Materials and Manufacturing Underpin Civilization

Why is it so important for Speculative Technologies to focus on materials and manufacturing? Here’s the essay version of my talk from the first Progress Conference (video version here) where I try to lay out the thesis behind our focus more fully.

To be maximally provocative: the materials in the device you’re reading this on and the processes that create and assemble them are more important to progress than the smallpox vaccine.

When you think of technologies that “help people” or save the world” what comes to mind? For most people, it’s things like life-saving medicines, carbon sequestration, or answers to existential risks. But we can’t do any of those things without new technologies in materials (“stuff”) and manufacturing (“ways to turn stuff into things”).

Consider stainless steel. In addition to being useful for easy-to-clean utensils, cookware, and sinks, it’s what enables the syringes that deliver your vaccines, the homes for the e-coli that create insulin, and many medical implants. Stainless steel wasn’t widely available before 1915, after a long and winding process of science, invention, diffusion, and scaling.

Further back in time, the power loom made it so that instead of freezing to death, it’s more common for people have too many clothes; not to mention clothes that are softer and better designed than people could imagine in the past. Iron enabled us to cultivate so many more soils and make things like nails that we don't even think of as “something we once didn’t have the capability to make.” Bronze sickles enabled humanity to drastically increase the calories we had access to. The importance of materials and manufacturing predates written history: stone and our ability to manufacture tools out of it enabled us to spread across the world. There’s a reason we literally name eras after the materials.

This kind of progress is not inevitable. In the same way that the eradication of smallpox or near universal literacy required great undertakings and agentic people, so too does the creation of new paradigms in materials and manufacturing. If you want more progress, whether that looks like Dyson spheres, happy healthy people playing basketball with their grandkids, or some other form of flourishing you need to care a lot more about boring materials and grimy manufacturing.

Why Materials and Manufacturing are important

In a nutshell, the properties of the materials we can harness, along with our ability to