Ask HN: What industry or technology needs democratization?
I've been combing through the S&P 500 lately as a mental exercise to find which large, old corporations have a younger startup competitor that immediately springs to mind.
I think it would be fun to see what technologies we can think of that are very complex, expensive, and operaionally intensive, but could somehow be brought into an individual user's household.
Examples to get your brain thinking:
-Mainframe -> PC
-Iron foundries -> 3d printing
-Stock trading/charting went from the few to the many
-Internet/telecom went from household to mobile
Some ideas of mine that are probably being worked on already anyway:
-FPGAs and ASICs are still extremely capital intensive to fabricate but offer legitimate performance boosts, not easy to get hands on these like x86 cpus
-3d printing for all feasible materials
-Manned aircraft of any kind are still very expensive to obtain and permit despite the massive demand I imagine to avoid traffic and go to places with no roads. Drone hoverboards already exist!
-Wireless/radio networks are extremely expensive to build and operate, hence why in the US it is cartelized. Plans for balloons in space exist to deliver service to rural areas- what about local players operating their own ham networks?
-Robotic chefs, robotic farms
-RasPis are making beowulf cluters and super computing more economically feasible for the masses. Soon some of the largest information businesses built around search (google, expedia) and data (financial exchanges) may become services a person can do themselves in private.
-Diamond mining/sales. Heavily cartelized for little reason. Massive demand, world could use more ethical suppliers of alternatives