[hbrav]

I'm a Brit who has worked in finance and AI. I honestly want to move into building hardware. My background is physics, I want to build things that make the world better. But the businesses just seem absent. One of the UK's most exciting hardware projects was Reaction Engines, and they went bankrupt recently.

I really want to know what we can do to fix this. As a country, we aren't building things that people want. Which means we are less powerful.

[heeton]

Same. I'm in the UK, I've been a software dev for a long time (with forays into physical consumer products, not electronics/hardware).

I tinker with robotics, rpis, embedded tools, and the potential _power_ there is huge. But I never hear or see of jobs or opportunities (in the ballpark compensation of software).

[pjc50]

> As a country, we aren't building things that people want.

The key distinction is between "what people want", "what people are prepared to pay for", and "what the people with all the money really want to buy".

The huge success of gatcha games which understand the economic inequality among their audience is important. Most of the free users are effectively there as an audience for the few whales who pay for the whole thing.

Similarly, startups are not so much about serving unmet needs as about fishing for whale VCs, of which there are very few and all searching in the same pond of Silicon Valley. They in turn want whale companies: a mere profitable business isn't enough, it has to be world-dominating.

The financial sector makes a lot of money because it serves the customers who have the money.