SITALWeek #301
Welcome to Stuff I Thought About Last Week, a collection of topics on tech, innovation, science, the digital economic transition, the finance industry, cobots, 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: lawn mowing robots and deflationary cobot trends; agtech; robots taking over bike lanes; big platforms retreat in healthcare to focus on wearables; merchandising streaming; tokenomics and a shift from profit maximization; creating the digital copy of the world for better building design; stimulating the vagus nerve; and lots more below...
Stuff about Innovation and Technology
AI Enables Perfect Lawn Stripes
Scythe is an autonomous electric lawnmower designed for landscapers. Once it learns a yard, it can mow on its own (using AI/sensors to spot potential hazards so the local golf course doesn’t turn into a scene out of 1989’s Blades, the Jaws-meets-Caddyshack mashup with a sentient lawnmower instead of a shark) while the operator tends to hedges and whatnot. Lawn tools are notorious environmental and noise polluters, and this video demo implies the electric Scythe is significantly quieter than a typical 90dB gas mower. Scythe is a good example of how autonomous technology will find a market in purpose-built robots well ahead of consumer vehicles. Having AI working alongside humans is also a viable method for countering inflationary trends, ultimately eliminating some jobs in industries where humans can work alongside cobots to do the job of more than one person.
Bike Lanes = Robot Lanes
With fully autonomous vehicles far off on the horizon (see #298), bike lanes are going to be co-opted by a slew of delivery bots traveling at bike speeds, such as the pizza-delivering REV-1 in Austin. This move is likely to create a new emphasis on bigger, safer bike lanes, which could result in more biking as well. Cyclists should also benefit from the fact drivers will probably exhibit more care regarding bike/bot lanes that include robots delivering precious ‘za.
Ag AI
John Deere now has more software engineers than mechanical engineers. Its CTO discusses AI farming: the “idea of enabling each individual plant in production agriculture to be tended to by a master gardener. The master gardener is in this case probably some AI that is enabling a farmer to know exactly what that particular plant needs, when it needs it, and then our equipment provides them the capability of executing on that plan that master gardener has created for that plant on an extremely large scale.
You’re talking about, in the case of corn, for example, 50,000 plants per acre, so a master gardener taking care of 50,000 plants for every acre of corn. That’s where this is headed, and you can picture the data intensity of that. Two hundred million acres of corn ground, times 50,000 plants per acre; each one of those plants is creating data, and that’s the enormity of the scale of production agriculture when you start to get to this plant-by-plant management basis.” The full interview is worth a read to understand the software, data, connectivity, and semiconductor challenges in the ag industry.
Pan-Fueled Email Surge
Microsoft’s Work Trends report on hybrid work shows that we sent over 40B more monthly work emails compared to pre-pandemic. By May of 2020, we were sending around 25B more emails, which steadily climbed to 40.6B by Feb 2021. The top productivity software providers, Microsoft and Google, are both pushing workers toward chat and meetings to replace some of that one-way email communication and lessen the gap to competitors like Slack. Google enabled chat and rooms for all Gmail users, and Microsoft has some new meeting features designed to put office and remote workers on more equal footing.
Wearables are Healthcare’s Only Hope
The tech giants have tried to disrupt healthcare for at least fifteen years, starting with Google Health’s first attempts to digitize health records in 2006. That effort was discontinued in 2012, restarted in 2018, and now Business Insider reports Google health is reorganizing again with employees moving to search (e.g., for connecting people to doctors and diagnostic services) and Fitbit (which Google acquired earlier this year). Apple has also struggled with its ambitious healthcare efforts, according to the WSJ, and recently narrowed its focus to just the Apple Watch. Similarly, Microsoft launched consumer health initiative HealthVault in 2007 and subsequently shut it down in 2019. Amazon, for now, remains the sole platform pushing forward with broad health initiatives that go beyond wearable technology (covered briefly in #297 and #289). I would think AI, combined with data from wearable devices, has the best shot at slicing through the Gordian Knot of systemic misaligned incentives in US healthcare (or, as mentioned last week, the “sickness and disability-care” system, as Russell Ackoff calls it).
Ambient Merch
Netflix is looking to emulate Disney’s success in merchandising content. Merchandising is most successful in conjunction with long-lived theme properties and shows with high-frequency viewing, like kids’ shows on ViacomCBS’ Nickelodeon that are watched daily. As such, merchandising would be somewhat at odds with Netflix’s binge viewing strategy and relatively short-lived shows (side note: binge watching has been losing out to weekly releases as viewers shift to the new streaming apps from the big studios; personally, I prefer the weekly release, especially two episodes a week like HBO Max did with Hacks). Netflix is often criticized for the dreaded post-season-two cancellations as they create more and more new content to keep the subscriber treadmill running. I’d like to believe that great content comes first, and merchandising is a side effect, but one thing I learned from the great documentary series The Toys that Made Us (which Netflix distributed but did not produce) is that oftentimes the toys come first, and then the shows are created around them. Disney’s strength is clearly in creating universes of characters and high-frequency episodic stories with authentic, personal connections that, in turn, create the opportunity for merchandising and in-park experiences (I've been hoping for Netflixland for over two years). While there is some great content on Netflix, there is a lot of ambient TV, which is unlikely to create durable franchises. Netflix opened a store (using Shopify) last week to sell merch tied to shows like Stranger Things and The Witcher. I would probably buy a The Toys that Made Us t-shirt.
Tokenomics: DeFi’s Inverted Business Model
Mark Cuban penned an interesting essay on how DeFi businesses can avoid costly, dilutive fundraising by creating a “near zero cost token that they distribute in accordance with the tokenomics they defined to their community (and whose approval is required to make any changes).” (Tokenomics is the way the various tokens created by a blockchain business are governed.) Cuban expands: “where a crypto based business competes with a traditional business, the crypto business may have a significant cost of capital and cost of operations advantage. There are a lot of financial institutions that should be concerned.” And then there’s the big mental inversion that those of us who have looked at traditional businesses forever need to make: these companies don’t maximize profits, they maximize token value. Which leads to a different concept of governance: token holders are in control (depending on how the token system is structured), so, in effect, customers could be driving the product’s strategy. This essay by John Chen, sent to me by a reader, discusses the marriage of tokens and SaaS, suggesting a new model for acquiring customers with token incentives.
Nvidia's Rapidly Expanding Omniverse
Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang did a press conference covering a range of interesting topics. He ties together the increasingly connected potential of the metaverse, blockchain, and DeFi, arguing that the digital economy will dwarf the analog one: “In the case of Omniverse, back to that again, let me make a couple of predictions. This is very important. I believe that there will be a larger market, a larger industry, more designers and creators, designing digital things in virtual reality and metaverses than there will be designing things in the physical world. Today, most of the designers are designing cars and buildings and things like that. Purses and shoes. All of those things will be many times larger, maybe 100 times larger, in the metaverse than in our universe. Number two, the economy in the metaverse, the economy of Omniverse, will be larger than the economy in the physical world. Digital currency, cryptocurrency, could be used in the world of metaverses.” Huang also described how Nvidia’s new HQ was completely designed using the company’s chips and Omniverse design tools to optimize for natural light while minimizing the need for air conditioning. The hallways are wider to accommodate future robots scooting around, and everything can be simulated in a photorealistic digital copy. And, he also threw some shade on AMD and Intel by calling CPUs commodities, even as Nvidia is supposedly still trying to buy Arm: “Nvidia doesn’t make commodity components. We’re not in the DRAM business or the flash business or the CPU business.”
Cloudflare’s Alternative to Cloud Computing
Macrometa is a distributed database company built on Cloudflare Workers, the serverless application platform. In some sense, Cloudflare is building out an alternative to cloud platforms like AWS. Ultimately, running applications on Cloudflare could be less expensive than on the large, centralized cloud data centers because an edge processing approach avoids the costs of having to move data in and out of the cloud and improves speed. Running at the edge also helps with low-latency or critical applications like autonomous pizza delivery robots. Also, it’s worth emphasizing the importance of platforms, including Cloudflare, that enable the creation of new businesses, an indicator of non-zero sumness and long-term success in the Digital Age.
Miscellaneous Stuff
Bioelectric Medicine
We covered the vagus nerve in SITALWeek #226, noting: “its ubiquitous importance, including in mood regulation (perhaps because 95% of the body’s serotonin is produced in the enteric nervous system and connected to the brain via the vagus). You can take care of your vagus with stretching, deep breathing, yoga, massage, and other forms of movement.” In SITALWeek #255, we mentioned gammaCore, a vagus nerve stimulator that received emergency FDA approval for treatment of COVID-induced asthma. A new study shows that using the gammaCore to send millisecond bursts of electricity to the side of the neck releases wakefulness chemicals, which helped Air Force members perform better after all-nighters. The device has been previously shown effective in treating cluster headaches and migraines. The vagus nerve has more than 100,000 fibers connecting nearly every internal organ to the brain, and governs aspects of basic bodily function, memory, emotion, and our sense of self. This Science Magazine article covers the vagus nerve and interoception, including the various ways the mind and body are much more connected (e.g., mood, metabolism, and digestion) than conventional wisdom would lead us to believe.
Stuff about Geopolitics, Economics, and the Finance Industry
NZS’ Chief Beekeeper Talks Complexity
Brinton was on the MOI Global podcast talking about NZS Capital and Complexity Investing with host John Mihaljevic:
“We had the pleasure of speaking with Brinton Johns, a co-founder and investor at NZS Capital, about the firm’s investment philosophy and process.
Specifically, we dug into the topic of complexity investing, which Brinton and his team have championed for years.
NZS believes that ‘the economy and the stock market are best understood as biological systems: specifically, complex adaptive systems. Complex systems have unpredictable outcomes; therefore, as investors, we focus on companies that are adaptable, long-term focused, innovative, possess long-duration growth, and maximize non-zero-sum outcomes.’
In 2014, Brinton and fellow NZS co-founder Brad Slingerlend published a white paper on complexity investing. The paper remains highly influential.”
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Disclaimers:
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