What advances in material science would have to occur for it to be as exciting to investors and average people as software? i.e. is the world of bits going to remain the dominant arena of novel creations for the next century?
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, arbitrarily long carbon nanotubes, etc.
If you forced me begrudgingly to make generalizations about average people, I’d point to the fact that people get excited when advances touch their lives: you could imagine everything from drastically cheaper electricity from room temperature superconductors, self-cleaning surfaces, items made from wood with drastically different properties …
What advances in material science would have to occur for it to be as exciting to investors and average people as software? i.e. is the world of bits going to remain the dominant arena of novel creations for the next century?
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, arbitrarily long carbon nanotubes, etc.
If you forced me begrudgingly to make generalizations about average people, I’d point to the fact that people get excited when advances touch their lives: you could imagine everything from drastically cheaper electricity from room temperature superconductors, self-cleaning surfaces, items made from wood with drastically different properties …