SITALWeek #260
Welcome to Stuff I Thought About Last Week, a collection of topics on tech, innovation, science, the digital economic transition, the finance industry, salad bots, and whatever else made me think last week. Please grab me on Twitter with any thoughts or feedback.
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In today’s post: from rocks to salad-making robots to Neuralink; how much video content will be interactive in five years? Are we ready for ambient surveillance wearables? Dolly Parton; WFH sending jobs offshore; the Fed shift and the best way to offset deflation; and lots more below...
Stuff about Innovation and Technology
Salad-Bot Sally
Sally the salad-bot, made by Chowbotics, looks like your typical vending machine, but can prepare fresh salads with up to 22 ingredients of your choice. This type of chef-bot is ideal for the pandemic era, which has seen the decommissioning of most salad bars around the world. The machines are monitored remotely to determine when the fresh, sealed ingredients need to be replenished. In other automated food news, Mastercard is working on cashierless, self-serve mini stores and vending machines that allow you to grab whatever you want using Amazon-Go-like technology.
From Rocks to Neuralink
The word "robot" was coined 100 years ago, according to a long read in National Geographic Magazine on robots and cobots in the September print edition (available online here for magazine subscribers). The pandemic’s timing coincides with increased integration of machine vision, sensors, and other components, as well as with a shortage of skilled labor in many industries, creating the perfect storm for robot demand. I recently lamented (#257) the rather stunted robot industry, but I’m becoming increasingly optimistic that a wide array of heterogeneous, automated machines are poised to take off soon, largely working alongside humans rather than replacing us (for now). And, as robots rise in use, the world will adapt to accommodate them. Taylor Farms, for example, is working on a new shape for its lettuce heads to enable harvesting by robots, according to the Nat Geo article. Humans are tool-building machines. We’ve co-evolved with the tools we’ve created since the first stones were put to use. There is a direct line from those rudimentary rocks to Elon Musk’s Neuralink, announced this past week (here’s the video of the full demo). The implant will eventually cost only a few thousand dollars and will have numerous medical applications – from helping people walk to treating depression. What struck me about Musk’s new creation is the vertical integration needed to create something so complex. Neuralink is designing custom chips, writing the software, designing the device with neurosurgeons, taking care of their test pigs, and even building the robotic surgery machine that implants the Neuralink. The announcement was presented as a recruiting tool to entice people in all disciplines to come work for the company, and the event hit that mark squarely. When asked whether the device will help us answer questions about consciousness, Elon discussed how amazing it is that life went from hydrogen atoms to consciousness, and one of his engineers then quipped “it turns out if you bombard earth with enough photons, you get a Tesla”, referring to the evolution of life in the presence of a nearby, accommodating star. Resistance is futile.
Battery-Powered Face Mask
LG is set to unveil a battery-powered, dual-fan, HEPA-filtration face mask. The carrying case recharges the mask (which has up to eight hours of battery life) and disinfects it with UV. No word on whether it will also have 5G. While it obviously seems like a gimmick and is easy to make fun of (like, can it also do a Darth Vader voice?!), the potential commercial applications of this type of device – with additional sensors and monitoring for construction, mining, hospital workers, etc. – are interesting.
The Legacy IT Paradox
The accelerated transition to the cloud from legacy, on-premises IT systems will still take decades to complete, but it's astounding to look at how much money is being wasted to keep outdated and vulnerable systems limping along. According to IEEE Spectrum: “Since 2010, corporations and governments worldwide have spent an estimated $35 trillion on IT products and services. Of this amount, about three-quarters went toward operating and maintaining existing IT systems. And at least $2.5 trillion was spent on trying to replace legacy IT systems, of which some $720 billion was wasted on failed replacement efforts.” Federal IT systems are even worse off because the amount they spend on modernizing is shrinking while maintenance is growing, and 75% of the government's 7,000 systems spend zero on modernizing. Given the pace of change in the economy, companies still running on old IT are probably more likely to lose share to modern competitors in various industries. The pace of innovation and share gains at Square compared to traditional banks comes to mind as an example.
Amazon’s Halo Wearable Gets Personal
Amazon’s new Halo health wearable (which was allegedly snaked from a startup Amazon looked at investing in) features Tone, a service that monitors your conversations throughout the day to let you know how you are feeling. This feature presents some complex questions that don’t yet have answers. First, the software is obviously listening to the person you’re having a conversation with – is everyone ok with that? We are clearly moving into an ambient surveillance society, or, more accurately, we are reverting to one – in tribes of 50-100 early humans, everyone knew everything about each other. Then we need to think about data. Who in their right mind would trust Amazon to scrupulously protect this incredibly personal and sensitive data? They may be committing to not using it for advertising or other purposes today, but they don’t appear to be giving any real control to consumers. But, on the positive side, this type of feedback could save people decades on the meditation cushion and possibly actually make people happier. Imagine a wearable that uses skin and voice sensors to stop you from saying that really stupid thing you know you don’t mean and will surely regret! And, then there’s the really tricky stuff: such a device would know if you were in love with someone well before you knew it yourself. And, what about hackability – will Russia or China be in control of your emotions? Humans haven’t even figured out how to deal with fake news, so I don’t think we’re ready for this tech yet. But, to answer the question that’s on everyone’s mind: no, Halo does not tell time. In other wearable news, I did find myself pre-ordering the new Fitbit Sense smart watch (I currently use the Fitbit Versa 2). The new version has added features such as GPS (coming for Garmin’s 10% smart watch share), ECG (a.k.a. EKG), and EDA (electrodermal activity) for monitoring your anxiety levels based on sweat, a signal from your sympathetic nervous system. It also tells time. We’ve been waiting nine months for Google’s acquisition of Fitbit to be approved by regulators with no end in sight. One thing is for certain – over the next decade, the data from wearables will turn the entire global healthcare system upside down and inside out, driving a major shift from treatment to prevention.
Video Game Rivals Hollywood’s Best
Sony’s June-released action-adventure game, The Last of Us Part II, showcases the rise of cinematic-quality graphics/storylines and has gamers binge playing Netflix style, according to Bloomberg. (Here is the trailer on YouTube). Increasingly, the lines are blurring between interactive and passive video content. As I mentioned last week, it’s a broad prediction that people will be watching more content in five years, but it’s hard to know what the mix will be between interactive storytelling universes (gaming like Fortnite etc.), lean-back-and-watch content like today’s TV series/movies, and life streaming via various platforms. With more movie production staged within game engines like Unity and Unreal, and tech like Disney’s new face-swapping AI (see #252), how long before a movie or TV show is digitally transformed into an interactive experience for viewers? In the meantime, streaming platforms face a dearth of new content due to pandemic production shutdowns, according to The Guardian. This phenomenon may outlive the pandemic. As content becomes more complex and interactive, increasingly only a small number of global platforms will be able to pay multiples more for all content, regardless of whether they make it in-house or buy from other studios, thus crowding out smaller channels and platforms. This type of winner-takes-most trajectory is typical for industries in the Information Age, where network effects and data create large advantages. Consumers get more content, and producers of content get more money. However, taken to the extreme, if there is only one company that controls everything, they won’t have to pay a premium anymore for content and they can charge what they want to consumers. But, the beauty of the Information Age is that anyone can stand up a new, higher positive-sum company built in the cloud and start anew.
Lego Semi Fab
Samsung Semiconductor built a working 520:1 scale model of its Pyeongtaek Semiconductor Line 1 out of Legos. The clean room alone took 15,000 bricks to build. Here’s a short video they shared.
TikTok Buyout Cynicism
I hate being cynical – being skeptical is good, but cynicism assumes the worst. Cynics are never right in the long term (not once in the history of the universe). Cynics are loud and often sound smart, but they add zero value toward finding solutions to complex problems. Cynics are negative sum creatures. Before radio, television, and the Internet, it was much harder to know what was true, so humans had better skeptic muscles and training back then. But, we got so used to having so much information we got lazy and let our skeptic muscles atrophy, which is a key reason why we have such a hard time with fake news today, and why you can’t turn around without seeing cynicism. That’s a roundabout explanation for why I'm a little hesitant to report that I'm cynical regarding the potential acquisition of TikTok by pretty much everyone currently in the running. People are fickle, and teenagers especially so, as this 2009 FT article on the bidding war and subsequent fall of MySpace reminds us. MySpace was a great asset, and the people running it following the acquisition were really smart and had great intentions (I met with them frequently 10-15 years ago). It’s hard to make an analogy to TikTok, but big companies have competing internal interests, and frequently have a hard time allowing for the creativity and freedom needed in a disruptive industry. What makes me more cynical than skeptical of the TikTok deal is that the motives seem suspect, at best. Oracle is trying to defend a multi-billion-dollar, sketchy, ad-targeting business as they lose access to the Apple IDFA and Chrome cookie data, so they have an existential need for the data on the 100M US users of TikTok. Walmart? Softbank? Microsoft? Netflix? Alphabet? This is a weird situation. Well, I suppose Elon Musk was right when he said at the Neuralink reveal last week: “the future is going to be weird”.
Miscellaneous Stuff
Wisdom of Jaron Lanier
This GQ profile of technologist Jaron Lanier contains many insightful nuggets. I’ve followed Lanier since 2010 when I read his book, You are Not a Gadget, about the design flaws in the Internet and other modern tech systems, which are now ultimately leading to lives being lost due to algorithms and manipulations. I also mentioned Lanier a few weeks back as the mastermind of Microsoft Teams’ new feature that will place your video self in a room with others to create a more realistic video conferencing interaction. There’s one line in the article describing the loneliness of the Big Tech execs during the recent congressional hearing that is a bit chilling: “Even Big Tobacco had friends.”
Way Beyond 9 to 5
Billboard ran a nice profile on the prolific and successful artist/business executive Dolly Parton (who is also popular with my podcast listeners, according to Spotify!). At age 74, she often starts her day at 4am to review options to build her brand and business empire. Amusingly, BMI presented Parton with an award for 10M cumulative radio and live performances of her 1974 hit “I will Always Love You”...on Spotify the song has been played over 50M times – 5x the entire amount of its analog life (on just one streaming platform that’s only been around for a little over a decade!).
The Latticework
Blas Moros is building a new resource for multi-disciplinary thinking and learning called The Latticework. I already find myself consulting it frequently to look up concepts that I need to sharpen my recollection of or learn more about. It’s early days for the project, but there is some great content already on there, so sign up and check it out! (Read through the introduction and vision sections, and then add your email to the ‘join us’ page for access if you like what you see.)
Stuff about Geopolitics, Economics, and the Finance Industry
Work-from-Offshore-Home
Identity platform Okta will allow any employee to work from home permanently going forward. As a result of US anti-immigration policies, this will mean a lot of high paying jobs and economic activity will be leaving the country. “About 70 Okta employees have already sought to take advantage of the remote work policy. Among them are a handful of employees outside the United States who could not enter the country to work due to Trump's extended limits on temporary worker visas, which were announced in June and strongly opposed by the tech industry. Another group of foreign-born employees asked to work remotely full-time because they feared the uncertainty created by the administration's policies, according to McKinnon, who described himself as ‘frustrated’ by the rules. ‘Directly because of what the US administration is doing, it's led them to not want to have to deal with the problem and we've been able to move them to other countries, like Canada.’”
Wrong Direction for Tech Regulation
The US House panel investigating Big Tech is floating the idea of Glass-Steagall-type reforms that would block tech companies from competing on their own platforms. I would guess that this would effectively mean that Amazon couldn’t sell anything first party that a third-party seller wanted to sell, and Apple couldn’t have Apple Music, etc. There’s no Industrial Age solution to fostering competition that would work in the Information/AI Age, and this type of reform is certainly a terrible idea that would be a lose-lose for everyone. What you want is more competition not less. Apple should be able to keep Apple Music but also be required to open iOS to all other app stores. Amazon should be required to host other third-party marketplaces. Most of all, data should be freed up, and consumers should be in charge of which third parties can access the data harvested and hoarded by these big platforms. (Our thoughts on tech regulation can be found here for the truly bored amongst you.)
Fed Policy Paradigm Shift
The Fed signaled an official change last week in its 43-year-old stance on inflation: instead of proactively eliminating excessive inflation before it happens (with interest rate hikes) to accommodate a target employment level in the economy (a flawed theory to begin with), they will now allow inflation to go above the prior target of 2%. In essence, it appears the Fed is willing to let go of the idea that targeting inflation impacts the unemployment level given the overriding deflationary impacts on the economy. Targeting inflation is an odd, 1900’s economist mentality that I don’t understand (and I even have a 1900’s degree in economics!). Nominal GDP grows in part due to rising prices, but nominal GDP doesn’t reflect the wellbeing of the 7B+ people on Earth in any meaningful way. We’ve had plenty of GDP growth while real wages for the vast majority of Americans have stagnated for 40 years (Ole Peters suggests DDP, Democratic Domestic Product, as an alternative).
If we pay less for something today that is similar, or even much better, than something we paid more for ten years ago, that seems like a good thing. Paying more for the same thing seems like a bad thing. But, let’s pretend, for a moment, that we have real knowledge that targeting 2% inflation is as important as some 1900’s economists think it is. We are currently in a long-term deflationary cycle due to technological acceleration (see the end of SITALWeek #258); and, even though rates CANNOT go up for existential reasons (see the end of SITALWeek #257), let’s assume that increased lending and money supply aren’t going to be enough to cause the desired amount of inflation. What might we do then to achieve structural, modest, positive inflation? How about sending checks to people? Perhaps lots of checks for a long time? Checks that would get everyone above the poverty line and meet basic needs, or perhaps even a little more? This action would have the double impact of potentially decreasing the labor pool (as some would opt out of working, thus increasing wages to entice people to work) and driving demand for goods and services that might increase inflation as well (or, at the very least, help offset the tsunami of deflation coming). Given that many people don’t even have enough money for groceries with the stimulus-check slowdown (as the WSJ reports), we might even find that we can print lots (and lots!) of checks, and still not worry about runaway, long-term inflation – especially given the nascent deflationary trends that are just beginning to accelerate as we approach the cusp of the AI Age (my apologies to all the gold fanatics worried about inflation!). It’s remarkable that we’ve seen such little inflation so far, even with structural inflation in big spending categories like healthcare and housing. Imagine when tech starts to drive healthcare costs way down (as it shifts the industry from treatment to prevention), tech-enabled work-from-home causes a migratory shift to cities with lower costs of living, and meat is grown in labs near consumption rather than on expensive, faraway farms? While it is by no means a sure thing, it’s becoming even easier to paint the picture of long-term, structural deflation/disinflation and low rates (of course with the risk of significant short-term shocks at any time).
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