it’s happening right now.
In the past, one genius was able to deliver several breakthroughs
now, if you don’t pour billions into something, there is almost no chance you achieve something big. Individual means nothing, thousands of people working in teams are needed to make any breakthrough possible.
And that is just the beginning. This was until now. Now it seems, that you not only need thousands of bright minds to get the breakthrough, but also decades of research. Like self driving cars that were announced 2005-2010 with huge investments from multiple companies, but it seems it will become reality in ~2030. Meanwhile, iPhone development started around 2002 and in 2010 smartphones were everywhere.
AI will also be the next big thing, but it’s also gonna be decades and billions before anything useful comes out of it.
We are only experiencing todays breakthroughs because billions are invested into the tech.
There will soon be a patent problems - if it took few years and few millions to develop new technology, nobody cares that you were copied two years later, as headstart was enough to get a good payoff. But if new technology takes decades of trial and error and billions of dollars, and after that you are copied in two years, investors will be hesitant to invest into long term projects