What Comes After Big Tech?

The next frontier of innovation isn't AI.

This is an updated version of a piece originally published by me on DeviantArt in 2021. It felt like a topic worth revisiting.

The King is Dead. Long Live the King. In 1959 two engineers at Texas Instruments, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, changed the world in the most profound way since the internal combustion engine. Their invention of the integrated circuit, the microchip, changed every aspect of military and consumer technology in ways no one prior to that moment could have imagined. In the 66 years that have followed, the microchip has been the absolute center of innovation, from guided missiles, GPS, digital cameras, personal computers, smart phones, and all the services enabled by the internet. The microchip is an enabling technology, the Core Technology of an era. It has changed our entire world, and brought all human knowledge into our pockets... and it is not going to get significantly better for the foreseeable future. The silicon microchip has become mature technology, like internal combustion or electricity, and innovation will come much slower from here on out.

This is going to be the most bitter pill for entrepreneurs and investors to swallow in the coming decade: the days of digital computing being high-tech are over. Transistors have been shrunk to near their theoretical limit, innovation in software has thus slowed to a crawl, and with that productivity in the United States has declined over the last decade and will continue to do so for at least the remainder of the 2020s. The iPhone was the last significant innovation in digital computing, and it is now more than a decade old. New innovations have been little more than improved services competing for existing markets, and genuine attempts to push the envelope of digital technology have largely hit dead ends. Wearable devices, VR, and "Internet of Things" have been little more than novelties, while Crypto and Large Language Model AI have been to Big Tech what the Concord and the Cadillac Eldorado were for internal combustion: huge money pits trying to restart the high yields on investments of the past. We are at the beginning of a period of consumer technology stagnation, another Malaise Era, and the futility of trying to push the envelope of digital innovation is becoming obvious to ordinary people.

So the question is: What's next? What is the next revolution in technology that will rearrange our world? Trying to imagine the next revolution in 2025 is not unlike someone in early 1970s trying to understand how a room sized computer your bank uses to transfer account information between other banks is going to lead to you being able to watch live videos on devices small enough to fit in your pocket. To have any hope of seeing where the next revolution will come from, we must look to past cycles of innovation and see how previous Core Technologies emerged.

Core Technology

Core Technologies are inventions that are at the center of every innovation of their era. The microchip didn't just bring you social media, it brought you the human genome project, the moon landing, along with virtually every innovation in every industry since it was commercialized. When we look at core technologies, we’ll see they each follow a similar cycle of development, and each fundamentally changed the nature of human existence. Puddling Iron made inexpensive high quality tools readily available to the masses, including complex machines that would create the 18th century textile industry, and with it the concept of a "job" as the main source of personal income. High pressure steam engines defined much of the innovation of the 19th century and created a world where humans could traverse great distances without the aid of the wind or livestock, and with that more interconnected societies that in turn gave rise to large colonial empires and nationalism. Electricity took back the night, made possible instantaneous communication across the world, and made cities more livable by eliminating coal burning heat sources. Internal combustion brought the world closer together with better ships, airplanes, and the automobile, which in turn compelled us to divide our societies into suburbs, and spawned everything from the tourist industry to McDonalds. All of these technologies completely revolutionized our world, and each was radically different from the last, but by no means possible without the innovations that came before. And all followed a development cycle that propelled them forward.

The Core Technology Cycle

The cycle of development to implementation and maturation of technology tends to follow a familiar pattern from the laboratory, to heavy investment and R&D by the government out of national interest, before eventually entering the consumer market. The time between each phase varies between innovations, but in general the following is a good guideline for understanding the cycle:

• Lab - A core technology often starts out as little more than theory, not yet possible to implement because other technologies have not yet been developed. Basic research often begins centuries before the technology has any practical application.

• Government - Technology often finds its first applications in matters of national interest. This does not only mean military applications, NASA was just as much an early source of R&D funding for the microchip as the Defense Department. At this point rapid development occurs often with near exclusive use by the government. For much of modern history, this phase in a new technology's evolution lasts about 20 years, with limited implementation to non-military users like financial institutions and the super-rich, who can cover the cost of being early adopters.

• Consumer - After about a generation of use by governments and a handful of private institutions, technology transfer inevitably occurs, be it through university grants, government tech-transfer programs, or collaborative R&D projects with private businesses. At this point we can see smaller phases within this Consumer phase:

  • Market Entry - An explosion of applications from private businesses and universities typically lasting around 20-30 years as a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the new core technology. This phase includes continued government R&D, but also increased investment from private companies to make steady improvements and stay competitive.

  • Commoditization - Eventually improvements begin to slow down as the technology reaches its material and physical limits, along with growing cost constraints to push those limits. What innovations that do come forward are less groundbreaking than in the previous phase, and less efficient innovators begin to fall away as the technology reaches a point of commoditization.

  • Maturation - Once the technology has reached a point of maturation, usually after about ten to twenty years after the end of the boom, productivity begins to decline. Investments in new companies yields diminishing rates of return, if any return at all for entrepreneurs. New applications seldom reach a mass market. It is at this point you get a "Concord;" something that solves a problem only for the wealthy, and even then is in no way worth the money. After the Concord moment there is a contraction in investment, followed by a point of genuine maturation, in which a more practical product emerges that sets the tone for a less innovative era, like the Chrysler K-Car. Innovations still occur, but less to create new applications, and more to improve existing applications or increase efficiency, and to lower costs for either consumers or manufactures.

The Next Revolution

In 1990 the US Government launched the Human Genome Project, the largest and most concerted effort yet to map human DNA. A working draft of the human genome was first published in 2001, and a more complete draft in 2003, formally concluding the project. It wasn't until May of 2021 that the last 5 gaps of rDNA were found and published, albeit with 0.3% containing some errors, and the Y chromosome was only fully sequenced in 2023. The completion of the Human Genome Project launched a wave of biotech projects either by or on behalf of major governments. In the 21 years since the working draft of the human genome was published, gene sequencing technologies have gotten faster and cheaper with each passing year. What took 13 years and $2.7 Billion, now takes about a day and costs about $600. CRISPR Cas9 has revolutionized genetic research and engineering techniques, while mRNA technology allowed Moderna to stand up a COVID vaccine in just 2 days with a mandate from the US government.

Today Biotech is a lot like computing in the early 1970s, and the first versions of products and applications that will be commonplace in 20 years are entering service. But these application are still used almost entirely by a few major corporations and the government. Thus, I think we can confidentially say that we'll see the first genuine biotech products available to the mass market come online very soon. This would be the equivalent of the Altair 8800, a revolutionary technical achievement, but used primarily by enthusiasts and a handful of early adopters. What will eventually follow will be the biotech equivalent of the Apple II or the Model T, a general purpose product that will enable mass market adoption to people with little to no formal education or training.

As biotech kicks off its era of Market Entry, most people will still see biotech as either novel or mysterious, but not really approachable, and in many cases a sign of the class divide. Think of how cars and airplanes were seen in the 1910s, or computers in the 1980s, or indeed steam engines in the 1840s. It won't be until about the 2040s that we'll see a true democratization of biotech and genuinely new services and applications as the generation of tinkerers and workers in the 2020s and 2030s matures to become managers and project leads. By then the list of applications will be truly transformative, and I could not even hope to attempt a guess at even half of the new products and services that will emerge.

New technology impacts more than just what products are available, it also impacts society and culture. The automobile defined economic growth from 1915 to about the 1960s in the US, but it also defined our image of labor, the changing ways we lived, and of course how we waged war. The same can be said of the microchip: it began as a revolutionary piece of technology that entered the mass market in the late 1970s and has defined virtually every innovation and aspect of market growth and the culture. Cyberpunk fiction would not exist if computers were not viewed with curiosity and suspicion in the 1970s and 80s. "Hacking" would not have become the deus ex machina for every action movie for the last 40 years without the microchip. Even the most basic idea of labor shifting from somebody with a greasy shirt to a person in a cubical or at home staring at a monitor owes its birth to the microchip. Biotech will be as transformative, initially impacting the healthcare industry much as the microchip impacted the financial sector. Where computers made our modern idea of the stock market possible, biotech will disrupt everything we know about healthcare right down to the idea of having to go to a "Hospital" to seek medical treatment. The same innovations that made the COVID vaccines possible will continue to mature to the point where small clinics will be able to diagnose disease with extreme accuracy and provide tailor made vaccines, either in-house or via companies with maybe a few dozen people. Its not difficult to assume that this technology could one day become entirely automated and portable.

A World Without Meat

Before I close this, I offer one scenario, outlining what I believe will be the most transformative early use-case for biotech: engineered cyanobacteria (algae). Several startups have already developed products made using engineered algae; all fairly simple alternatives to chemically derived products, but the next phase is just around the corner. Imagine a world where proteins are derived from algae grown in huge greenhouses in the desert, fed by only CO2 and salt water. The algae is dried out and plant based protein powder engineered to taste like beef, pork, or chicken could be then stored indefinitely before being shipped, rehydrated, and formed into processed roles or printed cuts of meat.

Unable to compete with the new synthetic meat industry, ranchers sell off their land, and farms in the great plains similarly sell as animal feed becomes nearly worthless giving rise to social unrest and a bio-luddite movement from rural communities. The Great Plains and other areas devoted to producing animal feed either switch to cereals consumed primarily by humans (a fairly small portion of agriculture compared to animal feed), or are left to be reclaimed by nature. Our image of the Plains changes from one of endless rows of Corn to one of meadows and small stands of trees. Politicians in subsequent years have to deal with the issue of reintroducing predators to Kansas and Nebraska to control the booming Deer and feral Pig populations. Even dairy cows are eventually left to go the way of the dodo as engineered algae replicates the chemical process to produce milk. Eventually, animal rights activists get their wish and it becomes a cultural taboo to consume real meat. The few species of cow that don't go extinct due to lack of demand for beef are kept either as pets or by religious communities that see synthetic meat as sinful.

Coastal land, particularly in the Sunbelt becomes the agricultural hub of the world as companies take advantage of easy access to cheap energy (both for cooling and heating their buildings but also for photosynthesis) to produce proteins and ship them over water. Huge grain silos are partially repurposed to dump tonnes of protein powder onto ships and trains, and those nations once defined as lifeless deserts become agriculture hubs (if they aren't experiencing any political instability). For America, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Mexico, their deserts become some of the most productive agricultural land in the world. For Europe and East Asia, this means either import dependency or setting up colonies in North Africa and Arabia, and a new era of military conflict.

The biotech age is going to be upon us, sooner than you might think. And the applications will absolutely change everything about how we live. There will be overhyped solutions, there will be people scared or ignorant of basic details of the technology for a time, but rest assured it is coming.