Five Material and Technological Revolutions of the Coming Planetary Phase Shift
Discussion
Nafeez Ahmed:
"Civilisations behave like other living systems. They grow, mature, break down, and either reorganise into a new form or collapse. We are in the breakdown stage – a moment when the way societies generate energy, move people and goods, feed themselves and process information is coming apart, even as a new way of doing all of that is being born in its shadow.
Five sectors of the global economy are crossing into new configurations at the same time. Each on its own would be a generational story. Together, they reshape everything.
Energy – Solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are now the cheapest source of electricity on the planet, on a cost curve that has been stable for two decades. Since 2011, onshore wind costs have fallen 59%, offshore wind 61%, solar 89% and batteries 83%. Some 84% of new global power generation in 2023 was renewable. Two trillion dollars a year now flows into clean technology investment – double the amount going into fossil fuels.
Transport – Electric vehicles, and behind them autonomous vehicles, are following the same cost curve. The internal combustion engine is heading the way of the horse and cart.
Food – Precision fermentation and cellular agriculture – using engineered microbes to produce proteins and fats at scale – are projected to make protein production five to 10 times cheaper than industrial animal agriculture by 2035. As the think tank RethinkX has documented, industrial livestock is heading for the same collapse that wiped out the kerosene-lamp industry in a decade. Up to 2.7 billion hectares of freed land could become available for rewilding, regenerative farming and carbon drawdown.
Information – This is the part Blair has noticed. AI is following a much steeper cost curve. The cost to train a model such as GPT-3 fell from $4.6 million in 2020 to a projected $30 by 2030. What Blair has missed is what AI is connected to.
Materials – Advanced materials, 3D printing, robotics and circular-economy chemistry are converging into a different industrial base that uses far less mining, land and brute-force extraction. The Congolese cobalt mine belongs to a world on its way out.
These are five threads of a single story. Cheap clean electrons make precision fermentation viable. AI optimises the grid that carries those electrons. The grid powers the AI. Autonomous electric vehicles become moving batteries that stabilise the grid. New materials make the batteries lighter, cheaper and recyclable. The loop closes.
Together, these revolutions amount to what physicists call a phase transition – a system flipping from one form into a fundamentally different one, the way water flips into steam."