Our old buddy Karl Gallagher steps us through some of the more entertaining scenarios featuring nanobots run amok:

A couple of the books I've read recently illustrated the powers and dangers of nanotechnology. One of the disputes in the field is whether molecular manufacturing can provide exponential production capabilities. MM would let us create a "nanofactory", a machine which builds things atom by atom, capable of producing anything it has the design data for. Exponential production happens when a nanofactory can build a duplicate of itself. Then the they could both duplicate themselves, until we have 4, 8, 16, 32, . . . enough nanofactories for every household in the world to have one. That would totally eliminate the world economy as we know it. If there's no limits on what the nanofactories can produce there could be a wave of homemade WMDs that would eliminate the world as we know it.

My favorite would have to be the "flesh-eating assemblers." Yikes!

-Linkathon.