š® Tesla special; internet of weird; Silicon Valley's problem; fizzy drinks; intelligent robots++ #29
Thinking about Tesla and the future of urban mobility; the downside of the internet of things; AI robots that pass IQ tests; lusting after your bot; fizzy drinks going flat; the changing scariness of the haka. Extending Mooreās Law.
Please recommend this: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook
Referred by a friend? Sign up
Dept of the near future
š± The price of the internet of things will be the vague dread of a malicious worldĀ Excellent, must read
āļøĀ Exploring the largest collective action ever: dealing with climate change and the organizational capabilities we need to achieve it. BrilliantĀ by @vkr
š® Why the world is getting weirder by Steve Coast (founder of Open StreetMap). Excellent explanation: technology and learning leaves only bizarre edge cases unaddressed. The weirding will continue. (From March)
šĀ Urban mobility at a tipping point. Excellent report from McKinsey, and wherever you look car ownership is trending down; and sharing and other services are up.
š¹The decline of big sodaĀ Consumers changes are pushing sugary drinks sales into a tailspin. Their tobacco moment? Imagine a fizzy-drink free future?Ā Good read
š¶Ā The problem with problems: Silicon Valleyās problem-focus has limits. Many real problems are not visible to the under-30 tech elite.
Dept of pay-it-forward
The Exponential View grows solely by your recommendations and referrals. If you are reading it today, chances are someone referred you.
šSo if you are a recent subscriber, please forward this on by email to five or six friends you think would enjoy it. They can just subscribe by hitting this link.
Dept of Tesla & future transport
Teslaās launch announcement for the Model X couldnāt have had better timing in the wake of diesel gate. Elon Musk opined on the future of Tesla cars including 1000km range within 2-3 years and fully autonomous driving in the same period of time.
A 1,000 km on a single charge is quite a tempting proposition. In fact, it would more than cover a monthās worth of driving for the typical Londoner.
But as McKinsey points out above, the pendulum is swinging away from car ownership. And almost every economist agrees that Uber, Lyft and other sharing mobility platforms make us wealthier. There is a simple way of thinking about this: is that market segmentation almost always increases consumer welfare. Why? Because the segmentation (different price/utility bundles) allow people who were pay too much for a given bundle pay less; and those who were priced out of the market afford a service they otherwise couldnāt.
š If car ownership is so passĆ©, despite Madison Avenues best efforts for 50 years, one might ask why a super-smart cookie like Elon Musk is producing new vehicles for people to buy. Gavin Sheridan reckons many of the innovations in the Model X are designed for a future Tesla Mobility platform (an Uber-like taxi service.) Good hypothesis, worth reading.
Traditional automakers, argues The Economist, haveĀ business models which are vulnerable due to their reliance on financingĀ (with nearly a trillion bucks of hydrocarbon-driven assets on their books).
As Elon Musk argues around #dieselgate: āweāve reached the limits of what we can do with gasoline.ā Musk gives away some hints of the future of Teslaās range in this set of fascinating tweets.
This leads to two interesting thoughts.
The first: if Sheridanās Tesla Mobility hypothesis is correct, then Tesla is building a vertically-integrated mobility platform where it owns the vehicle, operating system, autonomous navigation, storage and charging. All it needs is to add vehicles to cities and a real-time marketplace for travel before it has a āfull-stackā competitor to ride-sharing alternatives. Tesla starts to look increasingly like Apple; with Uber looking, by weak analogy, to Android (dependent on third-party manufacturers, Ā third-party drivers, etc).
The second is that the fossil industry / internal combustion business is a classically fragile system (and not an anti-fragile one in the Taleb sense.) Small shocks to the system (decline in car ownership, reduction in hydrocarbon use, new competition, new mobility models) nick at the system. Iāve got a weak notion forming here about how fragile this system is, but I am sure there is much deeper thinking about this out there.
If you know of something, please recommend it to me.
š Elsewhere, a great Buzzfeed review on riding in one of Googleās greenfield self-driving cars and how it might change our notions of driving. Recommended
Sweden to become fossil-fuel freeĀ joining other leaders like Costa Rica and New Zealand.
Short morsels for dinner parties
š Less is more. Sweden introduces a six-hour work week to increase output.
š»IBMās new carbon nanotubes may extend Mooreās Law a few more years.
An AI performs does an IQ test as well as a 4-year old. Albeit on a very limited domain.
By 2050, sex with robots will be more common than sex with humans
šĀ Fascinating insight in how farms are using drones and data to improve efficiency, yields and productivity.
AirBnbās exponential growth continues: 80m room nights booked this year, up from 40m last year.
Wholesale solar continues its exponential price decline, hitting 5c/kWh. (A 70% decline in 6 years, and it looks like it is ahead of forecasts.) Good news, everyone.
š Exponential change: first it is slow, then it is fast and uncomfortable as perfectly exhibited in this history of the hakaĀ (h/t @markthebln for identifying āexponentially scaryā)
š® Very Minority Report. Hitachi demonstrates a system which can predict crimes before they happen.
š¬Ā Dropletons join solid, liquid, gas, plasma, Bose-Einstein condensates and others as a new state of matter. Yay. Science.
āŖļø Todayās American teen is the least religious cohort ever. Yay. Science.
š Your smartphone is gorgeous. And child labour in toxic mines may be part of the supply chain. Good photo essay
Action video games, like first person shooters, have stronger positive cognitive effects than brainĀ training games.
What you wrote
EV reader, Ken Cukier, of The Economist, reviews three new books on artificial intelligenceĀ - including John Markoffās Machines of Loving GraceĀ and Jerry Kaplanās Humans Need Not Apply. Recommended.
MISSED CONNECTIONS: One EV reader published a book on holobioncy and man as super-organism. But I canāt remember who. If it was you can you drop me an email?
End notes
Thanks again for reading. I tried a different format this week - going slightly deeper into the subject of future mobility. Itās an experiment. Let me know if it works for you by hitting reply; or whether you prefer previous formats of wider and shallower content.