Technologies triumph over commodities sometimes
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January 19 2034
There was a time when agricultural and mineral commodities were the source of most economic value, and the favourite investment choice. Precious metals, crude oil, coal and copper were sought-after minerals, and actively traded on the spot and futures markets.
Bulk commodities such as maize, barley and wheat were on the exchanges, with daily price fixes.
Top companies in the S&P 500 were in oil, mining and railways.
But that was before the digital age, and the exponential rise of tech that reinvented every sector. Now the top companies are Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nvidia and Tesla. And SpaceX. With artificial intelligence (AI) supercharging scientific discoveries and bleeding-edge technologies, whole industries have been made obsolete. New industries have been created and every major firm is a tech business.
Gold, silver and titanium have been disrupted by graphene and novel alloys. Aluminium has been superseded by carbon composites and natural gas displaced by synthetic hydrogen. Former “critical minerals”’ such as lithium and rare earths face competition from graphene oxides and synthesised complex compounds. Why dig up tonnes of ore for a few grams of cobalt, when you can make something better in the lab?
Solar and battery tech has killed coal and oil. Heat wells are the new source of baseload generation, and gigawatt conductor cables are the new energy pipelines. Heat pumps are the new boilers and induction ovens the new furnaces. And AI-powered vertical farms produce 400 times more food per acre. Which only goes to show that resource companies that exploit technology get to stay in the game.
One commodity is booming in this hi-tech age. Though long displaced by lasers and optical fibres for data transmission, copper is the conductor of choice for everything from electric car motors and chargers to solar farms to grid interconnects. In the new world of electric everything, copper is red gold. /First published on Mindbullets January 18 2024
LIVING ROBOTS DO NANOTECH CHORES December 17 2024
Almost five years ago, scientists created the first living robots, called xenobots, from tiny blobs of frog stem cells. Most importantly, they discovered through simulation on a supercomputer that they could program the xenobots by redesigning their physical format. Their shape determined their function.
Now the convergence of biotech, nanoscale engineering and semiconductor design has given us the means to make atomically precise machines, and scale them up using biosynthesis. Just like cultured cells in a Petri dish, or growing pure crystals; they are identical copies of the original.
Using genetic tools such as CRISPR, we can program yeast cells to make diesel instead of beer; and using nanotech we can make solar panels just a hundred atoms wide — then copy them a billion times. Building a computer chip from the bottom up is exponentially more efficient in terms of both energy and materials; the same goes for electric car batteries.
Forget 3D printing, though it still has its place in heavy industry. The new world of xenobots and molecular machines is filled with assembly lines too small to see with the naked eye, where the “workers” are part organism and part machine, churning out feedstocks and components in abundance.
It’s not just cheap computers and batteries. Living machines are providing solutions for energy and food security, environment and health, and making innovative materials for aerospace. Soon we’ll be able to customise nanobots to do preventive maintenance — inside our bodies! The sky’s the limit when we can arrange molecules — and DNA — any way we want. /First published on Mindbullets December 17 2020