I'm not so sure. When a technological wave is big enough, it seems reasonable to start by asking: "what business can be built on this exponential wave?" This is contrary to standard YC advice (make something people want right away, don't create a solution in search of a problem) but empirically a lot of big companies started this way:
- Bezos saw the growth rate of the internet, spent a few months mulling over the question: "what business would make sense to start in the context of massive internet adoption" and came up with an online bookstore.
- OpenAI's ChatGPT effort really began when they saw Google's paper on transformers and decided to see how far they could push this technology (it's hard to imagine they forecasted all the chatbot usecases; in reality I'm sure they were just stoked to push the technology forward).
- Intel was founded on the discovery of the integrated circuit, and again I think the dominant motivation was to see how far they could push transistor density with a very hazy vision at best of how the CPUs would eventually be used.
I think the reason this strategy works is that the newness of a truly important technology counteracts much of the adverse selection of starting a new business. If you make a new To-Do iPhone app, it's unlikely that people have overlooked a great idea in that space over the last 10 years. But if lithium ion batteries only just barely started becoming energy dense enough to make a car, there's a much more plausible argument why you could be successful now.
Said another way: "why hasn't this been done before?" (both by resource-rich incumbents as well as new entrants) is a good filter (and often a limiting one) for starting a business. New technological capabilities are one good answer to this question. Therefore if you're trying to come up with an idea for a business, it seems reasonable to look at new technologies that you think are actually important and then reason backward to what new businesses they enable.
Two additional positive factors I can think of:
1. A common dynamic is that a new technology is progressing rapidly but is of course far behind traditional solutions at the outset. Thus it is difficult to find immediate applications, even if large applications are almost guaranteed in 10-20 years. Getting in early - during the borderline phase where most applications are very contrived - is often a big advantage. See Tesla Roadster (who wants a $100k electric sports car with 200mi range and minimal charging network?), early computers (what is the advantage of a slow machine with no GUI over doing work by hand?), and perhaps current LLMs (how valuable is a chatbot that frequently hallucinates and has trouble thinking critically in original ways)? It's the classic Innovator's Dilemma - we overweight the initial warts and don't properly forecast how quickly things are improving.
2. There is probably a helpful motivational force for many people if they get to feel that they are on the cutting edge of technology that interests them and building products that simply weren't possible two years ago.