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Tag Archives: innovation
June 2018 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- The Trump administration is proposing to subsidize coal-burning power plants. Meanwhile the long-term economic damage expected from climate change appears to be substantial. For one thing, Hurricanes are slowing down, which means they can do more damage in any one place. The rate of melting in Antarctic ice sheets is accelerating.
- The U.S. has slipped behind China in life expectancy.
- 60% of Syrians have been displaced by the war.
Most hopeful stories:
- The emerging understanding of cognitive bias could allow human beings to actually learn from our mistakes.
- A new estimate indicates that “stranded fossil fuel assets” could mount up to global wealth losses on the order of $1-4 trillion. Oil companies are starting to look ahead to a possible peak and decline in demand. In some states, natural gas companies are fighting the nuclear power industry, which is already in a tailspin. Elsewhere, offshore wind power may now be cost-competitive with natural gas. And in absolutely shockingly hopeful news, the U.S. Congress may have a realistic, bipartisan plan for a carbon tax.
- New York City is banning styrofoam.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- Explicit taxes to fund wars were the norm in the U.S. right up to the Vietnam war.
- In technology news, Google and Airbus are considering teaming to build a space catapult. The Hyperloop might be a real thing between Chicago’s downtown and airport.
- Just under 0.1% of migrants crossing the U.S. border are members of criminal gang such as MS-13. About half of border crossers are from Mexico while the other half are mostly from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Some are fleeing violence or repression, while others are simply looking for economic opportunity.
compact disks pronounced dead
Best Buy has stopped selling CDs. This technology would seem to finally be dead.
space catapults
A space catapult is a theoretical alternative to rockets, and apparently Airbus and Google are interested.
Rather than using propellants like kerosene and liquid oxygen to ignite a fire under a rocket, SpinLaunch plans to get a rocket spinning in a circle at up to 5,000 miles per hour and then let it go—more or less throwing the rocket to the edge of space, at which point it can light up and deliver objects like satellites into orbit.
top 20 metros for venture capital
This post has an interesting list of the top 20 metro areas in the world for venture capital investment. San Francisco and San Jose together vacuum up about 25%. Add LA and San Diego, and California gets over 30%. Boston and New York add up to a respectable 12%. After that it drops off quickly, with the major global cities tending to grab 1-2% or so. Austin does a great job marketing itself, but only adds up to 1.5%. Big cities in China and India are only grabbing in the 1% range, but presumably the money may go farther there. My home city of Philadelphia grabs around 1% which seems underwhelming, but at least we crack the list when there are a plenty of major cities (Miami, Atalnta, Houston, Rome, anywhere in Europe outside London and Paris, the entire continents of South America and Africa?) that do not.
May 2018 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- The idea of a soft landing where absolute dematerialization of the economy reduces our ecological footprint and sidesteps the consequences of climate change through innovation without serious pain may be wishful thinking.
- Lake Powell is in increasingly deep (actually shallow, ha ha) trouble.
- The American Academy of Pediatrics says climate change is already killing children.
Most hopeful stories:
- There are some new ideas for detecting the potential for rapid ecological change or collapse of ecosystems.
- Psychedelics might produce similar benefits to meditation.
- Microgrids, renewables combined with the latest generation of batteries, are being tested in Puerto Rico.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- I learned about the stag hunt, a cousin of the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory.
- Uber Air is looking a little more real. There are other ideas for autonomous urban helicopters too.
- Connecticut is the latest U.S. state to join the National Popular Vote Compact.
April 2018 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- According to a UN-affiliated study, “Conflict will remain a major driver of food insecurity in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, while drought is likely to worsen crop and livestock output, increasing food insecurity in countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya”
- BREAKING NEWS: Global warming is cause by increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Seriously.
- That big California earthquake is still coming.
Most hopeful stories:
- There was a slate of hopeful climate news this month (I couldn’t bring myself to pick just one, or even just three of these.) Long-promised smaller, safer, more modular nuclear reactors are starting to come to market. Maybe nuclear waste can be stored safely and cheaply in deep horizontal tunnels. There’s a new X-Prize for turning carbon emissions into useful products. Coal really is losing out to renewables. And Exxon may eventually pay for its climate crimes.
- It’s possible that your brain could be scanned at a high resolution so that your consciousness can be revived far in the future. The down side is that scientists would have to kill you first to do that with anything similar to current technology. Well, technology does have a tendency to improve.
- There are free online resources to teach general systems theory in middle school.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- There’s a phone app that can identify plants and animals in your back yard.
- A space hotel could open as soon as 2020.
- Dog food and people food made from synthetic meat are here.
March 2018 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- One reason the U.S. blunders into war repeatedly is that it does not do a good job of analyzing the motives of its adversaries.
- International investors may be losing confidence in the U.S. dollar. And a serious financial crisis in China is a possibility, although China is also trying to become a “cyber superpower“.
- One reason propaganda works is that even knowledgeable people are more likely to believe a statement the more often it is repeated.
Most hopeful stories:
- One large sprawling city could be roughly the economic equivalent of several small high-density cities. This could potentially be good news for the planet if you choose in favor of the latter, and preserve the spaces in between as some combination of natural land and farm land.
- The problems with free parking, and solutions to the problems, are well known. This could potentially be good news if anything were to be actually done about it. Self-parking cars could be really fantastic for cities.
- The coal industry continues to collapse, and even the other fossil fuels are saying they are a bunch of whining losers. And yes, I consider this positive. I hope there aren’t too many old ladies whose pensions depend on coal at this point.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- Some people really do win the lottery more than they should.
- You can buy a computerized chicken coop or cider maker.
- You can do network analysis or call Matlab in R.
the singularity is near…in China
This article in Economist says China wants to be a
“cyber superpower”—one that, within a dozen years, will lead the world in artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, semiconductors and the coming “5G” generation of mobile networks, not to mention synthetic biology and renewable energy.
This is a pretty good list of technologies of the future. Although they clearly have some potential military applications, they have many more civilian ones where everyone can gain at the same time. Personally I don’t think investing in the technologies of the future should be thought of as a zero sum game. It is more a question of whether the U.S. wants to keep up with its current peer group of the most advanced nations with the highest quality of life, a group it is still part of but in the middle of the pack and slipping toward the back, rather than out in front. If the idea of competing to lead in these technologies spurs the U.S. to action, that is okay with me. The article does have a few policy prescriptions:
Better that it should develop a broader policy to strengthen its technosystem, argues Ms Kania of CNAS. Instead of making it as closed as the Chinese one, which would seem to be Mr Trump’s preference, it needs to engage with allies such as Europe, Japan and Korea to spread open standards. It needs to build a shared digital infrastructure, such as common pools of key data for things like self-driving cars. And it needs to rediscover what has made it great in technology: investing in both basic and applied research and being an attractive destination for highly qualified immigrants (a requirement which, it must be admitted, the Trump administration is not well placed to meet).
I’ll offer a few more along these lines, if the U.S. would like to be a “cyber-superpower” a dozen years from now:
- Small businesses and startups innovate, and they challenge lazy established big businesses to innovate. It needs to be much, much easier to start a business anywhere in the United States. It is not necessarily taxes and regulations, but the fact that there are too many complicated, confusing taxes and regulations fragmented among local, state, and federal entities. We need to figure this one out.
- Economic growth requires continuous investment in human capital. People working toward an academic degree need an income, and the government needs to find a way to provide them with one. We need job skills training and retraining programs, and employers need to be heavily incentivized to train the workers they need in the skills they need. Skills-based immigration and guest worker programs can fill in the remaining gaps between the needed skills and available trained Americans.
- Economic growth requires continuous investment in physical capital (what economists call “plants and equipment”) and in public infrastructure. For the former, tax incentives could be the answer, however unpopular they might be. For the latter, an infrastructure bank could be the answer, where the actual creation of the money supply is done through the issuance of infrastructure bonds.
- Economic growth requires continuous innovation. On the private side, big tax incentives for research and development could be the answer, while on the public side, we could just turn on the taps for funding research, particularly at public universities. This has been slipping in recent decades from where it used to be.
- I just mentioned a number of programs that require public spending, of course. I think they would pay for themselves in the long run, but in the short run new sources of revenue would be needed, however politically unpopular. I would look to a value added tax as the international best practice which the U.S. continues to ignore, and taxes on pollution and waste which have the added benefit of making us healthier and safer.
- For any of these policies to have a prayer of getting through our political system, we would need a constitutional amendment making it clear that the right to free political speech applies only to human beings, not to corporations or dollars. Otherwise the United States will not be able to have these nice things.
The Wizard and the Prophet
Charles Mann, author of 1491, has a new book called The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World.
Here’s the Amazon description:
From the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493–an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow’s world.
In forty years, Earth’s population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups–Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug’s cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces–food, water, energy, climate change–grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author’s insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.
I made my own attempt to reconcile these world views a few years ago. My conclusion was that it is theoretically possible to grow without exceeding limits, if almost all innovation that occurs is aimed at transcending those limits. In the real world, I don’t think there is any evidence our species is capable of that. What is more likely is that technology helps us grow until we come up against the limits, then we experience a setback that takes us back under the limits, then eventually we start again. We may push the limits a little further each time, but the setbacks can be long and painful enough to ruin entire human lifetimes. If I am right, we haven’t even finished the first cycle yet as a planetary civilization. Mann’s book 1491, along with Jared Diamond’s Collapse, were instrumental in helping me to realize that regional and even continental cultures have experienced major setbacks before.