Since the 1970s, following the development of the Standard Model, physics has entered a period of relative dormancy. While incremental progress continues, we have yet to witness another groundbreaking revolution similar to those of the early 1900s. This stagnation is not merely an academic concern, but has profound implications for our society and technological capabilities. We find ourselves trapped in a vicious cycle: progress in fundamental physics and technological advancement in the physical world are deeply interdependent, each inhibiting the other's growth.
As a result, we find ourselves living in a world functionally similar to that of the mid-20th century.
We’ve been tricked into thinking we live in a radically different world, not because the hardware has changed, but because the software we consume has transformed dramatically. The advent of version control systems like Git in the early 2000’s revolutionized collaborative development, allowing thousands of developers to work concurrently on complex problems at exponentially higher velocity. In shortening the development lifecycle, these paradigm shifts brought forward meta-systems like the cloud which has democratized access to vast computational resources, enabling startups and individuals to build and scale applications at rapid velocity. These meta systems now power the same infrastructure that underpinned deep learning and this past wave of technological progress.
The American Government is, unfortunately, mostly to blame for our lack of progress in the physical world as they have destroyed domestic industrialization and the manufacturing sector over the last 50 years. The U.S. built up the greatest industrial manufacturing base in the world during World War 2 because the government poured funding into the mouths of manufacturing industrials using their technology to build dual-use production lines for commercial and defense interests. Subsidization of these industrials in order to scale up our defense efforts was the biggest driving factor for the U.S. starting its reign as a lasting superpower.
After the end of World War 2, the American divested from industrial funding into financial institutions that were orthogonal to actually building meaningful technology. The first venture capital firm, NSF, and DARPA were all started on the premise of funding companies trying to apply wartime technology to peacetime. In doing so, the primes that won the U.S. the war saw the total percentage of DoD funding drop all the way down to 6% today and have been left out to dry by the government. Factories have been shut down, jobs have been outsourced to China, and critical knowledge has been lost.
As a result of this resource and knowledge bleed, the primes are suffering. This doesn't just weaken our overall industrial and manufacturing capabilities, but actively threatens our national security. Raytheon recently violated ITAR by sending blueprints of fifth-generation fighter jets and missiles to China, Russia, Iran, and more. Raytheon preemptively committed $1B to fight whatever lawsuits came from their actions, but only ended up getting slapped on the wrist with a $200M fine. Sending blueprints to our adversaries is outright horrible for national security, but is not even close to the biggest issue we have to deal with as China has been stealing American technology for decades. China's GDP has been growing over 2x as fast as the U.S.'s and they have contributed 31% of global GDP growth over the past decade compared to the U.S.'s 9%. In addition to their rapid economic growth, their industrial capabilities have overtaken ours and they far outpace us now. China has 250x greater shipbuilding capabilities and far greater drone and missile production capabilities. We're in a pseudo-arms race with China, but instead of the race being nuclear warheads, it’s drones and artificial intelligence.
Our ability to address global challenges hinges on our capacity to push the boundaries of fundamental science and engineering across a vast problem set in hardware/atoms, specifically climate change, energy scarcity, manufacturing, and defense. AI is a rising tide, but it is clearly not the rising tide for critical industries in hardware. In order to revitalize the American industrial base, we must reform our academic institutions and reassess funding mechanisms, but just as crucially, the government must intervene to subsidize and financially incentivize careers in manufacturing and real engineering, redirecting talent away from the convenience of the gig economy (+ software) and toward rebuilding the backbone of real-world production. Bottoms-up we need to equip incumbents and new industrials with 21st century software and hardware tooling to give their laborers superpowers.
To be fair, it feels like parts of the U.S. government have started to wake up to this in the tail end of the Biden administration. The industrial policy push (CHIPS, the IRA’s incentives, and a renewed emphasis on domestic production for energy and defense supply chains) is directionally correct: you cannot have a credible national security posture if you don’t control the ability to build—at scale—chips, materials, munitions, ships, drones, and the industrial inputs that underpin all of it.
My hope is that a any future administration understands these problems as nonpartisan and foundational. This is not “jobs” rhetoric or a feel-good manufacturing revival story; it’s about reducing strategic dependence, rebuilding capacity, and restoring the feedback loop between science, engineering, and real-world production. If we fail to fix the industrial base, we’re not just choosing slower economic growth, we’re accepting further exponentially compounding national security risk.