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> things William Gibson wrote about in fiction 20 years ago

Greg Bear, 26 years ago (Blood Music): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

Which is funny, because the goo is actually green.

I never understood the fear of nanotech, because I see no reason that tiny robots would be any more scary or harmful than all the bacteria out there already. And the bacteria can already both self-replicate and kill us.

If bacteria were as powerful as nanotech, there would not be any need for nanotech. Nanotech could potentially be to bacteria what the space shuttle is to a horse.

Nanotech can neither replicate nor kill us yet. It's not magic, and evolution has a huge head start on dealing with issues like powering it and self-replication. Devices at that scale are, generally, quite frail to things like stray cosmic rays or other background radiation causing them to break down.

And the space shuttles are dead; there will be no more of them. Horses, meanwhile, have survived for millions of years, so you're making the opposite point by mistake.

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