The future is never hindered by a lack of technology

In just a few weeks, it will be ten years that I'm using the example of lab-grown meat to explain Moore's law and other derivative tech power laws.

Start in 2013 with a €250,000 small burger entirely grown in a lab from beef cells that requires a few months of work, and soon enough, the technology will be fast and cheap enough to get into a BigMac. Consider satellite technology, and you'll quickly see that the cost-efficiency to send a Kg of payload to an Earth's Lagrange point obeys an exponential law too. Same as the cost to produce a GW of electricity with solar panels or sequencing an entire human genome.

And yet, it often stops on its track after initial enthusiasm from early adopters. It keeps on being more and more efficient and affordable. Still, consumers cringe at the idea of artificial meat, astronomers are horrified by having hundreds of small artificial bright objects masking the night sky, and converting entire agricultural lands to solar doesn't seem such an obvious trade-off all of a sudden.

There's a constant underrated yet brutal bottleneck to the future of any tech, and it's not about it being finally delivered.

It's about its adoption.

For all the prescience and the money poured into pushing technologies ahead, we always end up short of understanding how to cross the chasm to the core market. No surprise that companies that have built such a powerful intuition on how and when to push technology to consumers are so powerful.