Reinventing Production Food Systems Energy and Transportation Information and Communications Materials and Resources
There’s no need to re-invent the wheel, RethinkX sums it up with clarity above all:
To understand where we’re at, how we got here and how we can create a healthier and more prosperous co-existence, we refer to the summation of RethinkX:
Production of materials will be transformed in the same way as food production, moving from a breakdown to a build-up model. Just like the chemical and petrochemical industries disrupted plant and animal-based materials and created a panoply of materials that did not exist in nature, so new technologies will disrupt extractive resources and chemical synthesis by creating a near-infinite array of materials with hitherto unheard of capabilities at a fraction of the cost and
resource utilization of extraction-based methods. Indeed, precision biology and PF are to the 21st century what the chemical and petrochemical industries were to the 20th century.
Together with CRISPR, additive manufacturing, and nanotechnologies, they will allow us to manipulate matter, energy, and information at smaller scales with far greater efficiency to build materials with combinations of properties that are stronger, lighter, and more flexible, all with minimal waste. As these technologies improve in both cost and efficiency, resource scarcity could become a thing of the past.
These material disruptions will not be a simple substitution of new materials for old. Modern materials will disrupt sectors and transform society in unexpected ways. For example, as the cost of solar PV drops below the cost of building materials (such as structural plywood), the line between construction and energy will blur.79 As builders use PV as building material (because it is cheaper), the effective cost of electricity will be zero or even negative.
The extraordinary improvements in the costs and capabilities of modern technologies mean that these sector disruptions are inevitable. Driven by powerful feedback mechanisms, these sectors and all others will be transformed through the 2020s and into the 2030s at a speed and scale that almost no present-day analysis predicts. Together, they represent a new system of production that could ultimately deliver a new age.