The whole concept originated with a Feynman thought experiment about exponential growth. He never posed it as a real thing just if a small thing replicated a lot it would take over a planet in a seemingly short doubling. There are so many environmental factors that would destroy this self replicating system and many of them are physical limitations of reality. Yet throughout the 90s we had sensationalist stories about how grey goo was just around the corner.

I see similar sensationalism about the nature of intelligence and the current growth of AI systems and am just enjoying being alive to witness it. It's going to get so much better in such a short period of time and all the basilisks in the world aren't going to come fill our nightmares.