[beetwenty]

The sense I get from all of it is that there's a phase shift in technological progress occurring, not dissimilar to the 1970's one where we ceased seeing the bulk of disruptive developments occurring in vehicles and energy, and started seeing them in IT fields. That initial boom produced a lot of new product categories, and then successive decades saw a lot of consolidation and transformation away from nuts and bolts and simple efficiencies towards services and IP holdings and consumer marketing. And we know the nature of that market very well today since everyone present has breathed in it for most or all of our lives at this point.

But the nature of the next market is, of course, much harder to glimpse. Like looking into pier glass, it takes effort to get a fragmented view of things. It's not as easy as Thiel's view: AI and surveillance, for example is more broadly authoritarian than it is any specific ideology. And infrastructure often leapfrogs stages in the developing world, and that can be true of a developed country like the U.S. too.

There's plenty of good work being done quietly in the current market. The word I'd pay the most attention to is sustainability, though. It's been more-or-less entirely a marketing term for decades, never delivering on the promise, but then, often it takes a while for the products to catch up to the marketing.