Fifteen years ago, nanotech run amok was one of the top feared existential risks. Nowadays, nobody really talks about nanotech x-risk. What changed? Why did people decide nanotech was no longer scary?
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I did a deep dive into the state of nanotech research here, including correspondence with the experimentalist who worked on the nanofactory project.
Essentially, research into molecular nanotech hit a wall in like 2010. They did not get very far: all they were trying to do was place two carbon atoms onto a carbon surface, and they failed, as they didn't have the means to reliably image diamond surfaces. To my knowledge, there hasn't been another major attempt since.
We are just nowhere close to even beginning to succeed with drexler-style nanotech, and the whole thing might just be impossible or impractical, or turn out to not be as impressive as previously thought.
On the other hand, there have been some more recent advances with DNA based robotics and DNA origami, so there may be some successes on engineered biology based bots in the future.
Nanotech progress has been a good deal slower than was expected by people who were scared of it.
I agree, however, isn't there still the danger that as scientific research is augmented by AI, nanotechnology will become more practical? The steelmanned case for nanotech x-risk would probably argue that various things that are intractable for us to do now, have no theoretical reasons why they couldn't be done if we were slightly better at other adjacent techniques.
Has this limitation been ameliorated by advancements in imaging? I used to work in materials science and don't anymore, but my understanding is that scientists have very recently refined needles to one-atom width at the point, which should improve the resolution of scanning tunneling microscopy. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.