Why You Should Be Excited About Room-Temperature Superconductors

This past week, Korea released two papers claiming to have created a material (LK-99) that is superconductive at ambient temperatures. Before you get too excited, other scientists are still skeptical and cannot replicate their results fully. 

Hyun-Tak Kim—ScienceCast via TIME

Whether this ends up being the breakthrough (or not), there's reason to be excited about where this technology is going.

Semiconductors are the unsung heroes of the tech world, and they power everything from your smartphone to your car. A semiconductor, colloquially a "chip," is a substance that falls somewhere on the continuum between conductor and insulator. Manufacturers process silicon and other materials into semiconductors for all kinds of devices that rely on harnessing electricity for processing power. They're the underpinning of technology, and the 4th industrial revolution is built on the development of better and more connected chips.

That's just a semiconductor, though. What we're talking about now are superconductors. Superconductors have (you guessed it) very high electrical conductivity, allowing lossless or semi-lossless transfer. Up until now, superconductors were only possible at very specific temperatures. A common example of this technology is an MRI machine. 

In 2021, I posted an article on which technologies I thought would impact us most over the next 5-10 years.  

Before I get back to superconductors, here's what I wrote in 2021 about my top 5 technologies: 

1. Compute Power is going to increase, and the ability to brute force problems will create new possibilities. Quantum computing will become more important and likely available for commercial use. 
2. New and better AI platforms will transition AI from a tool for specialists to a commodity for everyday people - it won't just be Artificial Intelligence, it will be Amplified Intelligence (helping people make better decisions, take smarter actions, and continually measure and improve performance). 
3. Blockchain and authenticated provenance are going to become more important as the world becomes increasingly digital. Trust and transparency will be important as indelible logs are needed for finance, medical, armies, etc.
4. IoT will become more pervasive, enabling near digital omniscience as everything becomes a sensor that transmits data up the chain. 
5. Mass customization will become the norm instead of simple mass production as hardware, data, and AI continues to improve products, medicine, custom supplements, and just about everything else. 

 via - "What Technologies Are Going To Most Impact The Next 5-10 Years?" - August 2021

At that same time, the chip shortage massively affected the supply chain. My takeaway was that building and running intelligent AI systems takes a lot of computing power, and as more competitors enter the scene, the cost to play will increase, and so do the stakes of winning and losing. 

To a certain extent, the AI arms race has become a chip arms race. To nations, it is a cold-war-level existential threat.

Advancements in room-temperature superconductors would create a snowball of changes that would affect technology everywhere, and change the makeup of that chip arms race. 

Better conductivity means less heat dissipation, smaller wires, more efficient and faster movement, and smaller tools. That means your processors won't heat up, motors will be able to handle higher torque/weight, and it also becomes a step in making quantum processors a reality. More practically, it means better and longer-lasting batteries, significantly less waste, and a massive jump in robotics. It also means 50x-100x faster chips. 

You could argue it's the "holy grail" of material science. But, we haven't addressed the implications of those new technological possibilities. Electrical grids would be more efficient. Data centers would not only be cheaper but more efficient. And on the more sci-fi side of it, we could create superfast levitating trains which would travel with less friction. 

The chip arms race would still exist because human nature means we will always fight for the best technology and advantages. However, when new technologies are created, their predecessors get cheaper and more accessible. That means more people experimenting with better technology, which often leads to unexpected boons. 

Every technological advancement makes technology as a whole more accessible and prevalent. 

Whether this breakthrough ends up being scalable and sustainable is up for debate, but it's already a sign of progress. 

Onwards!