A decade ago would be circa 1994. That would have been only slightly after the release of Nanosystems and may have been before the release of the first robust molecular designs for aspects of an assembler arm such as the Fine Motion Controller.

I think it is clear to a number of people at this point that the tip chemistry is going to be an important issue. (One is going to need a library of structures/reactions that the tip can adopt and engage in.) But enough reactions have been done at both the simulation and experimental levels at this point that it should be clear that these can be developed.

What has been a "job for later" is an actual atomic scale design for a full assembler system, including the 4-8 million atoms in the arm itself. That is roughly ~1000x the number of atoms in the FMC. But given the high level of redundancy in the structure of an assembler arm the job is probably only 10-100x more complex than the design of the FMC. That is something that could easily be undertaken by either a major national laboratory or a major manufacturing company. My current guess is that the design would require ~25 person-years (perhaps much less if significant software design support were available). While that isn't something an academic chemist would seriously consider it is something that a company like IBM or Boeing or Intel could easily wrap their hands around.

The October 2004 issue of Wired magazine has comments by Smalley in which he describes his change of heart:

Sitting in his hotel room at June's NanoSummit, Smalley explains that he was once captivated by Drexler's notions. "I was enchanted by Engines of Creation," he says. "I read it in a single sitting, and then I reread it." As late as 1999, he testified to Congress about "what will be possible when we learn to build things at the ultimate level of control, one atom at a time."

But doubts crept in as Smalley pondered the theory. "For months I said to myself, How could we have missed this? Is it really possible to do chemistry in this way? After a while I thought I saw what might be some problems. The more I thought about it, the more troublesome they appeared. Finally I ended up thinking, it's just hopeless."

Smalley recalls a meeting he arranged with Drexler at Stanford about a decade ago. "I wanted to talk about the tip," he says, referring to the business end of Drexler's machines. "I love the idea of the assembler. So I tried to drag him into a conversation about the tip, and he stonewalled. It was as if the tip was a job for later."

I've been wondering about that myself for some time. It's certainly been a dramatic U-Turn for him. He is very hostile to his old position but only seems to offer hand waving arguments and wishy washy metaphores. There's definately something strange going on there. Its almost like a self denial.

The Illuminati. I'm not ready to forfeit my life at this time – so that's all I'll say.