From Killer Drones to Robotaxis, Sci-Fi Dreams Are Coming to Life.

The world is on fire, and that’s giving some of the richest men the audacity of hope.

Hope that their billions, brains and brashness can usher in a new world filled with robot cars, killer drones and solar power. In other words: hard tech.

These sci-fi dreams—made popular by Elon Musk—have been building for some time. But they have become harder to ignore in the past month, with gambits from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey and Daniel Ek.

They’re all pouring money into efforts that a few years ago would have seemed like the stuff of science fiction but are now becoming very real. Their collective interest is giving hard tech a moment, not unlike the rush of investment and entrepreneurs to software with the debut of the iPhone and the rise of mobile computing.

The enthusiasm for hard tech is fueled, in large part, by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. It holds the eventual promise of greater autonomy for physical machines and new advances in science.

Today’s hard-tech moment, which is intertwined with the AI boom, presents the opportunity to change entrenched industries :

… defense, transportation, energy production and more. And with that, possibly create new winners.

This past week, for example, Ek, who created his fortune with streaming music service Spotify, turned his attention to drone technology. It’s an area that has taken on greater attention after high-profile drone attacks were used by Ukraine in Russia and by Israel in Iran.

Ek’s investment firm, Prima Materia, led a 600 million euro fundraising round, equivalent to $691.4 million, for Helsing, a German defense-tech startup developing AI drones. “There’s an enormous realization that it’s really now AI, mass and autonomy that is driving the new battlefield,” Ek told the Financial Times.

And Musk has said Tesla soon expects to begin public rides in the automaker’s robotaxis in Austin, Texas. If the chief executive pulls it off, it could be a huge step in the company’s pivot to robotics, which Musk has suggested could lead to humanoid robots outnumbering people…. Continue