Memes of Production

The week before the walkman was invented, someone was looking at the portable cassette player that was the size of a Chemistry textbook sold by Sony and saying "maybe we could take out the VU meters and the DSLR mic jacks and run it on AAs?"

The materials science and engineering principles we have now are so well understood that, without discovering a fifth phase of matter or a cheap way to make graphene or something like that, I don't see a revolution coming from STEM. If something sucks today, it's because of political or economic reasons, not engineering ones. We lower nuclear powered robots onto the surface of Mars using autonomous rocket cranes. We can engineer whatever the fuck we want. You look at Star Trek, and we don't have holography, matter replicators, matter teleportation or faster than light travel and that's basically it. Which one of those are you working on?

We're not going to get a phone that does something they don't already do, because the manufacturers would rather remove than add features. You might get one whose battery holds marginally more power per gram or charges marginally faster because they found a way to make a slightly different Lithium compound economically at scale.