Yesterday's sci-fi becomes today's new toys
- sciart0
- Jun 23
- 1 min read
Excerpt: The world is on fire, and that’s giving some of the richest men the audacity of hope.
Hope that their billions, brains and brashness can usher in a new world filled with robot cars, killer drones and solar power. In other words: hard tech.
These sci-fi dreams—made popular by Elon Musk—have been building for some time. But they have become harder to ignore in the past month, with gambits from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey and Daniel Ek.
They’re all pouring money into efforts that a few years ago would have seemed like the stuff of science fiction but are now becoming very real. Their collective interest is giving hard tech a moment, not unlike the rush of investment and entrepreneurs to software with the debut of the iPhone and the rise of mobile computing.
The enthusiasm for hard tech is fueled, in large part, by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. It holds the eventual promise of greater autonomy for physical machines and new advances in science.
Today’s hard-tech moment, which is intertwined with the AI boom, presents the opportunity to change entrenched industries: defense, transportation, energy production and more. And with that, possibly create new winners.