Only half way through November – here is an “October in Review” post.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: When it comes to the #1 climate change impact on ordinary people, it’s the food stupid. (Dear reader, I’m not calling you stupid, and I don’t consider myself stupid, but somehow we individually intelligent humans are all managing to be stupid together.) This is the shit that is probably going to hit the fan first while we are shouting stupid slogans like “drill baby drill” (okay, if you are cheering when you hear a politician shout that you might not be stupid, but you are at least uninformed.)
Most hopeful story: AI, at least in theory, should be able to help us manage physical assets like buildings and infrastructure more efficiently. Humans still need to have some up-front vision of what we would like our infrastructure systems to look like in the long term, but then AI should be able to help us make optimal repair-replace-upgrade-abandon decisions that nudge the system toward the vision over time as individual components wear out.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Some explanations proposed for the very high cost of building infrastructure in the U.S. are (1) lack of competition in the construction industry and (2) political fragmentation leading to many relatively small agencies doing many relatively small projects. Some logical solutions then are to encourage the formation of more firms in the U.S., allow foreign firms and foreign workers to compete (hardly consistent with the current political climate!), and consolidate projects into a smaller number of much larger ones where economies of scale can be realized. There is some tension though between scale and competition, because the larger and more complex a project gets, the fewer bidders it will tend to attract who are willing to take the risk.