The Futurist

ATOM Award of the Month, January 2021

It is time for another ATOM AotM.  This one, in particular, goes retro and ties into concepts from the early days of The Futurist, back in 2006.  This award also dispels the misinformed myth that 'we can no longer send a man to the Moon like we did in 1969-72' or, even worse, that 'human progress peaked in 1969'.  If anything, progress in space-related advancement has been steadily on an exponential trendline.  

The first man-made object to be placed into orbit and send back information from orbit, was Sputnik in 1957.  Since that time, satellites have risen in number and complexity.  But the primary cost of a satellite is not the hardware itself, but rather the cost of getting it to orbit in the first place.  While the early data is sparse and the trendline was not easy to discern, we are now in an inflection point of this trajectory, enabling a variety of entities far smaller than governments to launch objects into orbit.  If the trendline of a 10x reduction per decade is in fact manifested, then a number of entirely new industries will emerge in short order.

(image from https://www.futuretimeline.net)

The emergence of private enterprises that can create profitable businesses from space is an aspect of the 21st century that is entirely different from the capital-intensive government space programs of the second half of the 20th century.  From geospatial data to satellite-derived high-speed Internet, the era of commercial space is here. 

SpaceX has already begun the Starlink program, which advertises 1 Gbps Internet access for rural customers.  It is not yet apparent how SpaceX will upgrade the hardware of its satellites over time, but if the 1 Gbps speed is a reality, this will break the cartel of existing land-based ISPs (such as Comcast), where the gross margin they earn on existing customers is as high as 97%.  Needless to say, high-speed access available to the backwaters of the world will boost their economic productivity.  

Other efficiencies are on the horizon.  3D Printing in space is very pragmatic, as only the 3D Printing filament has to be replenished from Earth, and finished objects are simply printed in orbit.  As the filament never has an awkward shape, it is far less expensive to send unprinted filament into an orbiting 3D printer.  Asteroid mining is another, and is an extension of the fundamental ATOM principle of technology always increasing the supply of, or alternatives to, any commodity.  The prices of precious metals on Earth could collapse when asteroid mining reaches fruition, to a much greater extent than oil prices plunged from hydraulic fracturing.  

But the falling cost of launch per unit weight is only half of the story.  To see the second exponential, we go all the way back to an article from April 22, 2006, titled 'Milli, Micro, Nano, Pico'.  The point here is that the ability to engineer smaller and smaller (integrated circuits with 5 nm transistors), at greater and greater scale, comprise a double exponential of technological intricacy and integration.  Surely, this has to result in a modernization of the electronics sent up into space.  

Consider that the major unmanned spacecraft that NASA has launched, such as the Pioneer, Voyager, and Cassini probes.  These were electronics from the 1970s, with designs that are not being updated to this day given that the New Horizons probe (launched in 2006) was still the same size.  We know that an electronics design, from 1975 to 2020, is expected to shrink in both size and cost by a factor of over 1 million.  If a supercomputer the size of an entire room in 1975 is less powerful than a 200-gram Raspberry Pi system in 2021, then why is NASA still launching one-ton devices that have incorporated none of the advances in electronics that have happened in the last 45 years?  The camera and transmitter on Voyager 2 are surely far less powerful than what exists in 2021 smartphones.  

Given the continued shrinkage in electronics and decline in launch costs, it is long past time for thousands of Voyager-type probes, each the size of a smartphone, to be launched in all directions.  Every significant body in the Solar System should have a probe around it taking pictures and other readings, and the number of images available on the Internet should be hundreds of times greater than exists now.  This will happen once someone with the appropriate capabilities notices how far behind the electronics of NASA and other space agencies are.  

Hence, this ATOM AotM makes use of up to three exponential trends at once.  But the decline in launch costs per unit weight alone has immense implications.  

This will be the final ATOM AotM posted on this website as an article.  Future instances will be on my new YouTube channel, which I hope to inaugurate in February.  

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

3.  Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

12. The ATOM's Effect on the Final Frontier

 

 

ATOM Award of the Month, November 2020

As the lockdown has lasted longer than anyone thought, the third of the three coronavirus-related ATOM disruptions has continued to strengthen.  As indicated in the June 2020 ATOM AotM, the pandemic has made workers adapt to remote working, which dramatically reduces demand for office real estate, particularly in premium locations.  This effect comes on top of the already underway glut of retail real estate that is discussed here often.  

The market cap of Zoom has risen 5x to about $150 Billion since May.  This is an indicator of the expected volume of usage (whether this is the company that wins in the long run or not).  This has immense implications for urban real estate.  The exodus is already evident in rapidly rising vacancies and falling rents in the most expensive locations.  If Pinterest, a company with only $1 Billion in revenue, decided to pay $90M (one year's rent) to terminate a 5-year lease, think of how many expiring leases are simply not being renewed (i.e. there is no cost to end them).  

The most immediate effect is the sudden halt in many current construction projects, even if the costs are already sunk.  Even if you just count skyscrapers taller than 150m in height, there were 625 under construction worldwide before coronavirus.  These were mostly in China, but 75 of them were in the US, including 41 in NYC alone.  Many are now on hold, but any buildings more than 20% complete have to be finished eventually.  This is in addition to the huge volume of new skyscrapers completed in recent years (see image).  To see charts of completion over time, this website has a lot of data (change city as needed).

It will take time for the capital to churn and repricing to manifest and stabilize, but the construction and permitting nexus is certain to do the worst possible thing, and halt all future construction in an attempt to constrict supply as well as obstruct the conversion  of former office space into apartments.  This will merely make the exodus more durable and irreversible.  

The next question is one of how cityscapes adjust over the longer term.  People often cannot think beyond binaries.  Inane articles present just two choices, between the old fashioned structure of everyone commuting to an office every weekday and a system where 500 employees each work out of 500 homes at all times.  Once the quarantine ends, the shift will be gradual.  Five days a week in the office will become two or three.  People can live twice as far away from home, which quadruples the amount of land area they can choose to live in, which, in turn, presents low-cost choices in most cases.  The structural migration takes some time, as only renters are that fluid, but it nonetheless advances.  

Residential real estate prices nearer to former job cores will fall, while those further away will stay the same.  But the demand to convert excess office supply into residential supply will pressure prices further.  This is ATOM deflation, but a problem for existing mortgageholders who are in a leveraged situation relative to their home equity.  The Federal Reserve, of course, will print more money to keep up, but it will flow in directions the Federal Reserve did not predict.  Hence, the cycle continues.  As collaboration over videoconferencing becomes more normal, the distances that one can live from the main office rise.  Eventually, some workers will be able to cross state lines and establish residency in low-tax states.  The three places where workers are under the most onerous yoke of living costs and taxes are Los Angeles, New York City, and worst of all, the San Francisco Bay Area.

The state of Pennsylvania has just a 3% state income tax, and parts of PA are just 75 miles from Manhattan.  A commute from there to NYC was not viable under the 5-days-a-week model, but is under a 1-2 day model.  The greater tri-state area never had to worry about the PA state line until now, but this corridor of capital exodus has begun, and portions of Eastern PA near Route 80 and other major highways connected to the tri-state area might just experience a fortuitous wave of incoming wealth. 

But the tougher nut to crack is CA, particularly since the wealth creation in CA only began much more recently, and the state borders have thus become problematic far after they were drawn.  While no two bordering states have a higher differential in income tax rates than CA and NV, CA never had to worry about this since the high-income people were all over 200 miles from the Nevada border, where the climate is far less pleasant.  But as CA has increased its top income tax bracket from 9.3% in 2011 to what might become 16.3% soon, this rising delta combined with the Zoom revolution has begun to generate cracks in the dam.  California's taxation greed has not taken into account how the ATOM adapts around such obstacles given that they want to levy a tax hike even as Zoom has decimated San Francisco's office rental market.  As more Silicon Valley professionals cross into Nevada, the network effect manifests, and they help others settle there.  There are already such resettlement cooperative groups in Reno, Incline Village, and the Las Vegas area.  

Rents in San Francisco fall as much as 31%.

Hence, it is quite appropriate to compare the Bay Area's high costs and taxes with OPEC's assumption that it could keep oil prices at $110 or higher forever.  We know how that ended, and the same process could easily manifest over here, especially since it involves many of the people who are directly producing all the essential technological components of the ATOM.  Expensive urban real estate, whether office, retail, or even residential, is a commodity.  If it is made expensive due to artificial scarcity, then it falls under the might of the ATOM all the same.  

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

4 : The Overlooked Economics of Technology

 

ATOM Award of the Month, August 2020

For this month's award, we will delve into a disruption that took place a few years ago, and how that disruption is about to have a second act, accelerated by coronavirus.  Hence, it is related to the June 2020 ATOM AotM.  

Streaming video has already disrupted the film and television industries completely.  Due to recent events, it is now on the brink of its second act. 

First, a recap of the first act.  Netflix was the first and most well-known among existing streaming services, of which there are now over a dozen.  The disruptions inherent to this were immense and across multiple sectors.  Blockbuster alone had 9094 stores at its peak in 2004, alongside Movie Gallery's 4700, and these were not small stores in square footage and parking lot space.  There were other, smaller video rental chains as well.  Collectively, they consumed thousand upon thousands of acres of prime urban land.  The removal of this entire resource allocation and supply chain was immensely productive, and rapid.  

Additionally, the entire structure of how films and television are produced was upgraded into a more productive version.  The old paradigm of 26 episodes per season, and commercial breaks every few minutes was extremely restrictive.  Most 'one hour' programs from the 1980s and 90s were barely 40 minutes of real content.  All of that has been swept aside with the technological revelation of on-demand streaming.  The exceptionally low price of most streaming services qualify as a true ATOM disruption.  Try explaining to young people today how, in the early 1980s, people had to rush home to not 'miss' their favorite program or a movie that was being shown on TV for the first time (including commercials for a third of that time).  

But the second act is the disruption of the next industry, education, by the same medium.  The seeds were sown in 2015, with only the 800,000 Chinese students paying full price delaying the manifestation of this ATOM disruption.  Coronavirus has shuttered in-person schooling, which has forced students online.  Yet, universities, in their hubris, want to charge the same fee.  This invited comparisons that universities are ill-equipped to rebut, and are uncannily similar to what taxi medallions said when Uber disrupted their entitled status quo.  Suddenly, questions of both cost and duplication of effort began to move to the forefront.  

The following list summarizes the extent of the mismatch, even though the Harvard 'annual' price actually represents just the eight-month academic year.  Furthermore, $50,000/yr for Harvard is probably still a better value than $40,000/yr for a university ranked closer to #50.  Of course, this table is for dramatic effect, and the disruption is going to be in lower-value education (K-12 and lower-tier universities) first.  

Articles written about this disruption have appeared in important non-tech publications :

The Atlantic

Harvard Business Review

New York Magazine

The 'emperor has no clothes' moment for the ridiculously expensive 'education industry' draws near.  People are beginning to finally figure out how little value (or even negative value) they are getting for their money, combined with the acceleration of technological alternatives.  This is something I have been anticipating for some time, and thus had become one of the most overdue disruptions around.  

The key, of course, is for employers to have the courage to buck the status quo.  Employers have been unusually timid about hiring entry-level candidates without degrees, or even creating their own onsite training programs.    

For example, there is no reason why a large tech company cannot simply hire the 18-year-olds with the highest SAT scores, and put clusters of them into on-site training programs, and even house them in local dormitory-like apartments near the office campus.  If the SAT score is not enough info, students can also add a dossier of their accomplishments and a writing sample.  Effectively, the college application for which a student pays $50-$100 for the privilege of submitting, can be an online upload for free, accessible by login only by verified employer HR staff email addresses.  Once hired, the tech company mentors the candidate, and commits to three years of employment, so that their resume is sufficiently solid in the absence of the university credential.  Each US military branch has 'basic training' that is of 7-12 weeks in duration, so there is no reason tech companies cannot have a 3-year training program for 18-year-olds.  As long as other tech companies recognize the training from the first (Google, Amazon, etc.) as valid, the graduates can circulate throughout the tech industry, and the monopoly of universities is broken.  

In addition, the premise that the 'contacts' they make at a university are more valuable than the contacts they make in their first three years at Google, Amazon, or Tesla is absurd.  The truth about college is that a person's best friends usually are not going into the same professional field, whereas this link is met in the training program.  Even if their compensation net of free housing is very little, that is still a vastly higher net compensation relative to a university degree.  But alas, these supposedly innovative tech companies have not yet demonstrated the courage to bypass college.  

Fortunately, the ATOM might do the hard work of normalizing streaming education at the same cost as other streaming content, bypassing the need for employers to wait for a 'Spartacus'.  This long-overdue correction of a massive resource misallocation may finally be upon us.  

 

Related :

The Education Disruption : 2015

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

3.  Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

8.  The ATOM Transformation by Sector

9.  Reframing 'Inequality'

 

ATOM Award of the Month, June 2020

The pandemic has ratified and accelerated a whole host of ATOM principles, so I have to update parts of the entire publication.  Suffice it to say, a number of pent-up ATOM predictions just got fast forwarded, with a seminal day in the history of economics having been forced into manifestation.  We can divide the events into two parts : technological and monetary.  

Among technological disruptions, there are three that qualify as having been overdue for a long time, that got tipped over by this catalyst :

1) Video Conferencing : This was something that Cisco expected to take off 14 long years ago, but expensive proprietary hardware and the inertia of old habits prevented it from attaining the critical mass necessary for entrenchment.  Cisco lost at least $6 Billion on this endeavor.  Now, however, as people are forced to work from home, a critical mass of users have to adapt to this usage, which in turn attracts more innovation and capital to the technology.  While none of the companies advancing videoconferencing in 2009 are the same ones as the ones winning now, this is common in the technology sector (recall the search engine wars).  The cascade of disruptions I listed in 2009 still apply.  Among other things, if cubicle-style workplaces can agree that all on-premise meetings are restricted to three days a week (M-W, or Tu-Th, or whatever), then the distance that an employee can commute effectively doubles, and the housing availability for them thus increases 4X.  The current status quo of certain real estate being vastly more expensive than equivalent real estate 30 miles further from the jobs cluster may finally correct.  This is a form of standard-of-living increase that is poorly captured in GDP statistics.  

2) Educational Institutions : The extraordinarily distorted cost/value equation of both higher and lower educational institutions (which should not be conflated with the concept of 'education') already crossed the point of no return in 2015.  But, as with videoconferencing, too few people were willing to be 'Spartacus' and make use of alternative solutions that were in fact lower risk.  This applies to both students and employers, for employers declaring that they will hire based on on-site testing and online certifications, rather than degrees that bear little to predictive value of employee performance, is the catalyst that would have induced more students to bypass the universities-as-gatekeeper oligopoly.  The fact that universities want to charge the same tuition for online classes (and are being sued by students disputing this), when comparable online classes are available for orders of magnitude lower prices, is going to reduce US university enrollment permanently.  To cope, there is no reason that US universities cannot be forced to return to a 1980s-era cost structure.  

3) Retail Real Estate Re-Purposement : Overlooked among the technological and economic effects of this black swan is the fact that the 'retail apocalypse' and shift to e-commerce has fast-forwarded to such an extent that millions of acres of US retail land (including parking lots) will never return to previous levels of usage.  This was partially mentioned in the ATOM AotM for August 2017, and is often brought up in comments.  E-commerce was still just 12% of all retail sales before the pandemic, but if that 12% were to shift to 15%, or effectively jump two years ahead of the previous trend, that alone is a vast acceleration with visible results for the suburban landscape.  

In fact, when you combine the permanently lower demand for premium office space from the greater usage of videoconferencing, and the mass closure of retail real estate (at least in the US, where six times as much land is allocated to retail relative to most advanced countries), the correction and pressure to re-allocate could be extreme.  In places like California, the extreme restrictions on new residential construction will be exposed even more visibly as office space joins retail in a permanent glut.  

But the bigger event was not even these technological accelerants.  Instead, the complete and supreme validation of all ATOM conclusions was manifested fully.  Recall that the Federal Reserve was actually reversing QE and increasing interest rates in 2019.  It had begun to pause and correct that misguided reversal process, but still at too timid of a rate of net increase to even keep up with the ATOM trendline of monetary creation required to halt technological deflation.  

However, this crisis forced the Federal Reserve to do the right thing, even if they still don't understand the new economics of technology.  March 15, 2020, is a day that can fairly be described as the 'Netscape Moment in Economics'.  For those who recall the original 'Netscape Moment', on August 9, 1995, the Internet browser company Netscape did an IPO that exceeded its anticipated price by a huge margin, and triggered a boom in Internet company formation for the next 4.5 years.  Even after the bust, the economy was permanently into the Internet age.  Similarly, 3/15/2020 is the day where the Federal Reserve, in one fell swoop, lowered the Fed Funds rate to 0% (where it should have been all along), and signaled permanent QE.  In the following 10 weeks, over $3 Trillion of new QE was done, and the entire trajectory is starting to look more like the exponential parabolas that we are accustomed to seeing wherever the accelerating rate of change and exponential technology emerge.  As of May 31, here are two charts to depict the total QE effect (source : Yardeni) :

The first chart indicates the cumulative rise in the sum of the four major central banks.  Note the feeble attempt to reduce the balance sheets in 2018-19, only the forced to return to the trendine.  The second chart is the YoY percentage increase.  I have always said that the ATOM requires 16-24%/yr as an annual rate of increase to offset deflation and maintain optimal (2-3%) inflation.  The increase is now probing the upper limit of even my range, and it will be interesting to see if inflation emerges even then, or if the ceiling is even higher than I estimated (meaning that technological progress is now even faster and broader than before, and monetary creation could be higher than before).  

I said elsewhere that the decade of the 2010s had $23 Trillion of cumulative QE worldwide.  The PhD Economists of the world, who have predicted 100 of the last zero bouts of hyperinflation, still believe QE is an aberration and assume that the cumulative QE will be reversed (i.e. that the 2020s will have -$23 Trillion of cumulative QE).  I claim the opposite, which is that under both ATOM principles and the Accelerating Rate of Change, the 2020s will see about $100 Trillion of QE, and that this will move towards sending cash directly to people (rather than the esoteric bond-buying that comprises of QE today, which inevitably concentrates the benefit of this monetary creation in very few hands).  

Mark my words.  The entire profession of economics, full of PhDs who have never had any contact with entrepreneurs and real-time economic decisions, will be wrong by an epic margin.  

 

 

ATOM Award of the Month, February 2020

It is time to award a new ATOM AotM, and the first one somewhat coincident with the newly published version 2.0 of the ATOM publication.  This one has been discussed elsewhere on this website, but at the moment, it is perhaps the single biggest disruption in the global economy.  

First, a small story.  Photovoltaics (PV) is actually my first exponential technology, and what made be aware of the concept in a time when even 'Moore's Law' was not a household term and Intel was a very small company.  When I was 10 years old, I wrote a 5th grade paper (about 800 words) on exponential improvement of solar cells of about 5% a year.  It predicted cost-effectiveness in the 'early 21st century'.  The paper was a hit and was submitted to a contest that all the elementary schools submitted papers to, and I was taken, along with a number of other 5th graders from the Cleveland area to an event where the Mayor of Cleveland at the time (George Voinovich) meets the children and does a photo op.  We didn't understand any of that, but each child got a framed certificate. 

Sure enough, as the decades passed, PV did become cost effective in the early 21st century.  It has been a subject on this website for a long time, and while we often point out how many technologies have failed to meet industry-derived projections, as you can see from this old 2007 article, a US DoE chart thought PV installations in the US would be merely 15 to 30 GWs.  In reality, the 2020 number is about thrice the upper bound of that projection, at 80-90 GWs, with over 3% of US electricity generated through PV.  Even better, the world average is higher than the US average, and the world total continues to grow in excess of 25% a year.  Remember that this ATOM advancement is tied to the advancement of electric vehicles, as not merely is crude oil being replaced with electricity.  For many countries, the oil was imported, while the photovoltaic electricity is generated domestically.  This is a victory against OPEC, as imports from OPEC are being replaced with domestic energy.   

As we recall Swanson's Law, the 40-year trend is consistent (note that both axes are logarithmic).  While it took decades to get up to 3% of world electricity consumption being through PV, the jump from 3% to 12%+ will not take longer than a few years.  The inflection point is here, and the dollar impact is among the biggest of any ATOM transformations currently underway.  Even more than the dollar impact, it is the multiplier effect of these specific dollars given where the shift is being generated.  

(Images from Wikipedia and Our World in Data.  Click to enlarge).  

The best part about solar, which is not true of wind power, is that the poorest countries in the world are in fact the ones with the greatest solar intensity, and are thus the most suitable for solar.  Much has been written about why cold-weather cultures have done better than hot-weather cultures on average, but now the very resource that was not being monetized can be monetized.  By contrast, wind power, while good, is both slower-advancing and most applicable in countries that are already wealthy, and so does not have quite the same multiplier effect.  This map of solar intensity indicates where the greatest utility of photovoltaics can reside (image attribution, GNU Free Documentation License v1.2).    

The absolute lowest-prosperity countries are still too disorganized to take advantage of this, but even the third quartile is well-prepared to rapidly increase PV installations and move away from oil imports.  In the near future, it will seem quite absurd that people were importing their energy from thousands of miles away.  

 

Related :

The End of Petrotyranny - Victory

The End of Petrotyranny

Solar Power's Next Five Game-Changing Technologies

A Future Timeline for Energy

Why I Want Oil to Hit $120 per Barrel (epic 2007 article)

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

3.  Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

 

  

 

ATOM Award of the Month, November 2019

It is time for another ATOM AotM.  This month's award has a major overlap with the November 2017 award, where we identified that telescopic power has been computerized, and as a result was rising at 26%/yr.  This itself was a finding from a much older article from all the way back in September 2006, where I first identified that telescopic power was improving at that rate.  

But how do better telescopes improve your life?  Learning about exoplanets and better images of stars are fun, but have no immediate relevance to our individual daily challenges.  If you are not interested in astronomy, why should you care?  Well, there is one area where this advancement has already improved millions and possibly billions of lives : we have now mapped nearly all of the Near Earth Objects (NEOs) that might be large enough to cause a major disaster if any of them strike the Earth.  Remember that this is an object with a mass that may be billions of tons, traveling at about 30 km/sec (image from sciencenews.org), of which there are many thousands that have already orbited the sun over 4 billion times each.  

All of us recall how, in the 1990s, there were a number of films portraying how such a disaster might manifest.  Well, in the 1990s, we had little awareness of which objects were nearby at what time, and so there really was a risk that a large asteroid could hit us with little or no warning.  However, as telescopes improved, 26%/yr (the square root of Moore's Law, since pixel numbers increase as a square of linear dimension shrinkage) got to work on this problem.  Now, as of today, all asteroids larger than 1km are mapped, and almost all of the thousands that are larger than 140m (the size above which it would actually hit the surface, rather than burn up in the atmosphere) are mapped as well (chart from Wikipedia).  We have identified which object might be an impact risk in what year.  In case you are wondering, there is a 370m asteroid that will get very near (but not hit the Earth) in 2036.  Of course, by 2036, we will have mapped everything with far more precision, at this rate of improvement.  In other words, don't worry about an asteroid impact in the near future, as none of significance are anticipated in the next 17 years, and probably not for much longer than that.  Comets are a different matter, as we have not mapped most of them (and cannot, as of yet), but large ones impact too infrequently to worry about.  

Hence, the risk of an impact event, and mitigation thereof, is no longer a technological problem.  It is merely a political one.  Will the governments of the world work to divert asteroids before one hits, or will they only react after one hits in order to prevent the next impact?  These questions are complicated, as this problem is completely borderless.  Why should the United States pay the majority of the expense for a borderless problem, particularly one that has a 71% chance of hitting an ocean?  At any rate, this is another problem that went from deadly to merely one of fiscal prioritization, on account of ATOM progress.  

More interestingly, within this problem is another major business opportunity that we have discussed here in the past.  Asteroid mining is a potential industry that is simultaneous with asteroid diversion, as asteroid pulverization may waste some precious metals that can be captured.  Many asteroids have a much greater proportion of precious metals than the Earth's surface does, since 'precious' metals are heavy and most of the quantity sunk to the center of the Earth while the Earth was forming, while an asteroid with much lower gravity has its precious metals more evenly distributed throughout its structure.  There are already asteroids identified that have hundreds of tons of gold and platinum in them.  Accessing these asteroids will, of course, crush the prices of these metals as traded on Earth (another ATOM effect we have seen elsewhere in other commodities), and may reduce gold to an industrial metal that is used in much the way copper is.  This, of course, may enable new applications that are not cost-effective at the current prices of gold, platinum, palladium, etc.  But that is a topic for another time.  

 

Related :

ATOM AotM, November 2017

SETI and the Singularity

Telescope Power - Yet Another Accelerating Technology

 

ATOM Award of the Month, February 2019

For this month's ATOM AotM, we examine something that even the rest of the technology industry has virtually no awareness of, and the US public is entirely oblivious of, even though we have a President from the construction industry.  

The US construction industry has had no net productivity gain in the last 70 years.  Even worse, it declined by 50% over the last 50 years.  Construction should be seen as a type of manufacturing, as most construction is not devoted to anything highly customized or unusually complex.  Yet, manufacturing itself has risen in productivity by 800% over the same period that construction has not risen at all.   A combination of organized crime, government graft, and an anti-productivity ethos have contributed to this epic failure.  

Given that construction is about 7% of the US economy, this is troubling.  Imagine if that 7% was 16x more productive (i.e. merely keeping up with manufacturing).  Americans, particularly urban Americans, don't realize that they could have thrice the square footage for the same price if this sector merely kept up with manufacturing.  There would also be several hundred thousand more jobs in construction, and much broader home ownership.    

Meanwhile, outside of the many biases of the Western media, there is an amazing example of supreme construction efficiency.  China has grown at 7% a year over the last 20 years, even as the US has shrunk at -1% a year (click image to enlarge, image from The Economist).  The productivity of China has greatly enlarged the size of its construction sector, to the extent that it is 20% of China's economy vs. just 7% in the US.  While the two countries are a different stages of growth and China is still at a much lower absolute level, the differential is still immense.  

Normally, in any industry, such an immense productivity differential leads to the productive country exporting products to the less productive country, swiftly driving local unproductive businesses to their deserved demise.  Construction, however, produces a product that is not transportable, so a productivity normalization has not happened.  At least not yet.  But this high of a differential eventually finds a way to engineer a normalization.  Modular construction is one method where parts are manufactured, and then assembled on site.  China could start exporting this to the rest of the world.  

Here is a Spire Research report on the advances in China's construction technology.

The Western media, in its hubris, is quite willing to criticize China for building entire cities 10 years before they are needed.  How often have we seen stories about empty cities in China that take a few years to fill up?  By contrast, the United States (and California in particular) does something much worse, which is to build structures 20 years after they are needed.  Given the choice between these two schedule misalignments, China's approach is vastly preferable.  

Beyond this, the costs of US ineptitude are about to become more problematic.  The eCommerce revolution is exposing the massive misallocation of land toward retail space, that is a uniquely American distortion.  Part of this is due to a peculiar depreciation schedule in the tax code originating in 1954.  The abundant land in the US interior led to the same lopsided usage of land in California, leading to the grotesque situation we have today where ultra-expensive housing resides next to vast, empty parking lots.  High California housing prices are the product of extreme artificial supply restriction, aided by low construction productivity that ensures an apartment complex takes three years to complete, where the same in China takes under one year.    

Dramatic photos of dead malls can easily evoke emotions in the average American, who has been trained to think this sort of retail experience is normal.  But charts that reveal the unique extent of US profligacy with regards to retail land reveals a much more logical sequence of impending events.  As eCommerce continues to shutter brick and mortar retail, there will be a rising groundswell of pressure to repurpose this land for a more contemporary use.  Unfortunately, the inadequate level of US construction productivity threatens to greatly delay this conversion, severely damaging our national competitiveness relative to China.  

On the subject of where the US may see China catch up, most of the focus is on Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing, and other high-concept technologies.  Yet the construction productivity differential alone represents the single biggest sectoral deficit from the point of view of the US and many other countries.  China is well-positioned to dominate the entire construction industry worldwide once it can more easily win international contracts and transplant its productivity practices abroad.  If the US blocks Chinese construction imports, other countries across the world will happily partake in these high-quality end products.  This should be welcomed by anyone with a free-market bent. 

For this reason, China's construction sector, in breaking the low-productivity pattern seen in almost the entire rest of the world, is the recipient of the February 2019 ATOM AotM.  

 

 

ATOM Award of the Month, December 2018

It is time for another ATOM AotM.  This month, we return to the energy sector, for it is where the greatest size and scale of ATOM disruptions are currently underway.

We visited batteries briefly in August 2017's ATOM AotM.  There are two exponentials here, battery cost per unit of energy, and battery energy density per unit volume.  Hence, despite 40 years of apparent stagnation interspersed with angst about how electric vehicles failed to arrive in response to 1973 and 1981 oil spikes, the exponential trend quietly progressed towards the inflection point that we have arrived at.  True to the exponential nature of technology, more progress happened in 2011-20 than 1970-2010, and we now have viable electric vehicles that are selling rapidly and are set to displace gasoline consumption in a matter of just a few short years.  Electric vehicles are now 2% of all new vehicle sales in the US, and 3% worldwide, with a high annual growth rate.  Due to the rapid cost improvements in EVs expected in the next three years, a substantial tipping point is perhaps no more than three years away.  

This rapid rise is in the face of two major headwinds : the low price of oil (due to another ATOM disruption), and the high price of EVs (the top-seller in units is a $50,000 vehicle).  It is now a certainty that once a high-quality EV becomes available at the $30,000 pricepoint, the speed of displacement will be startling.

A tracker that records monthly sales at both US and WW levels is here.  The speed of advancement merits monthly visits to this tracker, at this point.  Note that over time, the US is actually where total displacement of ICEs by EVs will be the slowest, since other countries are more suited for EVs than the US (they have higher gasoline prices, and often 220V electrical outlets that lead to faster charging).  In fact, a suddenly popular home upgrade in the US is, ironically, the installation of 220V outlets in the garage, specifically for EV charging.  

As an example of a true ATOM disruption, the transformation will be multi-layered.  From oil import/export balances, to gasoline refinement and distribution networks, to the reduction of near-slave labor from the Subcontinent forced to find work in Gulf petrostates, to mechanics dependent on ICE vehicle malfunctions, to surplus used ICEs unable to sell and thus forced to slash prices, to power management and pricing by electric utilities, to prime land occupied by gas stations, a variety of status quos will end. 

Don't underestimate how soon the domino effect will take place.  Once EVs are sufficiently mainstreamed in the luxury car market (which is set to happen in 2019), then the entire range of urban commercial/government vehicles will swiftly transition to electric.  The US has 800,000 police cars, 210,000 USPS vans, and a variety of other government vehicles.  On top of that, private enterprises include 110,000 UPS vehicles, 60,000 FedEx vehicles, and perhaps over 300,000 pizza delivery vehicles.  As these transition, observe how many gasoline stations shutter.  

The much greater lifespan of EVs relative to ICE's will be one of the four factors that lead to the majority of automobile use migrating to an on-demand, autonomous vehicle model by 2032, as discussed before.  

 

Related :

The End of Petrotyranny

Why I Want Oil to be $120/Barrel

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

3.  Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening.

 

ATOM Award of the Month, October 2018

For this month's ATOM AotM, we visit the medical industry, and examine a technology that seems quite intuitive, but on account of patents and other obstacles, has seen rapid improvement greatly delayed until now. 

Surgery seems as though robotics would be ideally suited for it, since it combines complexity and precision with a great deal of repetition of well-established steps.  The value of smaller incisions, fewer instances of bones being sawed, etc. is indisputable, from qualitative measures such as healing pain, to tangible economic metrics such as hospital stay duration post-surgery.  

Intuitive Surgical released its Da Vinci robot to the market in 2001, but on account of Intuitive's patents, they sustained a monopoly and did not improve the product much over the subsequent 17 years.  Under ATOM principles, this is a highly objectionable practice, even if technically they can still earn a high profit margin without any product redesigns.  As a result, only 4000 such robots are currently in use, mostly in the US.  Intuitive has achieved a market capitalization of over $60 Billion, so it has succeeded as a business, but this may soon change.  Now that Intuitive's patents are finally close to expiry, a number of competitors are ready to introduce ATOM-consistent exponential improvements into the competitive landscape.  

The Economist has a detailed article about the new entrants into this market, and the innovations they have created.  In addition to mere cost-reduction due to smaller electronics, one obvious extension of the robotic surgery model is for each robot to be connected to the cloud, where the record of each surgery trains an Artificial Intelligence to ensure ever-improving automation for several steps of the surgery.  With AI, greater usage makes it improve, and when thousands of surgeries around the world are all recorded, that makes each machine simultaneously better.  As costs lower and unit volume increases, the volume of data generated rises.  As the accumulation of data rises, the valuation of companies capturing this data also rises, as we have seen in most other areas of technology.  

This level of data combined with greater circuitry within the robot itself can also increase the speed of surgery.  When more of it is automated, and the surgeon is doing less of the direct manipulation, then what is to prevent surgeries from being done at twice or thrice the speed?  This enables a much shorter duration of anesthesia, and hence fewer complications from it.  

 

 

ATOM Award of the Month, May 2018

For the May 2018 ATOM AotM, we will visit a technology that is not a distinct product or company, but rather is a feature of consumer commerce that we would now find impossible to live without.  This humble yet indispensable characteristic of multiple websites has saved an incalculable amount of frustration and productivity loss.  I am, of course, referring to web-based reviews.  

Lest you think this is a relatively minor technology to award an ATOM AotM to, think again, for a core principle of technological progress is that a technology is most successful when it is barely even noticed despite a ubiquitous presence.  

Part of what has enabled eCommerce to siphon away an ever-rising portion of brick and mortar retail's revenue is the presence of reviews on sites like Amazon.  Beyond eCommerce, sites like Yelp have greatly increased the information access of consumers seeking to patronize a low-tech business, while media sites permit a consumer to quickly decide which films and video games are worthwhile without risking a blind purchase.  While false reviews were a feature of the early Internet for over a decade, now there is considerable ability to filter those out.  

I recall a frustrating episode that a friend and I experienced in 1999.  We wanted to rent a film from Blockbuster videos, but did not know which one.  We found one that had familiar actors, but the movie was extremely subpar, resulting in a sunk cost of the rental fee, transportation costs, and time spent on the film and two-way transit.  When returning to Blockbuster to discharge the VHS Cassette of the film, we selected another, based on the same criteria.  It was even worse.  We had rented two separate films over two separate round trips to Blockbuster, only to be extremely unsatisfied.  Movie review sites like IMDB did exist at the time, but my friend did not have home Internet access (as his Internet activities were restricted to his workplace, as was common at the time).  

Now, in this anecdote, just list the number of ATOM disruptions that have transpired since :

1. There is no longer a 'Blockbuster Video' that rents VHS Cassettes, as films are rented online or available through a Netfilx subscription.
2. Everyone has home Internet access, and can see a film's reviews before ever leaving home.

Hence, it is no longer possible to waste hours of time and several dollars on a bad film.  The same goes for restaurants, and in this case, both the consumer and the business are shielded from an information mismatch on the part of the consumer.  I have always felt that it was unfair for a patron to judge a restaurant negatively if they themselves did not order what they might have liked.  Now, with Yelp, in addition to reviews, there are pictures, enabling a vastly more informed decision.  

Even higher-stakes decisions, such as the selection of a dentist or auto-mechanic, has slashed the uncertainty that people lived under just 12 years ago.  The better vendors attract more business, while substandard (or worse - unethical) vendors have been exposed to the light of day.  This is a more powerful form of quality control than has ever existed before.

Now, to see where the real ATOM effects are found, consider the value of the data being aggregated.  This drives better product design and better marketing.  This also expands the roadmaps of accessory products or complementary products.  The data itself begins to fuel artificial intelligence, for remember that any pile of data of sufficient size tends to attract artificial intelligence to it.  This leads to a lot of valuable analytics and automation.  

If one were to rank the primary successful Internet use cases to date, the ability to see reviews of products and services would rank very high on the list.  For this reason, this receives the May 2018 ATOM AotM.  

 

 

 

ATOM Award of the Month, February 2018

For this month's ATOM AotM, we will address the sector that any thought leader in technological disruption recognizes as the primary obstruction to real progress.  When we see that sectors that are overdue for disruption, such as medicine, education, and construction all happen to be sectors with high government involvement, the logical progression leads us to question why government itself cannot deliver basic services at comparable costs to private sector equivalents. 

As just one example out of hundreds, in California and other high-tax states, the annual license plate registration can cost $400/year.  What does the taxpayer truly receive?  The ability to trace license plates to driver's licenses and insurance.  Why should such a simple system cost so much?  It seems that it should only cost $2/year under 2018 technological levels.  By contrast, note how much value you receive from a $96/year Netflix subscription.  By all accounts, many basic government services could easily implement cost reductions of 98-99%.  

While the subject of government inefficiency vs. the ATOM is perhaps the primary topic of this website and the ATOM publication, just one small example across the world demonstrates what a modernized government looks like.  The tiny country of Estonia contains just 1.3 million people.  A desire to catch up from decades of being part of the Soviet Union perhaps spurred them into a unique desire to modernize and digitize government services into a state that Americans would scarcely believe could exist.  Here are some articles by publication about Estonia's successful digitization, where you can read about specific details :

The New Yorker

The Atlantic

Fortune

Estonia has also taken early steps towards certain ATOM realities.  While it does have high consumption taxes, income tax is a flat 21%, thereby saving immense costs in complexity and processing (which cost the US over $700 Billion/yr).  If only it figures out the ATOM principles around monetization of technological deflation, it could reduce income taxes to zero.  

Now, for the unfortunate part.  When a country manages to produce a product or service that the rest of the world wants and cannot produce at the same quality and price themselves, the first country can export the product to the outside world.  From Taiwanese chipsets to South Korean smartphones and television sets to Italian cheeses, the extension of sales to exports is straightforward.  Yet in the governance sector, despite being a third of the world economy, Estonia has no market where it can sell its services to hasten the digitization of other governments.  Whether at the Federal, State, City, or County level, the United States has hundreds of governments that could simply hire Estonian consultants and implementation staff to rapidly install new services.  This could be lucrative enough to make Estonia a very wealthy country, and then attract competition from other countries (such as nearby Finland, which is attempting to follow Estonia's path).  Yet, unlike a private sector product or service, governance just does not value efficiency or productivity to this extent.  The State of California alone could save billions of dollars per year, and either spend the taxes on other things, or (preferably) pass the savings on to the taxpayers.

Before long, the ATOM will force even the largest nation states to improve their productivity of government services.  But that process will be messy, and government officials may take a scorched-earth approach to defending their own rice bowls.  Let us hope that Estonia inspires at least a few other countries into voluntary modernization.   

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

10. Implementation of the ATOM Age for Nations.

 

 

ATOM Award of the Month, January 2018

With the new year, we have a new ATOM AotM.  This is an award for a trend that ought to be easy for anyone to recognize who is at all familiar with Moore's Law-type concepts, yet is greatly overlooked despite quite literally being in front of people's faces for hours a day.  

The most crude and uninformed arguments against accelerating technological progress are either of a "Word processing is no better than in 1993, so Moore's Law no longer matters" or "People can't eat computers, so the progress in their efficiency is useless" nature.  However, the improvements in semiconductor and similar technologies endlessly finds ways into previously low-tech products, which is the most inherent ATOM principle.  

The concept of television has altered cultures across the world more than almost any other technology.  The range of secondary and tertiary economies created around it are vast.  The 1960 set pictured here, for $795, cost 26% of US annual per capita GDP at the time.  The equivalent price today would be $15,000.  Content was received over the air and this was often subject to poor reception.  The weight and volume of the device relative to the area of the screen was high, and the floorspace consumed was substantial.  There were three network channels in the US (while most other countries had no broadcasts at all).  There was no remote control.  

There were slow, incremental improvements in resolution and screen-size-to-unit-weight ratios from the 1960s until around 2003, when one of the first thin television sets was available at the retail level.  It featured a 42" screen, was only 4 inches thick, and cost $8000.  Such a wall-mountable display, despite the high price, was a substantial improvement above the cathode ray tube sets of the time, most of which were too large and heavy to be moved by one person, and consumed a substantial amount of floor space.

But in true ATOM exemplification, this minimally-improving technology suddenly got pulled into rapid, exponential improvement (part of how deflationary technology increased from 0.5% of World GDP in 1999 to 1% in 2008 to 2% in 2017).  Once the flat screen TV was on the market, plasma and LCD displays eventually gave way to LED displays, which are a form of semiconductor and improve at Moore's Law rates. 

Today, even 60-inch sets, a size considered to be extravagant in 2005, are very inexpensive.  Like any other old electronic device, slightly out of date sets are available on Craigslist in abundance (contributing to the Upgrade Paradox).  A functional used set that cost $8000 in 2003 can hardly be sold at all in 2018; the owner is lucky if someone is willing to come and take it for free.    

Since once ATOM-speed improvements assimilate a technology, the improvements never stop, and sets of the near future may be thin enough to be flexible, along with resolutions of 4K, 8K, and beyond.  Sets larger than 240" (20 feet) are similarly declining in price and visible in increasing numbers in commercial use (i.e. Times Square everywhere).  This is hence one of the most visible examples of ATOM disruption, and how cities of today have altered their appearance relative to the recent past.  

(Statista reference link)

This is a large ATOM disruption, as there are still 225 Million new sets sold each year, amounting to $105 Billion/year in sales.  

 

Related :

The Impact of Computing

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening.

 

ATOM Award of the Month, November 2017

For this month, the ATOM AotM goes outward.  Much like the September ATOM AotM, this is another dimension of imaging.  But this time, we focus on the final frontier.  Few have noticed that the rate of improvement of astronomical discovery is now on an ATOM-worthy trajectory, such that this merited an entire chapter in the ATOM publication.  

Here at The Futurist, we have been examining telescopic progress for over a decade.  In September of 2006, I estimated that telescope power was rising at a compounding rate of 26%/year, and that this trend has been ongoing for decades.  26%/year happens to be the square root of Moore's Law, which is precisely what is to be expected, since to double resolution by halving the size of a pixel, one pixel has to be divided into four.  This is also why video game and CGI resolution rises at 26%/year.  

Rising telescope resolution enabled the first exoplanet to be discovered in 1995, and then a steady stream after 2005.  This estimated rate led me to correctly predict that the first Earth-like planets would be discovered by 2010-11, and that happened right on schedule.  But as with many such thresholds, after initial fanfare, the new status quo manifests and people forget what life was like before.  This leads to an continuous underestimation of the rate of change by the average person.

Then, in May 2009, I published one of the most important articles ever written on The Futurist : SETI and the Singularity.  At that time, only 347 exoplanets were known, almost all of which were gas giants much larger than the Earth.  That number has grown to 3693 today, or over ten times as many.  Note how we see the familiar exponential curve inherent to every aspect of the ATOM.  Now, even finding Earth-like planets in the 'life zone' is no longer remarkable, which is another aspect of human psychology towards the ATOM - that a highly anticipated and wondrous advance quickly becomes a normalized status quo and most people forget all the previous excitement.   

The rate of discovery may soon accelerate further as key process components collapse in cost.  Recent computer vision algorithms have proven themselves to be millions of times faster than human examiners.  A large part of the cost of exoplanet discovery instruments like the Kepler Space Observatory is the 12-18 month manual analysis period.  If computer vision can perform this task in seconds, the cost of comparable future projects plummets, and new exoplanets are confirmed almost immediately rather than every other year.  This is another massive ATOM productivity jump that removes a major bottleneck in an existing process structure.  A new mission like Kepler would cost dramatically less than the previous one, and will be able to publish results far more rapidly.  

Given the 26%/year trendline, the future of telescopic discovery becomes easier to predict.  In the same article, I made a dramatic prediction about SETI and the prospects of finding extraterrestrial intelligence.  Many 'enlightened' people are certain that there are numerous extraterrestrial civilizations.  While I too believed this for years (from age 6 to about 35), as I studied the accelerating rate of change, I began to notice that within the context of the Drake equation, any civilization even slightly more advanced than us would be dramatically more advanced.  In terms of such a civilization, while their current activities might very well be indistinguishable from nature to us, their past activities might still be visible as evidence of their existence at that time.  This led me to realize that while there could very well be thousands of planets in our own galaxy that are slightly less advanced that us, it becomes increasingly difficult for there to be one more advanced than us that still manages to avoid detection.  Other galaxies are a different story, simply because the distance between galaxies is itself 10-20 times more than the diameter of the typical galaxy.  Our telescopic capacity is rising 26%/year after all, and the final variable of the Drake equation, fL, has risen from just 42 years at the time of Carl Sagan's famous clip in 1980, to 79 years now, or almost twice as long.  

Hence, the proclamation I had set in 2009 about the 2030 deadline (21 years away at the time) can be re-affirmed, as the 2030 deadline is now only 13 years away.  

Despite the enormity of our galaxy and the wide range of signals that may exist, even this is eventually superseded by exponential detection capabilities.  At least our half of the galaxy will have received a substantial examination of signal traces by 2030.  While a deadline 13 years away seems near, remember that the extent of examination that happens 2017-30 will be more than in all the 400+ years since Galileo, for Moore's Law reasons alone.  The jury is out until then.  

(all images from Wikipedia or Wikimedia).  

 

Related Articles :

New Telescopes to Reveal Untold Wonders

SETI and the Singularity

Telescope Power - Yet Another Accelerating Technology

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

12. The ATOM's Effect on the Final Frontier

  

 

ATOM Award of the Month, September 2017

For September 2017, the ATOM AotM takes a very visual turn.  With some aspects of the ATOM, seeing is believing.    

Before photography, the only image capture was through sketches and paintings.  This was time-consuming, and well under 1% were prosperous enough to have even a single hand-painted portrait of themselves.  For most people, after they died, their families had only memories via which to imagine faces.  If portraits were this scarce, other images were even scarcer.  When image capture was this scarce, people certainly had no chance of seeing places, things, or creatures from far away.  It was impossible to know much about the broader world.    

The very first photograph was taken as far back as 1826, and black&white was the dominant form of the medium for over 135 years.  That it took so long for b&w to transition to color may seem quite surprising, but the virtually non-existent ATOM during this period is consistent with this glacial rate of progress.  The high cost of cameras meant that the number of photographs taken in the first 100 years of photography (1826-1926) was still an extremely small.  Eventually, the progression to color film seemed to be a 'completion' of the technological progression in the minds of most people.  What more could happen after that?  

But the ATOM was just getting started, and it caught up with photography around the turn of the century with relatively little fanfare, even though it was notable that film-based photography and the hassles associated with it were removed from the consumer experience.  The cost of film was suddenly zero, as was the transit time and cost from the development center.  Now, everyone could have thousands of photos, and send those over email endlessly.  Yet, standalone cameras still cost $200 as of 2003, and were too large to be carried around everywhere at all times.  

As the ATOM progressed, digital cameras got smaller and cheaper, even as resolution continued to rise.  It was discovered that the human eye does in fact adapt to higher resolution, and finds previously acceptable lower resolution unacceptable after adapting to higher resolution.  Technology hence forces higher visual acuity and the associated growth of the brain's visual cortex.  

With the rise of the cellular phone, the ATOM enabled more and more formerly discrete devices to be assimilated into the phone, and the camera was one of the earliest and most obvious candidates.  The diffusion of this was very rapid, as we can see from the image that contrasts the 2005 vs. 2013 Papal inaugurations in Vatican City.  Before long, the cost of an integrated camera trended towards zero, to the extent that there is no mobile device that does not have one.  As a result, 2 billion people have digital cameras with them at all times, and stand ready to photograph just about anything they think is important.  Suddenly, there are countless cameras at every scene.  

But lest you think the ubiquity of digital cameras is the end of the story, you are making the same mistake as those who thought color photography on film in 1968 was the end of the road.  Remember that the ATOM is never truly done, even after the cost of a technology approaches zero.  Digital imaging itself is just the preview, for now we have it generating an ever-expanding pile of an even more valuable raw material : data.  

Images contain a large volume of data, particularly the data that associates things with each other (the eyes are to be above the nose, for example).  Data is one of the two fuels of Artificial Intelligence (the other being inexpensive parallel processing).  Despite over a decade of digital images being available on the Internet, only now are there enough of them for AI to draw extensive conclusions from them, and for Google's image search to be a major force in the refinement of Google's Search AI.  Most people don't even remember when Google added image search to its capabilities, but now it is hard to imagine life without it.  

Today, we have immediate access to image search that answers questions in the blink of an eye, and fosters even greater curiosity.  In a matter of seconds, you can look up images for mandrill teeth, the rings of Saturn, a transit of Venus over the Sun, the coast of Capri, or the jaws of Carcharocles Megalodon.  More searches lead to more precise recommendations, and more images continue to be added.  In the past, the accessibility of this information was so limited that the invaluable tangents of curiosity just never formed.  Hence, the creation of new knowledge speeds up.  The curious can more easily pull ahead of the incurious.  

Digital imaging is one of the primary transformations that built the Internet age, and is a core pillar of the impending ascent of AI.  For this reason, it receives the September 2017 ATOM AotM.    

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

 

ATOM Award of the Month, August 2017

For the August 2017 ATOM AotM, we will bend one of the rules.  The rule is that a disruption already has to have begun, and be presently underway.  

But this time, a conversation in the last month's comments brought forth a vision of a quad-layer disruption that is already in the early stages and will manifest in no more than 15 years time.  When fully underway, this disruption will further tighten the screws on government bodies that are far too sclerotic to adapt to the speed of the ATOM.  

To start, we will list out the progression of each of the four disruptions separately.

1) Batteries are improving quickly, and while electric vehicles are not yet competitive in terms of cost and charging speeds (partly due to the true cost of imported oil not being directly visible to consumers).  At the same time, an electric car has far fewer moving parts, and fewer liquids to deal with.  By many estimates, an electric car can last 300,000 before significant deterioration occurs, vs. 150,000 for an internal combustion engine car.  Now, under the current ownership model, a car is driven only 12,000 miles/year and is parked 90% of the time or more.  The second half of an electric vehicle's lifetime (150,001-300,000 miles) would only begin in year 13 and extend until year 25 of ownership, which is not practical.  If only there were a way to avoid having the car remain idle 90% of the time, occupying parking spaces.  It may take until 2032 for electric cars to compress the cost delta to the extent of being superior to ICE cars in total ownership costs for the early years, which then leads to the dividend available in the later years of the electric car's life.  

2) Autonomous vehicles are a very overhyped technology.  Stanford University demonstrated an early prototype in 2007.  Yet even a decade later, a fully autonomous car that operates without any human involvement, let alone the benefit of having a network of such cars, seems scarcely any closer.

Eventually, by about 2032, cars will be fully autonomous, widely adopted, and communicate with each other, greatly increasing driving efficiency through high speeds and far less distance between cars than humans can manage.  Uber-like services will cost 60-80% less than they do now, since the earnings of the human driver are no longer an element of cost, and Uber charges just 20-30% of the fare itself.  It will be cheaper for almost everyone to take the on-demand service all the time, than to own a car outright or even take the bus.  If such a car is driven 20 hours a day, it can in fact accrue 300,000 miles in just 5 years of use.  This effectively is the only way that electric cars can be driven all the way up to the 300,000 limit.  

3) The displacement of brick and mortar retail by e-commerce has far greater implications for the US than for any other country, given the excessive level of land devoted to retails stores and their parking lots.  The most grotesque example of this is in Silicon Valley itself (and to a lesser extent, Los Angeles), where vast retail strip mall parking lots are largely empty, yet are within walking distance of tall, narrow townhouses that cost $1.5M despite taking up footprints of barely 600 sqft each.  

As the closure of more retail stores progresses, and on-demand car usage reduces the need for so many parking spaces, these vast tracts of land can be diverted for another purpose.  In major California metros, the economically and morally sound strategy would be to convert the land into multi-story buildings, preferentially residential.  But extreme regulatory hurdles and resistance towards construction of any new housing supply will leave this land as dead capital for as long as the obstructionists can manage.  

But in the vast open suburbs of the American interior, land is about to go from plentiful to extremely plentiful.  If you think yards in the suburbs of interior cities are large, wait until most of their nearby strip malls are available for redevelopment, and the only two choices are either residential land or office buildings (there are more than enough parks and golf courses in those locations already).  Areas where population is already flat or declining will have little choice but to build even more, and hope that ultra-low real estate costs can attract businesses (this will be no problem at all if the ATOM-DUES program is implemented by then).  

This disruption is not nearly as much a factor in any country other than the US and, to a lesser extent, Australia, as other countries did not misallocate so much land to retail (and the associated parking lots) in the first place.   

4) This fourth disruption is not as essential to this future as the first three, but is highly desirable, simply due to how overdue the disruption is.  It is quite shocking that the least productive industry in the private sector relative to 50 years ago is not education, not medicine, but construction.  US construction productivity has fallen over the last 50 years.  Not merely failed to rise, mind you, but outright declined in absolute terms.  

But remember, under ATOM principles, the more overdue a disruption is, and the more artificial the obstructions thwarting it, the more sudden it is when it eventually happens.  China is not held back by the factors that have led to the abysmally low productivity in US construction, and when there is so much retail land to repurpose, pressure to revive that dead capital will just become too great, even if that means Chinese construction companies have to come in to provide what the US counterparts cannot.  This pressure could be the catalyst of the long overdue construction productivity catchup.  This topic warrants a lengthy article of its own, but that is for another day.  

Hence, the first three factors, and possibly the fourth, combine by 2032 to generate a disruption that will be so comprehensive in the US that the inability of government to change zoning laws and permitting at anything close to the speed of market demand will be greatly exposed.

The first disruption, batteries, alone could be an ATOM AotM, but this time, the cumulative disruption from these multiple factors, even if it will take the next 15 years to accomplish, gets the award.

Related :

The End of Petrotyranny (and Victory)

Why I Want(ed) Oil to Hit $120 per Barrel

A Future Timeline for Automobiles

A Future Timeline for Energy

Why $70/Barrel Oil is (was) Good for America

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

11. Implementation of the ATOM Age for Individuals

 

ATOM Award of the Month, July 2017

The ATOM AotM for July 2017 reminds us of the true core principles of the ATOM.  Whenever anything becomes too expensive relative to value provided, particularly if done so through artificial government intervention in markets, a technological solution invariably replaces the expensive incumbent.  

Taxi medallions, particularly in New York City, are just the crudest form of city government corruption.  Drunk with its own greed, the city ratcheted up the price of taxi medallions from $200,000 in 2003 to $1M in 2013, which is far faster than even the S&P500, let alone inflation.  Note how there was no decline at all during the 2008-09 recession.  This predatory extraction from consumers, much like high oil prices artificially engineered by OPEC, created a market window that might otherwise have not existed until several years later.  This induced the ATOM to address this imbalance sooner than it otherwise might have. and gritty entrepreneurs swiftly founded companies like Uber and Lyft, which provided a dramatically better value for money.  As a result, the price of taxi medallions in NYC fell by 80% from the inflated peak.  The ATOM was at a sufficiently advanced level for the technological response to be as rapid as it was (unlike with, say, expensive oil in the 1973-81 period, when there was almost no ATOM of macroeconomic significance).  Image from aei.org.

Remember that the reduction in cost for a certain ride and demolition of a seemingly intractable government graft obstacle is just the first of several ATOM effects.  The second is the security of each driver and passenger being identified before the ride.  The third is the volume of data that these millions of rides generate (data being one of the two core fuels of Artificial Intelligence).  The fourth is the ability to dynamically adjust to demand spikes (the surge pricing that the economically illiterate malign).  The fifth is the possibility of new service capabilities altogether.  Recall this excerpt from Chapter 11 of the ATOM :  

Automobile commuters with good jobs but lengthy commutes have joined Uber-type platforms to take a rider along with them on the commute they have to undertake anyway. The driver earns an extra $200-$400/week (against which an appropriate portion of car and smartphone costs can be applied as deductions) with no incremental input time or cost.  Meanwhile, other commuters enjoy having one less car on the road for each such dynamically generated carpooling pair.  The key is that a dead commute is now monetized even by corporate-class people, increasing passengers per car and reducing traffic congestion, while replacing dedicated taxicabs.  For the macroeconomy, it also creates new VM where none existed before.

The creation of an entirely new sub-economy, with entirely new velocity-of-money (VM), is where new real wealth creation is the purest.  This effect of these ride-sharing platforms is still in its infancy.  When autonomous vehicles replace human drivers, the loss of driver income is matched (indeed exceeded in post-tax terms) by savings to passengers.  

It does not matter which company ultimately wins (Uber is having some PR problems lately), but rather that the disruption is already irreversible and woven into the fabric of the ATOM and broader society.  Maybe Uber and Lyft will just be to transportation services what Data General and Commodore were to computing.  The point is, this is a superb example of how the ATOM works, and how the transformation is often multi-layered.  

 

ATOM Award of the Month, April 2017

It is time for the ATOM AotM for April 2017, for which we return to an article I wrote way back in 2009.  That article is titled 'The Publishing Disruption', and at the time of writing, we were on the brink of a transformation in content publication as seismic as the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.  Since that time, the anticipated sequence of events unfolded as expected.  

To excerpt from that article, consider how many centuries of background evolution occurred to get us to where we were in 2007 :

What a unique thing a book is.  Made from a tree, it has a hundred or more flexible pages that contain written text, enabling the book to contain a large sum of information in a very small volume.  Before paper, clay tablets, sheepskin parchment, and papyrus were all used to store information with far less efficiency.  Paper itself was once so rare and valuable that the Emperor of China had guards stationed around his paper possessions. 

Before the invention of the printing press, books were written by hand, and few outside of monastaries knew how to read.  There were only a few thousand books in all of Europe in the 14th century.  Charlemagne himself took great effort to learn how to read, but never managed to learn how to write, which still put him ahead of most kings of the time, who were generally illiterate. 

But with the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century, it became possible to make multiple copies of the same book, and before long, the number of books in Europe increased from thousands to millions. 

But then, note how incredibly low-tech and low-productivity the traditional publishing industry still was well into the 21st century : 

Fast forward to the early 21st century, and books are still printed by the millions.  Longtime readers of The Futurist know that I initially had written a book (2001-02), and sought to have it published the old-fashioned way.  However, the publishing industry, and literary agents, were astonishingly low-tech.  They did not use email, and required queries to be submitted via regular mail, with a self-addressed, stamped envelope included.  So I had to pay postage in both directions, and wait several days for a round trip to hear their response.  And this was just the literary agents.  The actual publishing house, if they decide to accept your book, would still take 12 months to produce and distribute the book even after the manuscript was complete.  Even then, royalties would be 10-15% of the retail price.  This prospect did not seem compelling to me, and I chose to parse my book into this blog you see before you.

The refusal by the publishing industry to use email and other productivity-enhancing technologies as recently as 2003 kept their wages low.  Editors always moaned that they worked 60 hours a week just to make $50,000 a year, the same as they made in 1970.  My answer to them is that they have no basis to expect wage increases without increasing their productivity through technology. 

An industry this far behind was just begging to be disrupted.  As we have seen from the ATOM, the more overdue a particular disruption is, the more dramatic and swift the disruption when it eventually occurs, as the distance to travel just to revert to the trendline of that particular innovation, is great.  Proceeding further in the original article :

The Amazon Kindle launched in late 2007 at the high price of $400.  Many people feel that the appeal of holding a physical book in our hands cannot be replaced by a display screen, and take a cavalier attitude towards dismissing e-readers.  The tune changes upon learning that the price of a book on an e-reader is just a third of what the paper form at a brick-and-mortar bookstore, with sales tax, would cost. 

As of 2017, an entry-level Kindle 8 costs just $80 (with 3 GB of storage), yet is far more advanced than the $400 Kindle of 2007 (with just 250 MB of storage).  Cumulative Kindle sales are estimated to be over 100 million units now.  Statista attribution link.  

But the Kindle hardware is not the real disruption, as it is a new purchase imposed on people who needed no such device to read paper books.  The real ATOM disruption is in books themselves.  Now, an author can publish directly on Kindle, and at a $10 sales price, immediately begins to receive a 70% royalty.  Contrast that with the 10-15% royalty on a $20 sales price in traditional book publishing, that too after a 12-month waiting period even after the manuscript is complete.  While bound books may still make sense for famous authors, the new market created by the Kindle has enabled the publication of many books that only expect to sell 10,000 copies.  There is no material involved, so the production and distribution cost of any such publication has literally fallen by a factor of millions.  A hefty cost is now no cost, precisely as the ATOM predicts.   

2017 is the year where e-book sales have surpassed print and audio book sales, as per the chart.  Since the previous article, brick and mortar bookstores have seen a torrent of closures.  Borders Bookstores has completely shut down all of its 511 bookstores in the US.  Barnes & Noble still exists, partly due to capturing the residual Borders revenue, but a growing share of B&N's in-store revenue is now from the coffee shop, magazines, and certain specialty book sales.   

The unshackling of the bottom 99% of authors and aspiring authors from the extreme inefficiency of the traditional publishing industry has unleashed more content than was ever possible before, and is a market upgrade just as significant as that of the Gutenberg press in the 15th century.  It is also a perfect demonstration of the accelerating rate of change, for while it took centuries for the diffusion of printed books to manifest, the e-book transformation was in mere years.  For this reason, the Amazon Kindle and e-book ecosystem are the winner of April 2017's ATOM Award of the Month.  I need more candidate submissions for future ATOM AotM awards.  

Related ATOM Chapters :

3 : Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

4 : The Overlooked Economics of Technology

 

ATOM Award of the Month, March 2017

It is that time of the month again.  For our third ever award of the ATOM AotM, we return to an article I wrote over 10 years ago about the lighting revolution.  At that time, when the disruption was still in the future, I highlighted how the humble status of the light fixture leads to an associated disruption going widely unnoticed.  That continues to be true even today, despite the important product transition that most people have already undertaken.  

So the ATOM AotM award for March 2017 goes to the LED lightbulb.  Something that most people do not even notice is a major engine of the ATOM, as it has introduced rapid price/performance improvements into what used to be a stagnant product.

Charge of the Light Brigade :  Remember that the average household has about 25 light bulbs on average.  From the chart, we can see that light output per until of energy and cost per watt of LED lighting are both improving rapidly, leading to a double-exponential effect.  Lighting is hence now fully in the path of the ATOM and is seeing progress at a rate entirely beyond what the predecessor technology could have have experienced, and is indeed one of the fastest technology shifts ever.  Bulbs are now purchased in packs of 4-12 units, rather than the single-unit purchases of the recent past.  The expected electricity savings worldwide are estimated to be over $100 Billion per year in the near future.  

The domino effects of this are immense.  Follow the sequence of steps below :

• LED bulbs are reducing the electricity consumed by lighting.
• This reduction in demand more than accommodates the proliferation of electric cars.  The first 100 million electric cars worldwide (a level we are still extremely far from) will merely offset the loss of electricity demand for lighting.  
• The spread of electric cars with no net rise in electricity consumption nonetheless reduces oil consumption and hence oil imports.  The US already has a trade surplus with OPEC, for the first time in half a century, and this force is strengthening further.  Even if the price per barrel of oil had not fallen through fracking, the number of imported barrels still would have plunged.  
• So even though most lighting is not fueled by oil, it created a puncture point through which a second-degree blow to oil demand arose.  

That is truly amazing, making LED lighting not just a component of the ATOM but one of the largest disruptions currently underway.  

That concludes this month's ATOM AotM.  I need more reader submissions to ensure we have a good award each month.  

Related :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening.

The Imminent Revolution in Lighting, and Why it is More Important Than You Think

 

ATOM Award of the Month, February 2017

After the inaugural award in January, a new month brings a new ATOM AotM.  This time, we go to an entirely different sector than we examined last time.  The award for this month goes to the collaboration between the Georgia Institute of Technology, Udacity, and AT&T to provide a fully accredited Masters of Science in Computer Science degree, for the very low price of $6700 on average. 

The disruption in education is a topic I have written about at length.  In essence, most education is just a transmission of commoditized information, that, like every other information technology, should be declining in cost.  However, the corrupt education industry has managed to burrow deep into the emotions of its customers, to such an extent that a rising price for a product of stagnant (often declining) quality is not even questioned.  For this reason, education is in a bubble that is already in the process of deflating.  

What the MSCS at GATech accomplishes is four-fold :

• Lowering the cost of the degree by almost an order of magnitude compared to the same degree as similarly-ranked schools
• Making the degree available without relocation to where the institution is physically located
• Scaling the degree to an eventual intake of 10,000 students, vs. just 300 that can attend a traditional in-residence program at GATech
• Establishing best practices for other departments at GATech, and other institutions, to implement in order to create a broader array of MOOC degree programs

After a slow start, enrollment now is reported to be over 3300 students, representing a significant fraction of students presently studying MS-level computer science at equal or higher ranked schools.  The only reason enrollment has not risen all the way up to the full 10,000 is due to insufficient resourcefulness in shopping around and implementing ATOM principles to greatly increase one's living standards through ATOM means.  Aside from perhaps the top two schools like MIT and Stanford, there is perhaps no greater value for money than the GATech MSCS, which will become apparent as the slower adopters drift towards the program, particularly from overseas.  

Eventually, the sheer size of enrollment will rapidly lead to GATech becoming a dominant alumni community within computer science, forcing other institutions to catch up.  When this competition lowers costs even further, we will see one of the most highly paid and future-proof professions being accessible at little or no cost.  When contrasted to the immense costs of attending medical or law school, many borderline students will pursue computer science ahead of professions with large student debt burdens, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of ever-more computer science and ATOM propagation.  The fact that one can enroll in the program from overseas will attract many students from countries that do not even have schools of GATech's caliber (i.e. most countries), generating local talent despite remote education.  

Crucially, this is strong evidence of how the ATOM always finds new ways to expand itself, since the field most essential to the feeding of the ATOM, computer science, is the one that found a way to greatly increase the number of people destined to work in it, by attacking both cost thresholds and enrollment volumes.  This is not a coincidence, because the ATOM always finds a way around anything that is inhibiting the growth of the ATOM, in this case, access to computer science training.  Subsequent to this, the ATOM can increase the productivity of education even in less ATOM-crucial fields medicine, law, business, and K-12, since the greatly expanded size of the computer science profession will provide entrepreneurs and expertise to make this happen.  This is how the ATOM captures an ever-growing share of the economy into rapidly-deflating technological fundamentals.   

As always, the ATOM AotM succeeds through reader suggestions, so feel free to suggest candidates.  Criteria include the size and scope of the disruption, how anti-technology the disrupted incumbent was, and an obvious improvement in the quality of a large number of lives through this disruption.  

Related :

The Education Disruption : 2015

11. Implementation of the ATOM Age for Individuals 

 

ATOM Award of the Month, January 2017

With the new year, we are starting a new article series here at The Futurist.  The theme will be a recognition of exceptional innovation.  Candidates can be any industry, corporation, or individual that has created an innovation exemplifying the very best of technological disruption.  The more ATOM principles exhibited in an innovation (rising living standards, deflation acting in proportion to prior inflation in the incumbent industry, rapid continuous technological improvement, etc.), the greater the chance of qualification.

The inaugural winner of the ATOM Award of the Month is the US hydraulic fracturing industry.  While 'fracking' garnered the most news in 2011-13, the rapid technological improvements continued.  Natural gas continues to hover around just $3, making the US one of the most competitive countries in industries where natural gas is a large input.  Oil prices continue to fall due to ever-improving efficiencies, and from this chart (you must see this all-important chart), we can see how many of the largest fields have seen breakevens fall from $80 to under $40 in just the brief 2013-16 period.  This is of profound importance, because now even $50 is a profitable price for US shale oil.  There is no indication that this trend of lower breakeven prices has stopped.  Keep in mind that the massive shale formations in California are not even being accessed yet due to radical obstruction, but a breakeven of $30 or lower ensure the pressure to extract this profit from the Monterrey shale continues to rise.  Beyond that, Canada has not yet begun fracking of its own, and when it does, it will certainly have at least as much additional oil as the US found.  

This increase, which is just an extra 3M barrels/day to US supply, was nonetheless enough to capsize this highly elastic market and crash world oil prices from $100+ to about $50.  Given the improving breakevens, and possibility of new production, this will continue to pressure oil prices for the foreseeable future.  This has led to the US turning the tables on OPEC and reversing a large trade deficit into what is now a surplus.  

If you told any of those 'peak oil' Malthusians that the US would soon have a trade surplus with OPEC, they would have branded you as a lunatic.  Note how that ill-informed Maoist-Malthusian cult utterly vanished.  Furthermore, this plunge in oil prices has strengthened the economies of other countries that import most of their oil, from Japan to India.  

Under ATOM principles, technology always finds a way to lower the cost of something that has become artificially expensive and is hence obstructing the advancement of other technologies.  Oil was a premier example of this, as almost all technological innovation is done in countries that have to import large portions of their oil, while almost none is done by oil exporters.  Excess wealth accumulation by oil exporters was an anti-technology impediment, and demanded the attention of a good portion of the ATOM.  Remember that the worldwide ATOM is of an ever rising size, and comprises of the sum total of all technological products in production at a given time (currently, about 2% of world GDP).  Hence, all technological disruptions are interconnected, and when the ATOM is freed up from the completion of a certain disruption, that amount of disruptive capacity becomes available to tackle something new.  Given the size of this disruption to oil prices and production geography, this occupied a large portion of the ATOM for a few years, which means a lot of ATOM capacity is now free to act elsewhere.

This disruption was also one of the most famous predictions of mine here at The Futurist.  In 2011, I predicted that high oil prices was effectively a form of burning a candle at both ends and such prices were jolting at least six compensating technologies into overdrive.  I provided an equation predicting when oil would topple, and it toppled well in accordance with that prediction (even sooner than the equation estimated).  

This concludes our very first ATOM AotM to kick off the new year.  I need candidate submissions from readers in order to get a good pool to select from.  Criteria include the size and scope of the disruption, how anti-technology the disrupted incumbent was, and an obvious improvement in the quality of a large number of lives through this disruption.