, elements such as titanium, boron, tungsten, and palladium. I wouldn’t be surprised if the first prototypes of their kind are larger than 1-250µm. Tardigrade-sized bots, perhaps… Hopefully with tardigrade-esque resiliency.

With that out of the way, there are many other issues with “grey goo” and nanomachines in general. For one thing, I don’t know if attempts to fabricate diamondoid or carbide nano-robots at atmospheric pressure & with low energy input are feasible. And, if we are to presume that they’re feasible, I don’t know if these processes are rapid enough to pose a threat to humanity. For another, extreme temperature changes can probably affect nanobot sensors and movement. And then there are presumably many other ways to affect their sensors, their ability to move, and their capacity to generate and store energy. Grey goo is only a doomsday scenario if we’ve got tremendously capable and adaptable self-reproducing nanobots. Their ability to adapt to their environments would have to be like that of microorganisms accelerated a few billionfold; they’d have to be quick and diffuse enough so that some fraction of their population survives any attempt we could make at destroying them; and they’d have to be voracious.
…Given the current state of the art, I’d say that we have nothing to worry about at the present time. Practical nanomachinery is something that’s feasible within the next few decades, but I’d bet that it’ll take a lot longer than that for it to become capable of overcoming all defenses and overrunning our planet. In the near-term, AI is probably the greater threat.

(Interestingly, in his new book Nick Bostrom suggests that if we get AI right, and if it comes before rogue nanobots, it will be able to apply countermeasures to the risks associated with nanotechnology. To quote: “If we create superintelligence first, we will face only those existential risks that are associated with superintelligence; whereas if we create nanotechnology first, we will face the risks of nanotechnology and then, additionally, the risk of superintelligence.)