Tag: innovation

2020s Technology

Therapeutic plasma exchange is FDA-approved (not for aging, but for a bunch of other conditions). I imagine there remain prohibitions on advertising that it can add years to your life, but it is safe, and a doctor can prescribe it off label. It’s also cheap. An automated plasmapheresis machine—which lets you do treatment after treatment—can be bought online for under $3000. That is less than the cost of a single transfusion of young blood sold by the startup Ambrosia. How long until someone opens a clinic offering plasma dilution? I bet someone tries it in 2021. If it works, people will get over the weirdness, and it could be commonplace by 2030.

What is more plausible this decade is enhanced and advanced geothermal systems. The legacy geothermal industry is sleepy, tapping energy at traditional volcanic hydrothermal hotspots—forget about it. The next generation of the industry, however, is a bunch of scrappy startups manned by folks leaving the oil and gas industry. The startups I have spoken to think with today’s technology they can crack 3.5¢/kWh without being confined to volcanic regions. With relatively minor advancements in drilling technology compared to what we’ve seen over the last decade, advanced geothermal could reach 2¢/kWh and become scale to become viable just about anywhere on the planet. Collectively, the startups are talking about figures like 100s of gigawatts of generation by 2030. I’m watching this space closely; the Heat Beat blog is a great way to stay in the loop. As I wrote last month, permitting reform will be important.

The 2020s will be a big decade for sustainable alternative fuels (SAF). Commercial aviation can’t electrify—batteries will never match fossil fuels’ energy density. Given political realities, aviation has no choice to decarbonize, which means either hydrogen fuel or SAF. Hydrogen fuel is much better than batteries, but still not as energy dense as fossil fuels or SAF, and so my money is on SAF, and particularly on fuel made from CO₂ pulled from the atmosphere. It is easy to convert atmospheric CO₂ to ethanol in solution; and it is easy to upgrade ethanol into other fuels. But it is hard to separate ethanol from water without using a lot of energy—unless you have an advanced membrane as Prometheus Fuels does. I have written about Prometheus before and continue to follow them closely. Their technology could decarbonize aviation very suddenly.

Construction tech is another area to watch. Whether it’s 3d-printed homes as imagined by Icon, or advanced manufactured housing as designed by Cover or Modal, there has to be a better way to build than our current stick-built paradigm. Housing costs have skyrocketed largely due to zoning rules, but construction technology is another lever by which we can increase housing productivity. This is another area where the barriers don’t seem to be primarily technological.

Never Going Back

Third-Order Consequences
This is where things start getting really wild. Unshackled by the office’s location, people will move where they want to move, often out of expensive cities and into more affordable towns with better weather. Those are first-and second-order effects. Some third-order effect might be that because they’re saving more money, they have more money to invest, and the trends that I wrote about in Software is Eating the Markets towards more retail investment in stocks, art, real estate, and more will accelerate.

Other potential third-order effects include:

Rise of Alternative Education. As mobility increases, more people will need to give online or alternative education a real shot, because they’ll be loath to gain freedom from the office but remain tied down by their childrens’ schools. Homeschooling options like SchoolHouse, which matches groups of families with teachers to form microschools, Primer, an online homeschooling community and infrastructure startup, or Outschool, which lets kids take online classes or camps from anywhere, will appeal to parents who want to move while keeping their kids well-educated.

More Fluid Employment. Productive employees may work multiple full-time roles. In GitLab’s fourth phase, Intentionality, employees are measured on output. If employees can keep up the output, employers will be comfortable letting them work multiple jobs. The absolute star performers, who Dror calls “The 10x Class,” will put their talents up for a global auction, and will reach income levels similar to top athletes and celebrities.

New Employee Stock Options. As companies and employees enjoy a more transitory relationship, and as Remote leads to more precise performance tracking, equity will have to evolve to be rewarded for performance and contribution instead of tenure and rank. As Sari and I wrote, we think that Fairmint is in a great position to make this possible technically. Remote will make it acceptable culturally.

Ancient steam engines

The invention of the steam engine is usually ascribed to British engineers of the 17th and 18th centuries. James Watt is best known for inventing an especially efficient type of the engine in 1786, which was applied first to trains and then in the early 19th century to ships. It is much less known that the engine was invented in the 1st century AD by Greek engineers of Alexandria, more than 1.5 ka before Watt. The British Library holds a remarkable collection of Greek manuscripts that describe and illustrate these early steam engines in great detail.

Open RAN

Open RAN looks like a great alternative to all the proprietary 5G nonsense.

contrary to the information being published by legacy RAN vendors, Open RAN is real; Open RAN has been deployed in commercial networks today; the Open RAN community is thriving; the cost savings are being realized; and operational performance requirements and KPIs are being met.

DARPA

PMs pull control away from directors by having only 1 official checkpoint before launching programs and pull control away from performers through their ability to move money around quickly. PMs design programs to be high-risk aggregations of lower-risk projects. Only 5–10 out of every 100 programs successfully produce transformative research, while only 10% of projects are terminated early. Shifting the risk from the performers to the program managers enables DARPA to tackle systemic problems where other models cannot.

Solving online events

It’s often struck me that networking events are pretty inefficient and random. If you’re going to spend 1 hour or 2 in a room with 50 or 500 people, then you could take that as a purely social occasion and enjoy yourself. But if your purpose is to have professionally useful conversations, then what proportion of the people in the room can you talk to in 1 hour and how likely is it that they’ll be the right ones? Who’s there? I sometimes suggest it would be helpful if we all wore banners, as in the image at the top, so that you could look across the room and see who to talk to. (First Tuesday did something like this in 1999, with different colored badges.)

This might just be that I’m an introvert asking for a machine to manage human connections for me (and I am), but there is also clearly an opportunity to scale the networking that happens around events in ways that don’t rely on random chance and alcohol tolerance. A long time ago Twitter took some of that role, and the explosion of online dating also shows how changing the way you think about pools and sample sets changes outcomes. In 2017, 40% of new relationships in the USA started online. Next, before lockdown, you would often have planned to schedule a non-urgent meeting with a partner or client or connection ‘when we’re in the same city’. That might be at some specific event, but it might also just be for some ad hoc trip – ‘next time I’m in the Bay Area’ or ‘next time you’re in New York’. In January most people would never actually have thought of making that a video call, but today every meeting is a video call, so all of those meetings can be a video call too, and can happen this week rather than ‘next time I fly to that city’ – or ‘at CES/NAB/MIPCOM’. In the last few months video calls have broken through that habit. I wonder what happens if we accelerate all of those meetings in that way.

On the unbundling of events, and how networking might be done better.

The new economics of chess

Do not underestimate Magnus Carlsen. He has been #1 in classical chess, rapid, and blitz, all at the same time. He is a huge YouTube star in chess. He has won a tournament about chess trivia, and he has been #1 in fantasy football for the whole world (not an easy feat).

And now he is bringing an economic revolution to chess, with himself as the #1 labor and equity earner at the same time.