And, she added, "The identical activity can be turned into work or into leisure by being packaged differently." Gardening, for example, is essentially the same activity as farmingbut in one case it is "recreation," and in the other, "work." Nanotechnology would allow you to choose what was work, instead of having brute nature foist that work upon you.
Beyond that was the fact that even after nanotechnology was perfected, even after it had become widespread and freely available, not everyone would take equal advantage of it.
Not everyone was going to want to get their food from a "meat machine" or to live in a mock-wood, nanomachined house. When absolutely every last person in the neighborhood could produce their own Hope diamond how much more stylish it would be to wear, instead, a piece of handmade wrought iron. Often enough it was the surpassingly primitivethe native, the simple, the basic and plainthat was the sign of genuine taste and refinement, as in the case of the suburban American fireplace, which, in the late 20th century, was the ultimate piece of home furnishing. It was a basic error, apparently, to think that all would be nano in the Nano Age.
As to how it would in fact work out, in detail, that was something that nobody could know until it actually happened. In the end, the case could be made that what nanotechnology meant for the human specieswhether it was a godsend or a moral disasterwas not an issue that could be decided in advance. Indeed, it might not be decidable even afterwards.
Since when were social questions ever "decided" in any true sense anyway? After all, they weren't like scientific questions where you could immediately run to nature, or to experiment, or to computer simulation, for verification or disproof of a given answer.
And even within science itself there were exceptions to the rule. In mathematics, for example, some questions were said to be "formally undecidable," which meant that they were not susceptible of resolution by any known or imaginable method. There was also a separate class of problems to which there were in fact answers, only the answers were unknowable in advance on account of the inherent complexity of the situation--the weather on a given day 50 years from now, for example. Such problems were said to be "computationally irreducible" or "intractable." There was no way of calculating the answer that was faster than just waiting around for the actual outcome.
Maybe the ultimate meaning of nanotechnology was not knowable in advance. You couldn't predict itamp; you simply had to let it happen. You had to make it work, you had to make it turn out for the best, rather than decide, beforehand, that it was going to be heaven on earth or hell on wheels.
Ralph Merkle, Drexler's right-hand man when it came to molecular simulations, had a saying about this. When he traveled around giving lectures and spreading the nano dream, he'd always finish up the same way, with the same bright quotation which seemed to ccapture the right spirit in words. He'd project it up there on the screen, his final thought, his cclosing message: "The best way to predicct the future is to create it."
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