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The way electronic Turing-complete machines resulted in a new industry segment with market leaders dedicated to vertical integrated products in the field is ver
by VLM 11y ago
The way electronic Turing-complete machines resulted in a new industry segment with market leaders dedicated to vertical integrated products in the field is very unusual.
Usually it happens a lot more like LASERs. There is no giant LASER segment of the economy. There are just lasers in barcode readers, medical gear, machine tools, lasers in robots, lasers in survey gear, lasers in hand held power tools, lasers in pointers, all manner of things not sold by LASER Inc a giant conglomerated manufacturer or even made by a LASER economic segment of dedicated LASER companies.
My gut level guess is Data Science will be more like LASERs and less like computers, as will nanotech.
Everyone will be doing nanotech, they'll just call it plain old ore refining, or plain old medical care, or plain old IC manufacturing, and they'll be no Nanotech Inc company or even market sector.
- graphene 11y agoThe counterargument is that as more and more industries start to do their engineering at the nanoscale (whether coming from above, as in materials and electronics, or from below as in biochemistry and pharmaceuticals), the physics of their systems will become more similar. This will cause their design rules to also become more and more similar, so it's plausible that you could end up with a small number of players possessing engineering expertise that can be applied to a very wide variety of sectors.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI don't think it's a counterargument, it's more a prediction for the late-game of manufacturing technology. For the mid-game, I suspect it will be like it's with chemistry, agriculture, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology nowadays - there is no unified sector encompassing all the areas above, but there are big companies, like Monsanto, 3M or DuPoint, doing all four at once, exploiting the relative similarities of the fields.