What needs to happen to make hardware easier

# What needs to happen to make hardware easier? ### Technology - Create more permissionless technologies* - Technologies that don’t need long supply chains - Manufacturing methods that are scalable by default (eg. Scale easily by parallelization)* - Automated machine tools* - Fewer black boxes - Telerobotics so people can cower across the world on hardware in the same way they can on software* - Much better simulations ### Institutional - Create more institutions focused on creating *scalable* technology* - More institutions where the people with experience scaling technology interact with people who are inventing it (see http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Prototyping+needs+manufacturing+in+the+room)* - Large funding sources that are risk tolerant without needing institutional venture capital return/timescale expectations. (Eg. no VC would have put in the money that Elon personally put into his companies early on and it would be far too much for angels) - Burn tech transfer offices to the ground - Unbundle new technology creation from academia and universities* - A lot of hardware innovations are pieces of a larger system. People building new kinds of hardware either need to reinvent that system from scratch *and* build a business around it *or* work with large, risk averse companies with small margins to integrate into their system. I’m not quite sure how to get around this but it might look like more advanced market commitments/other ways to pull capital from the future? ### Cultural - Pay hardware engineers better/make it a higher-status thing - More tolerance for funky new technology - More kids being exposed to taking things apart and putting them back together at an early age - More education that actually involves building physical stuff - A desire to trade off absolute optimization for reparability (eg. Wanting technology that is easy-to-fix instead of hard-to-break) - Getting rid of planned obsolescence and subscription-based business models for hardware - More cultural appreciation for the fact that scaling a technology often takes as much research as inventing it in the first place - A better understanding of how new atom-based technologies are created and get into the world (eg. move away from the Basic Science -> Applied Science -> Development linear model) - A realization that a lot of early hardware technology development creates public goods - ### Political - Less regulation on what you can do where (NEPA, zoning, etc) - Clearer rules on what you can and can’t do (in addition to fewer of those rules) - Either reduce the government’s near monopoly on pre-commercial research or change how the law encodes new technology development (see cultural point above) - Create more Shenzhens (physical places where the entire supply chain concentrates) - Rethink how IP works (I’m directly trying to work on the ones with asterisks and indirectly on the rest)  [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+needs+to+happen+to+make+hardware+easier) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+needs+to+happen+to+make+hardware+easier)