Do you know what a cozy chair at Stanford, a patent for 20 years ahead, and a lifetime grant from the NSF have in common? Exactly—the desire to change nothing. Why bother? The bread is already buttered, topped with caviar, the competition has been squeezed out by copyright laws and NDAs, and any new idea is a risk that your beautiful, multi-year body of work might become obsolete even before it hits the pages of Nature. Therefore, when yet another overfed professor curls his lip at a new technology, it’s not “weighted scientific skepticism,” but simply the instinct to preserve a comfortable spot.
A case that should be tattooed on the forehead of every skeptic: EUV lithography. In the mid-1980s, Japanese engineer Hiroo Kinoshita from NTT became the first in the world to produce an image using extreme ultraviolet light and reported it at a meeting of the Japan Society of Applied Physics in 1986. The reaction from the room? To quote Kinoshita himself: “The audience was extremely skeptical. However, my faith did not change.” During the same period at Bell Labs, Aubert Wood and Bill Sylfvast tried to push the same idea in the US—and received an “extremely negative reaction” from reviewers: they claimed that even if every component were assembled, the system would be so complex that its uptime would be “negligibly small.” Now look at 2026. Every chip in your smartphone, every graphics card, every AI accelerator—all of it is made on machines that use the exact same EUV lithography that the mainstreamers laughed at. What would have happened if Kinoshita had listened to his “esteemed colleagues” and gone to teach optics to freshmen?
Now let’s move to the Ukrainian trenches. Remember how back in 2020, serious men from military academies chuckled at the idea of FPV drones? “Toys for children,” “unserious weapons,” “real war is tanks and artillery.” Military science is generally one of the most conservative swamps on the planet—careers there are built over decades, and you certainly don’t get patted on the back for “unserious ideas.” But in 2022, when the AFU faced a question of physical survival, it suddenly turned out that a dirt-cheap FPV drone with a shaped-charge warhead could take out a million-dollar tank. And the conservative soldiers, for whom all this was “not according to regulation” just yesterday, turned enthusiast home-builds into an entire branch of service in a year and a half. Because the alternative was to die. And death is an excellent motivator to cast aside corporate pride and take what works.
The pattern is simple: technology is not pushed forward by those who are “doing fine.” Technology is pushed forward by those who have a choice between “accepting the new” and “dying” (metaphorically or literally). So let’s list some categories of people who are truly desperate:
– Startuppers with no money. They have nothing to lose but their over-commits. That’s why garage teams, not IBM’s R&D departments, give birth to the things that change industries.
– Fighting armies of the weaker side. Ukraine with drones, Mujahideen with Stingers, Finns with Molotov cocktails. The stronger side always has the temptation to “crush with mass,” while the weaker side only has their brains.
– Scientists from the “wrong” countries and institutes. When you can’t get an NSF grant simply because you aren’t from the “right” laboratory, you are forced to make a breakthrough just to be noticed at all. Half of the Nobels in the last 30 years went to people who were first dismissed by the mainstream.
– Patients with incurable diseases. The most desperate drivers of biohacking and DIY medicine. They literally have nothing to lose, so they are the first to test gene therapy from a garage.
– Victims of domestic violence in third-world countries. When you have no option to turn to the police or social services against an abusive father, the covert addition of drugs to food to enhance a violence inhibitor no longer seems like some kind of psychosis.
The conclusion? If you want to see the future—look at those who have no choice. They are the true engine of progress. And the “esteemed experts” will catch up in about 15 years—once the technology can be used to defend another dissertation and they can quietly live until retirement.
P.S. Hiroo Kinoshita, by the way, lived to see it. And let’s hope that he sometimes smiles cunningly while reading ASML’s annual reports.
