All of Benjamin Reinhardt's Comments + Replies
After a lot of research, I think that one of the most effective ways of allocating order one-$100M towards progress is to enable materials and manufacturing technology research that could shift paradigms but doesn't have a home in current institutions. Those conclusions come from a couple of observations:
- A ton of progress is driven by the second order effects of technologies: haber bosch, intended to remove german dependence on south american guano contributed a huge amount to solving overpopulation, etc.
- The technologies that most often have those second o
Not an expert, but as far as I can tell, nowhere near enough! There's some rumbling about making it easier to build nuclear and folks like Jamie Beard and Eli Dourado are doing admirable work to make it easier to drill geothermal, but for the most part people don't even think seriously about the counterfactual that we could have orders of magnitude more energy and what that would unlock.
I think the problem is that we don't have a clear roadmap -- if we did it would be much easier to execute on it. In the limit, what Hall (and Drexler before him) describes is physically possible but transients matter and nobody has done a great job describing the intermediate technologies.
Throat clearing aside, here are some of my personal hunches (I don't think there are any clear consensuses):
- Use a combination of our existing tools for manipulating matter with nanoscale precision to start building multi-component and approach nanoscale system
In no particular order (and for flexible definitions of "coming" and "soon" -- things always take longer than we expect and aren't inevitable):
- Plastics made from atmospheric carbon (if Casey Handmer et al are right about cratering solar panel prices)
- I think? Varda is making fiber optic materials in space.
- The science things we can learn from messing around with graphene (not sure it will make a useful product anytime soon)
- (Maybe) Ceramic airplane engines
Not an expert but I suspect it's unlikely that commercial products will be manufactured in space beyond expensive novelty items (do theraputics count as commercial?)
Reason being that commercial usually implies large scale, which I suspect will be limited in things in space that are going to come to earth.
Predicting the future is hard -- I hope I'm wrong!
If by "investors" you mean venture capitalists, I'm not sure that material science will ever be as exciting as software -- the margins on software are too high and the timescales are so short. Maybe if someone cracked truly automated generative materials.
But there are other kinds of investors -- I could imagine a number of valuable companies eventually being built around some general-purpose materials platforms: if someone figured out how to make steel with truly tunable properties, hierarchical materials, extremely efficient thermoelectrics, arbitra... (read more)
Another framing is that X only works on easy-to-justify “lean ideas.” Which is entirely rational from a business perspective. So maybe it’s less / not just naïveté but simply an inability to legibly justify an idea. You could call that naive I suppose.
https://benjaminreinhardt.com/efficiency <— also inspired by talking to Astro 😂
I suspect that for situations where you want millions of the exact same thing, 3D printing will never replace high volume standardized manufacturing.
However, you could imagine a world where additive manufacturing does become much cheaper and faster to the point where many more things are made with subtle customizations, or made on premise, etc. New paradigms almost never replace the old thing directly, but take over by changing the way things are done and measured.