Nanotech &quot;assemblers&quot; are coming in a sense, but they got the scale wrong. They&#x27;re called 3d printers and they operate at the macro scale, but they are not really any less disruptive.<p>As far as true nanotech goes, we&#x27;ve had it for about 4.5 billion years. It&#x27;s called biology. You are basically made of nano-assemblers holding hands. Genetically engineered biology and &quot;wet artificial life&quot; are engineerable nanotech, but if you want to see Turing-complete universal assemblers in action right now go plant a tree.<p>In other words, I sort of think nanotechnology is a useless neologism for biology and bioengineering and I doubt that anything other than carbon-based systems are going to do much better than biology... and those are basically synthetic biology.