Let’s say you have a group of friends who like to meet up every weekend to play the latest adventure video game. It’s really fun, but you each have gripes about some aspect of the game. Erkin doesn’t like the graphics. Mahendra doesn’t like the selection of accessories. “Why are there so many worthless gems cluttering up my inventory?” And so on…

“They should make a better adventure game.” Everyone agrees.

Everyone’s criticism is related to a hobby or job they pursue. Erkin is a graphic designer for a film studio, making innovative landscape models that look very much like a real-life scene. His last project, Jurassic Multiverse 5, had some people run screaming out of the movie theater during the first dinosaur chase scene.
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Mahendra has been a board game enthusiast since elementary school. Besides playing them, he designs unique board games with a flair for the fantasy adventure genre. He recently launched a Kickstarter for his new gem-crafting board game and it’s since garnered $75,000 in pledges, blowing past his initial $4,000 goal.

Karissa is a YouTuber who coaches aspiring programmers on how to pass brain-wracking interviews at tech juggernauts like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (FAANG). These interviews often ask the applicant to write algorithms to solve problems like “find the shortest path between two cities, visiting each intermediate city only once”, analyze their running time, and make them run faster if possible.

Karissa’s worked for a few of these juggernauts. She improved their recommendation algorithms a lot.

Now customers complain they spend more time deciding which movie to watch than actually watching movies. They also spend more time deciding which product to buy than actually using the product.
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At the weekly video game party, everyone forgets about their job or hobby and just enjoys the game with all its flaws, occasionally griping about this or that, suggesting how they’d fix some feature that feels more like a bug. Never mind that they could join forces and actually code a blockbuster that beats the game they’re playing.

“What’s going on?” Erkin complains. “I could animate an ogre way better than this!”

Why Progress Slows

This story loosely illustrates an attitude that slows and obscures atomically precise manufacturing (APM) progress. Just as talented game developers might wonder when a blockbuster will come out that finally fixes their pet peeve because they know the capability exists, molecular scientists and engineers might wonder whether their research will contribute to a breakthrough in APM because it solves a problem that held back progress.

But as K. Eric Drexler notes in Radical Abundance, “The missing ingredient needed for progress toward APM isn’t a breakthrough in science, but a breakthrough in purpose and organization.”

The scientific approach works well for studying existing systems. If you were trying to figure out what a dolphin is, you could have someone study its anatomy. Another person can independently study its feeding habits and another can study its social behavior. After you've studied all aspects of a dolphin, you can put together a coherent theory of what a dolphin is.

This approach wouldn't work as well for putting together a system, which requires an engineering mindset. There could be many ways to build what you want, so studying one aspect of the system won't necessarily be useful in the end. Further, in science, a failed experiment can suggest that a hypothesis is false or "that's not how the system works". In engineering, a failed experiment would only suggest that the system can't be built that way, not that it can't be built at all.

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