Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Reindustrialize Conference
Tech giants now want to build for the physical world.
“Software is eating the world,” digital-tech pioneer Marc Andreessen proclaimed 15 years ago. American industries might once have been built out of steel, concrete and oil. But now, he wrote, digitally based companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google were “poised to take over large swathes of the economy.”
History, and the stock market, proved him right. In this century, our economy has seen a huge shift from businesses based in atoms, the physical materials that make up infrastructure and machines, to those made of electrons, the digital bits that comprise the virtual world. Just think of how digital movies streamed on Netflix have largely replaced giant rolls of celluloid projected in metroplexes.
Today, we are pivoting back. Software is still vital, many tech leaders say, but so is the ability to build things in the unforgiving, material world. Ambitious young engineers now aspire to build more than the next dating or food-delivery app. They’re designing electric aircraft, rockets and small nuclear reactors. Talk to today’s startup founders and investors and you will often hear something like, “I want to work in atoms, not just electrons.” Even AI, seemingly the ultimate electron-based industry, requires massive investments in chips, data centers and new power plants. Hardware is cool again.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor.