2040 Vision: What Will the Triangle Look Like After the Robots Take Over? | Robots - INDY Week

It might take only one, explains Phil Torres, author, scholar, and freelance writer.

Photo: Rudi Petry

A single robot, a few billionths of a meter wide, dropped somewhere in the woods or on a front lawn. In a matter of days or weeks, the entire North American continent would be dust. No trees, no insects, no animals—not even a single bacterium. All of this organic matter will have been converted into copies of that first, mischievous little nanobot.

Engines of Creation:
The Coming Era of Nanotechnology

This is the so-called “gray goo” scenario, which K. Eric Drexler famously discussed in his 1986 book Engines of Creation. More than thirty years later, the danger looms closer. Whereas current 3D printers add one layer of plastic at a time, a nanofactory would move one atom or molecule at a time to build products from the very bottom up. The result would be “atomically precise manufacturing”—APM, for short. 

For example, two computers made this way would not only appear identical, but their atoms would also be in exactly the same position...

How fast might this happen? Quite quickly, since the replication process would be exponential, and we are notoriously bad at grasping exponential functions. We let them sneak up on us. 
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Source: INDY Week