At TechCrunch Disrupt, Three Technologies Hit Their Breaking Point at Once

By: Shashank Narayan

When I attended technology innovation conference TechCrunch Disrupt last month, I witnessed three technologies simultaneously reaching critical inflection points: AI, robotics, and space. Each is reshaping both economic opportunity and geopolitics in ways that will define the coming decades.

AI is on the verge of transforming far more than the software industry. The real opportunity lies in the $10 trillion services market, including software development, sales, HR, financial services, bookkeeping, and legal work. Recognizing this scale, massive investment has poured into the sector. Many describe this as a bubble, but we haven’t reached the ceiling yet. We still have a  shortage of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), major model improvements ahead and a landscape where many products still function as glorified chatbots rather than true automation.

At the same time, governments worldwide have awakened to AI's geopolitical implications. AI can dramatically improve and scale cyberattacks, by identifying exploiting vulnerabilities. There is also fear that if AI can improve itself then we may be faced with artificial general intelligence and eventually artificial superintelligence. We don’t yet know the risks and implications of such a development.  

Author Shashank Narayan (MMM '27) on right being interviewed at TechCrunch Disrupt

This existential risk is already changing how the U.S. government is approaching technology acquisition. Officials understand that with software-defined warfare, countries cannot afford traditional 17-to-20-year procurement cycles that lock in system vulnerabilities for decades. We're now seeing a shift toward agile, outcomes-based acquisition.

Space faces its own version of this pressure. The U.S. faces a shortage of launch pads and infrastructure. Meanwhile, countries worldwide are racing to build independent launch capabilities, understanding that access to space is critical for national sovereignty. Future commercialization may be the only path to reducing costs while maintaining strategic capability.

As AI transforms knowledge work, robots promise to transform physical labor. They're already embedded in manufacturing and logistics. What's changed is that large language models now enable robots to reason, plan, and make decisions through sophisticated frameworks like ReAct. This breakthrough opens doors to new applications, but the best opportunities like medical care, skilled trades, construction, community services, and driving present the hardest technical problems. Robots must navigate unstructured environments, make complex physical manipulations, and meet extraordinarily high safety standards.

The autonomous vehicle sector illustrates this well. Waymo now drives two million miles per week and is five times safer than human drivers. Despite this, deployment has been cautious. Over a decade of testing and still never on the highway.

Across all three technologies, the patterns are strikingly similar.  Each face infrastructure bottlenecks, each requires balancing deployment speed with safety. And each forces governments to rethink long-standing systems and assumptions. The nation that can master this convergence will define 21st century geopolitical power, but these technologies develop and deploy faster than any predecessors, giving nations less time to catch up and impo

sing steeper penalties for falling behind. Read More Technology Pieces: Is there an AI Bubble? The Wall-Less Empire: The Ilussion of Open AI Markets The SpaceX Diaspora: How Rocket Science is Transofmring Startup Culture