In the present noisy environment, your reaction reflects a rational heuristic for judging claims, but it gives the wrong result this time. I wish that this topic weren’t inherently outrageous-sounding, and that it hadn’t accreted layers of thick layers of genuine hype and rubbish. What sounds like hype, but isn’t, tends to be unusually important. Ambient hype leads therefore leads rational people to discount the upper end of the spectrum of important research directions — a perverse result with high opportunity costs.

(You also might want to take a look at “Productive nanosystems: the physics of molecular fabrication”, in the journal Physics Education.)

That’s ironic coming from you.

One can hope….