Heh. I remember listening to Drexler speak in 88 about nanotech. It was about nano-bots and grey goo (I bought his book, too). It sort of influenced my career towards macromolecular tinkering.

But 20 years later, nanotech is about materials made the same way as they were in the 80s, but with finer skill. Very different to how we thought it would be done in 88.

I think that’s the key lesson. As you say, “over promise and under deliver.” The over promise helps us think of all the good and bad. But we need to realize we’ll likely under deliver, in ways we never expected. And this is good.

This is a subject for several posts in itself, but there are a number of things the nanotech community have been grappling with, including:

Using an ill-defined banner to promote science and technology, without much thought over the political/social ramifications of this. Big problem here – “nanotechnology” ends up meaning very different things to researchers, business, policy makers, regulators, NGO’s, members of the public. So you get some mighty confusing conversations about what it’s about, what the opportunities and risks are, and how to manage them.

Over promising and under delivering. Hype runs out of steam in the end. Nanotechnology has tremendous potential, but expectations have been raised higher than they should have been in terms of what will be delivered, and by when.

Balancing initiatives aimed at stimulating research funding with initiatives aimed at providing solutions to problems. Not an impossible task, but at times there has been some cynicism floating around nanotechnology…

Foreseeing real challenges to progress, and devising strategies for getting round them. This has been a real learning curve for nanotechnology and, while I think we’ve done better here than with previous technologies, we aren’t doing that well yet.

Communication and engagement. We’re still in kindergarten when it comes to working out how to get the concepts and implications of a new technology like nanotech over to people potentially affected by it. And we’re even further behind when it comes to enabling stakeholders – citizens included – to be a part of science and technology-related decision-making. But we’re learning.

Despite many mis-steps, the nanotechnology community has learned a lot in these areas over the past decade. When it comes to synbio, the worry is that none of these lessons will be heeded – or even noticed. Which means that it will be like turning the clock back 10 years – worse, as society has moved on and is a different beast now than it was at the tail end of the 1990′s.