Thread by @Noahpinion

1/A rare @DKThomp post that I disagree with. There are good reasons for the slowdown in physical ("atoms") innovation in recent decades, and zero of them have to do with the choices made by Silicon Valley businesses.

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

2/First, much of the slowdown comes from the fact that for a long time we didn't discover new energy technologies.

Coal provided a huge boost to all sorts of physical technology. Oil provided another. But then we had a long period where we just kept using those things (or gas).

3/If you want to move things around, you need to produce and store energy, period.

Nuclear was supposed to be the next big primary energy source, and it would have, except safety concerns (justified or unjustified) basically scuttled it. And storing energy remains hard.

4/With battery technology we're finally getting a new pretty-good way of storing energy.

And, surprise surprise, we're getting physical innovation from it. Particularly drones:

cbinsights.com/research/drone…

5/Meanwhile primary energy generation finally has a big new revolutionary invention: solar. When that produces energy too cheap to meter (if only during parts of the day/year), that will drive more physical innovation too.

6/These big new technologies have followed the typical pipeline: Born in government-funded labs, implemented and made efficient by big companies with implicit or explicit subsidies, and then feeding into new business models designed by startups.

7/Batteries and solar will also allow our economies to be much more environmentally sustainable.

All that physical innovation and growth in the 19th and 20th century came at a cost - resource drawdowns, environmental destruction, sprawl.

8/Sustainability IS productivity. If your rich industrial civilization self-destructs in a few generations, you weren't as rich as you thought.

Much of current physical innovation is about increasing sustainability. That's real productivity.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

9/When you combine A) the temporary slowdown in energy technology, B) the shift from a focus on extensive growth to sustainability, and C) the one-time non-repeatable bump we got from discovering electricity, the slowdown in "atoms" innovation isn't hard to explain.

10/On top of this there are a few political considerations too. The fears about nuclear. Worries about noise and terrorism from flying cars. Those weren't necessarily forseeable to sci-fi writers in the 60s, so we shouldn't just yell "Where's my flying car!"...

11/U.S. tech companies *have* been driving some physical innovation - in batteries and electric cars, in solar, in drones, in reusable rockets, etc. Ultimately it's on government-funded labs to produce real breakthroughs, though.

12/But blaming slow physical innovation on U.S. tech companies ignores the rest of the world. Japan, China, and Europe aren't nearly as biased toward "bits" as the U.S. is. If companies could discover important new physical technologies, Toyota and Siemens would discover them.

13/Or if not Toyota and Siemens, then Chinese government-funded companies.

China has become the leader in drones: weforum.org/agenda/2018/09…

And doing pretty well in electric cars:
scmp.com/business/compa…

14/If you want the U.S. government to support companies to be able to scale in physical technologies to compete with rivals in China and elsewhere, you can make that argument, as Andy Grove did:

theatlantic.com/politics/archi…

15/There are probably no big new innovations in the world of "atoms" to be seized if only Silicon Valley would stop chasing ads and clicks and do some real science. This isn't the 19th century, startups don't invent the light bulb or the car in a garage anymore. We have labs.

16/If we want more physical innovation, we can try scaling companies that produce physical stuff, but we need to have the government spend a lot more on science:

jump-startingamerica.com

17/Instead of "tech" think "science". The key, as @patrickc and other have recognized, is not to make businesses better at finding ways to make money off of physical technologies (they're already really good at that!). It's to create more physical technologies.

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