(2/3) Tackling the future: internet agents, energy, cars and aircrafts
In this second article, I continue to break down each points from Vinod Khosla and unpack the unique challenges attaining such “possible…
In this second article, I continue to break down each points from Vinod Khosla and unpack the unique challenges attaining such “possible future”, if you want to reread his points or just opened this article, here is his presentation:
I am not going to fully reiterate his points here, just focusing on the title and my reaction, let’s dive in for this round:
5. “Internet access will be mostly by agents”
I am not yet old, but old enough to remember the times when fighting against viruses, trojans and other threats while surfing the internet, even as a consumer, required higher level of computer literacy. While today basically every service provider and operating system company protect their users with default anti-virus systems (due to their business interests), and email sending is protected by proof-of-work algorithms dampening (not eliminating) spam.
A favorite youtuber historian, VTH used to say: “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes”. I think it is perfect match in this instance, as in near future those “agents” will be simply much more sophisticated “anti-virus” programs, as AI proliferation gives an easy to use and cheap tools into the hands of everyone.
The old wild-west of the Internet will come back until a new equilibrium will be achieved between these little “AI agents” running amok for their owners. These agents will be the new browsers, mobile operating systems, etc, and trying to find a piece of relevant, trustful information on the Internet without one will be almost impossible.
However I think this is not an optimistic future at all, this is simply a consequence of the new generation of tools emerging in the market. It will take time until the public, the regulators, and everyone else catches up to handle these new tools.
And in a present, where scams targeting elderly on phone calls are still a huge thing, these new types of frauds and scams will be extremely scary and hard to protect against, if you are not especially advanced in computer science yourself.
Unfortunately even AI-detection forensic softwares are not strong enough yet to clearly pick out malicious content, even if it is targeted to a single recording that was done in a sloppy manner. And doing the same thing on a large scale will be prohibitively expensive computationally. Read about this in the intriguing story of:
What can be done now: specialized government agencies has to catch up in information security to fight massive scams, implement a robust notification system for the population to alert about these, run awareness campaigns and empower people to come forward to tell about the scams, provide on a need-to-use basis these agents free for use so we can continue banking, education and other sensitive areas of our lives safely. This way the achievements in digitalizing the world would not be undone by the Internet suddenly becoming a no mans land. Other venue to take is to support critical open-source projects around security, forensic analysis and privacy protection, maybe even with specialized government grants and subsidies.
A large portion of our modern life runs on code-bases written by nameless heroes for nothing in return, and if these disappear, or taken over by malicious actors, or just degrade due to previously mentioned billion+ “programmers” actions, that will hurt all actors across the board, including the corporations and individuals.
6. “There will be clean, dispatchable electric power”
To be fully honest, I had to research a bit this topic, though I am following the tokamak reactor’s building for a while and news around clean energy, not yet heard of the fusion boilers expression. And for a half an hour search, I could not find any reliable source, so I will go with my imagination: a radically new way to power industrial and even home boilers.
Basic process of generating electricity (the heat based ones that are currently the backbone of our energy grids) goes like this:
- generate heat by using a type of fuel (coal, gas, nuclear)
- => heat transferred into water generating steam
- => steams pressure let out through rotating blades
- => blades turn magnets
- => rotating magnetic fields generate voltage difference moving electrons
- => behold, electricity! (Of course it is an extreme simplification!)
Current environmental challenges come from the fuel type as the heat source, and the remaining materials after the fuel has been used. E.g. coal, lignite, even natural gas yields carbon dioxide and methane, greenhouse gases exacerbating the climate crisis. If we can switch the fuel to something else without these output materials, we can achieve green energy: here come fusion reactors, where the end-result of fusing atoms is free of greenhouse gases.
Read here more about the currently most advanced research and prototype:
This future I maximally believe in, one large part is that we have to achieve breakthrough in this field to be able to maintain our lifestyle and not loose the only habitable planet we have.
Unfortunately, as all research, this is inherently risky in terms of outcomes, especially the timeline to get there, as still one unsolved issue with these reactors blocks viability in commercial use: we can’t get more energy out of it than what we put in to start the fusion. It is a net energy loss at this point. I sincerely think that science is near to solve this though, how near, is up to debate.
Then the second issue comes into play, when science solves a basic problem, it is still far from being a product, and is even further from scaling it in the wild, especially to the level that humanity needs it. And humanity needs it Yesterday.
To cycle back to the original sentence, without knowing what researches go on behind closed doors, most of it does not make sense to me. Home appliances are a very long way, hundreds of years probably as the process to minify technology takes a lot of effort and ingenuity from experts, and in some cases laws of nature can’t even allow for it to happen (as we know them right now, e.g. blood sample analysis still requires enough sample to chemically, reliably detect traces and clues about an individual’s health).
Industrial scale fusion boilers are attainable if, and it is a large if, the above points are solved. Though the thinking of having a mini nuclear power plant at home, or a mini tokamak fusion reactor warms my inner engineer child, this still sounds extremely dangerous, especially on a large scale.
Geothermal is around for a long time and not yet available everywhere. The whole energy sector worths a fresh look, so I definitely take time in the near future to scour the Internet and compile a set of alternatives we already could apply to improve the energy mix toward green solutions.
What can be done now: subsidize fusion and geothermal research as much as possible, build flourishing international cooperations between scientists beyond political borders with the understanding that we need global cooperation to solve a global crisis. This is definitely a way to go toward a post-scarcity society. With unlimited green energy, we could solve water and food shortages and for a while, employment rates would skyrocket until we build out everything necessary.
7. “Cars could be displaced in cities”
If you only consider the title, it is a great prediction and I am 100% on-board. The problem starts with the solution put on the same slide: replace cars with cars. Personal autonomous transit is a fancy way of saying cars. It can drive itself, it follows a predetermined path or you can call it to yourself like Michael in Knight Rider, it still can pack only 4–6 people and runs on 4 wheels with own engine and power source. It is still a car.
What is the problem with cars? Beyond a myriad reasons, my top ones:
- inherent limitation in throughput: if you add one more street, you induce demand as more people choose to drive, leading to traffic jam, add one more and just repeat the cycle, tear down public transport so you have more lanes and now instead of able to move thousands of people in a moment, now you can move only a few hundred over hours of traffic jam;
- inefficient scaling: as each “pod” (read: car) contains its own engine, battery, tons of metal frames, safety equipment, etc, packed all for a few individuals, this concept ignores economics of scale that is played well by trains, subways and trams (one engine, large capacity to move people between large hubs quickly);
- low systemic reliability: as each car represents multiple breakdown points, even one can block an entire artery of your home city, holding up thousands of cars behind it. And a system can never be as reliable as its best parts, it will always be way less reliable than its worst part, as calculating reliability involves multiplying each parts failure rate! Read more about it here including Mean Time Between Failure and Mean Time To Repair KPIs:
Let me link a way better presenter in a short video format, Adam Something who knows a lot about urban planning and its consequences:
What can be done now: here comes the unsexy, we already have a great solution, mass transit via strategically placed trains. Technology is already available and well tested, efficient, building it is well known practice. Vast amount of train lines are still not electrified, can start there, increase interoperability between neighboring countries, install modern control systems, and so on. While nothing is ideal, take a great example of Tokyo and Japan’s railway systems and adapt to other places.
And well, maybe a “sexy” approach too: improve customer experience! Digitalization, unified and simple online ticket buying and information experience will increase willingness to choose trains over driving! Personally I traveled a lot around Europe in multiple countries with their local train, bus and subway systems.
The best, where I had no second thoughts, were always the ones with simplest, seamless experience for customers, e.g. London’s metro system uses now a card authorization at entry and exit, calculates the fee in the evening for the previous day and then charge you. Your only interaction is to use your phone’s wallet at the gates, nothing else. I want to see (or build even) similarly simple systems everywhere!
8. “Flying will be faster”
I know this one, the Concorde? The Tupolev?
Hm, wait, none of them are flying anymore, and they were here decades ago (Concorde’s first flight happened in 1969!). Their failure wasn’t even the engineering hurdles to solve, but economics, eating fuel like there is no tomorrow just to get to a far away destination only a few times faster. And those were only supersonic aircrafts, Mach 5 would mean hypersonic flights with even more engineering challenges.
To clarify, I believe these technologies will be solved and become available on the market. However adoption will be severely limited to a few, super-high demand destinations, only available top 0.1% earners or political leaders, maybe only in extreme emergencies or circumstances requiring the speed while offsetting the inherent risk due to expected returns.
This will not be a technology that becomes widespread even though it will be a fascinating engineering feat, just as the Antonov’s large cargo aircrafts specialized in heavy equipment transport.
Beyond that, as the energy density is the most important component I believe in being able to generate such a speed (as you know, the faster you go, the air friction, even if you leave the atmosphere will exponentially increase your energy needs just to maintain the given speed). To solve hypersonic flight with environmentally friendly fuel, material science need to find a way to compress enormous amount of energy density, and be able to convert that stored energy fast enough to mechanical drives to maintain and accelerate many tons of metal with people inside safely. So far this is only achieved by burning fuel as a fast process, compressing air and burning it quickly making the increased pressure propelling our crafts forward.
Read about supersonic and hypersonic craft research starting on Wikipedia, fascinating topic:
What can be done now: for the mass population, current flying speeds are acceptable and they are much more price-sensitive, so we want to lower the number of flights or to make those environmentally friendly, let’s think in systematic effects.
Medium distances, like 600–1000 km range could be served by high speed rail. Bringing time down to 2–3 hours of rides on these, which would motivate more people to choose it instead of a 1,5 hour flight on same route with the added hassles of stringent security checks and inconveniences. Though the requirement is to operate it low enough cost, so the prices will be affordable.
To be continued soon with points 9 to 12.
Thank you sincerely
Thanks to Vinod Khosla giving these points, inspired to think forward and I am sure this was his main purpose, to spark curiosity combined with hope for a better future.
Thanks for Ethan Evans to spreading it to his audience as it would not be on my radar otherwise.
And thank you my dear reader for your time and attention! If you enjoyed, leave me a clap or two! If you have any thoughts to share, challenges or comments, please write on the article, looking forward to read your thoughts!