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 order effects are how we make things and the stuff we make those things from (ie. materials and manufacturing)
These technologies require systems research, which in turn needs more coordination than academic incentives provide but is still too uncertain for startups.
Unsurprisingly, that’s the strategy we’re pursuing at Speculative Technologies.
That being said, I’m not a fan of some sort of global prioritization of funding. While in practice everybody must make it, I think that the best thing for one person to spend towards might not be the same as for another person.
I do think on the margin additional money towards startups or small projects (<$100k) isn’t as helpful as pooling money together with other people to enable a discretely larger or longer project. That could take the form of giving one person ~10 years of guaranteed funding, enabling a team of ~5 people over two or three years, or building a serious piece of infrastructure for a group of weirdos.
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.