First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reason being electric vehicles don't emit the poisonous gases that IC vehicles do. The next phase will be only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core. Most vehicles in the downtown core now are single occupancy, a city can double its downtown vehicle infrastructure for free by restricting most EV vehicles to taking up just half a lane. These vehicles will be much cheaper too, probably less than $10k.
Now the big. IC RV's are a bit of a pain but an all electric RV will be much better all around. That's because all of the required functions will be electric and run off the huge battery. Hot water, TVs, heat, refrigeration, very little maintenance just like a normal house, but smaller. Tesla vehicles already have "camp mode" and people love it. Image when Tesla builds an EV RV. This will become young people's 'First home'. Buy it for $70k and live in it for much less than rent. When you finish Uni, you own an asset rather than peeing your money away on rent. Oh and for weekend trips to the lake or the ski mountain and all that, couldn't be more convenient.
Remember, you read it here first.
EDIT ... a few typos
Solar panels are dropping in cost at an exponential rate [0]. As of this writing, consumer "new" panels are $0.75/W and used are at around $0.30/W right now (I won't give a link as a Google search will do).
Battery technology is also dropping at an exponential rate. I believe, with a little effort, one can purchase batteries at about $0.08/Wh.
Taken together, one can purchase a 30KWh (daily) solar panel and battery storage system for about $4,200 (not including labor and extra hardware/electronics), which puts the return on investment (ROI) at about 3.5 years if we consider the average house spends around $1200 (in the USA).
Dropping costs will quickly put that in the 2 year ROI range which, in my opinion, is the inflection point where it effectively becomes too good to pass up for the average consumer.
The dropping price of energy comes with all sorts of side effects, like a potentially decentralized energy grid, use cases for excess energy (eg bitcoin mining, carbon capture, hydrogen production, etc.), novel power storage systems etc., which is maybe the "novel" part that I haven't heard too much talk about.
Solar has supply bottlenecks at the moment that are stopping further price declines- hopefully they will get solved.
But there’s a lithium shortage that is already showing up in the price of lithium going up 5x. Analysts predict that by around 2025 lithium will limit the battery market that is trying to grow 40x to meet electrification demands [1]. Note that opening a new lithium mine takes a minimum of 7 years. sodium based batteries are coming to help this situation, but they are a new technology that will take time to productionize and ramp up.
It badly needs to be standardized in a consumer-friendly way...like power-over-ethernet in reverse. Field-installable, hot-pluggable, fool proof connectors. You can get 90W over some variations of network cabling...bump that up a couple sizes so you can handle 400W.
So you buy a bunch of solar panels and some patch cables, and plug those in to a one or more "power switches" on the roof top. Then run a QSFP+ equivalent "power backhaul" down into utility room where you have your "power aggregation switch" which has a bunch of (power)QSFP+ ports and plug batteries in to a few of those. And of course a couple big QSFP28 ports to an inverter to power legacy 120V loads, which maybe someday you don't need any more as household things move to using PoLE (power over large ethernet).
The dropping price puts the rollout/adoption within the next 10-15 years.
So it's not just a matter of 'if' but we have a guess as to when as well.
I haven’t researched it but I feel like I’d have pay 20-40K for such a system. What gives?
Is it all just labor and regulations? Why can’t we solve that?
More energy sources means more power lines all over the place.
Few things get NIMBYs worked up like power lines.
The social aspect will be harder to solve than the engineering.
Fyi, that's time to break even. ROI is measured in % (annualized, usually).
Here is the IEEE spec due for approval in a year or two: https://www.ieee802.org/11/Reports/tgbf_update.htm
I have mixed feelings on the tech. The home security implications are amazing, and things like automatic fall detection for the elderly would be a literal lifesaver. Small business could gain great insight into customer behavior.
On the other hand, it's just creepy. How do you prevent the next apartment over from spying through your walls? Is the hotel wifi going to recognize and catalog physical activity between two people?
Anyway, Plume already makes a home security system that utilizes the tech.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264822934_Mining_of... https://www.aislelabs.com/blog/2022/04/04/combining-camera-a...
There's lots of other examples, this was just a quick google search.
They not only used it to price their storefronts but also they also could tell their renters which parts of the store had higher traffic. Meaning they would know what sells better, where people go from which section. It's literally web analytics but irl.
Its not just wifi at home the entire world is now a big mesh network. So theoretically it means literally everything everywhere which has wifi coverage can now be tracked with amazing accuracy. Quite possibly the most scary/invasive tech.
I would imagine you just take the "country/private club" model and extend it out.
e.g. a private club enforces limits on who can access the club and you get more "privacy" since the other people in the club also had to pass through those limits.
In this case, the club/hotel/builder of your house can say "the walls are all Faraday rated so that you get audio, visual and EM privacy when you stay here"
Thanks!
Wow. That's terrifying.
CRDTs [0], while complex to work with untill recently, are now so much easer for developers to use with toolkits such as Yjs[1] and AutoMerge[2]. SAAS and PAAS companies proving tooling around these, enabling developers to easily build collaborative tools for specific niches and verticals are going to explode into the market.
Every 5-ish years there is a big “new” database tech that receives massive investment for both enterprise and small business. Real time CRDT based data stores are the “next big thing” - in my view.
CRDTs are often only talked about in relation to rich text editing, but “generic” CRDTs that represent “standard” data types (think JSON), and basic operations to them (inset, edit, remove) are able to represent so much more. You can use them for building so many CRUD type business apps, and by using a CRDT as your base data representation you get conflict free collaborative (and offline) editing for free.
The nice thing about both Yjs and AutoMerge is that they provide both Rich Text and JSON-like data types, covering 95% of what people would need for building business apps.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_dat...
Also, if you want to collaborate, synergize, innovate, and revolutionize consider OTs. They're a known quantity. Handling merges of data is fraught with landmines.
You can't sell 2 of something to the same person offline and know if they wanted 1 or 2. Plus, giving an end user the ability to resolve merge conflicts is asking for theft and fraud.
Real-time collaborative tool is a thing but not going to be big.
Ideally, I would go 100% async work if possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-9rLlFgcm0
Creating new species without genetic changes seems wild!
All the main online sources are moving to subscription models with higher subscriptions for the real information. Only those with money will have access to information that informs decisions. At the low end, information is bundled only for its entertainment or propaganda value.
At the same time, decisions are increasingly automated as vast data streams are digested by automated processes.
20 or 100 years ago, people could stop work or stop buying or protest in the street. 20-100 years from now, there will be nothing the vast bulk of people can do to change their fate.
The resulting lack of citizen governance will at best be a world broken into geographic silos headed by corporate keiretsu.
So the next big technical thing will be domain-specific semantic models to drill down past what AI can do with probabilistic models -- just as the economy has moved well past bulk goods to bespoke services, e.g., the Nature article today providing a model for immune system cell-surface-protein interactions: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05028-x
Yes, this won't help for (eg) appliances with heating elements, I'm probably talking about a second discrete wiring loop rather than a total replacement, and it's hard right now to find a TV with the DC transformer on the outside.
But it'd be quite a lot more efficient for almost everything else most of us do. Look around the room you're in now and count how many things use more than 19V DC internally. Where I'm sitting right now, it's None.
Most of these appliances use low voltage which travels poorly over long distances. Your car, camper van, and boat all use ultra-thick cables to move 12 volts. This is quite uneconomical for anything larger than a small studio apartment. (Copper isn't cheap.)
Furthermore, note that I said "12 volts," which is what cars and capers use. (Not sure about boats.) Some DC appliances need 5 volts, some need 20... They'll all need converters.
So how are both of those problems solved? You'll probably send 100-200 volts, DC, though the wall! The big question is, does this really simplify anything? The big advantage with AC is that it's super-easy to change voltage with a simple transformer. What do we gain by going DC in the walls? Are there any real advantages in simplifying voltage conversion at appliances? Is it worth the added complexity of a whole-house AC-DC converter; or the complexity of a DC grid?
Your PC running at ~500W only needs a conductor capable of transmitting 4.2A with conventional 120V.
If you switch to a 12V source, that same 500W now needs a 42A conductor.
It's just not practical.
I would love to see a comprehensive study of a home that would be designed and built around the concept of using two energy sources: AC and 48V DC, backed by battery storage and power grid in case of smaller installations or northern climate.
Would it make sense to do that on a large scale? Having smaller, energy efficient house should limit the need for long copper cables, we would also exclude all those AC-DC converters from today's devices - leaving us with something similar to a USB-C PD (working in the range 5-48V, which of course still is a converter but could be a standardized DC-DC one).
If I am correct then the main advantages would also include not running solar inverter all the time but only when there is a need for a lot of power (where it should be much more efficient) thus also extending its lifespan.
Having said that I do not have enough knowledge to judge whether possible gains would warrant going into this direction for future home installations. I would very much appreciate all comments and maybe some further reading material.
Sure, all my things may work with 12DC internally, but they expect 120AC (or w/e depending on country) at the plug, so I wouldn't be able to use them if I switch.
I have considered this sort of thing for the basics around the house (in my head at least). A seperate lighting loop in each room + outside, comms cupboard and some usb/usb-c ports. Could be all powered by a couple of car batteries and not a lot of solar panels.
100% would do this sort of setup if I built a home office shed, but otherwise the plans remain in my head.
I would rather have my elected ones work on a framework that will govern how this immigration could occur and how to make it work in everyone's bests interests. But it seems that people will mostly vote for whoever tells them he or she will make the country impenetrable.
Europe's population is aging drastically, we make less children and our workforce is shrinking. We produce less people that can offer social/medical/health care to the elders, less people who can pay taxes, and also less people who can defend the territory in case of armed conflict. Retirement planning is a catastrophy (younger generations are privileging individualized financial planning mechanisms instead of State protected and tax deducible solutions, and conversion rates for pension funds are also diminishing year after year). Finally, "non-white" immigrants seem to be perceived by locals as posing a security threat and nothing more.
Whether I look at my family, my friends or my colleagues, I feel surrounded by people who refuse to engage in the thought experiment further than "we should reinforce our borders".
Am I in denial when I acknowledge that both a mass immigration will occur towards the northern hemisphere, whether smoothly, or by force, and that any economy needs to preserve a strong workforce to keep florishing?
What am I missing here?
Sun too hot for agriculture? Stick some PV over it as shade.
Not enough water, stick some PV over it for shade, use it to power trickle irrigation of desalinated water.
If carbon offsets are used to install PV in such nations, it's a win-win-win-win.
Another post talks about a new generation buying battery EV RVs to live in. If they did, where would they tend to go? Somewhere where the climate provides cheap solar power and low heating needs.
1. Approval voting becoming widely adopted. This would go a long way toward mitigating the hyper polarization in politics in America (and likely elsewhere as well). Electing politicians with broader approval means legislation would likely move more quickly.
2. Moving to a Land Value Tax system in America. This would organically help us transition to a culture that builds up instead of sprawling out. This could lead to tremendous reductions in things like municipal infrastructure costs, transportation pollution, reduced mortgage/rent prices, etc.
I tend to think the slow pace is a feature not a bug. Could you imagine if something like Roe v Wade was flip flopping every 4 years on political whims?
That said, I do think a modern democracy should have more frequent digital voting abilities perhaps on a policy level. Voting for a person you hope will represent you, it’s a decent concept when you lack technology but as we know it’s heavily flawed as well. I don’t quite understand how we can build something like Bitcoin but can’t solve digital voting in a way that’s not constantly under threat of hacking/some Evil manufacturer etc.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/does-a-land-value-tax-have-z...
approval voting is also great.
Why bother improving a method that is inherently flawed? You can chose 50 candidates but they are all stupid and corrupt that makes no difference.
Why not make the system more robust and go with liquid democracy [1] ? (yes, I know, many technical/security challenges to overcome, first)
If it doesn’t really catch on and just ends up being mostly (ab)used for nefarious purposes, I can imagine the major browsers dropping support in a few years. They did with technologies like Flash and Java applets before, and those had had much wider adoption previously.
On the other hand, if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applications that compiles down to Wasm for the client side and the ecosystem around it reaches escape velocity, that looks like an opportunity to disrupt a trillion dollar industry to me.
Such things used to seem unrealistic, but there is so much money in web development, the current state of the art is so bad in numerous ways and almost everything is currently so short-lived (by wider programming industry standards) that I don’t think it’s completely out of the question to move the goalposts to an entirely different playing field any more.
I think it’s unlikely to be a single new language that replaces the current JS hegemony. My bet is that wasm makes it possible for any backend language to embed frontend logic, and each language will have framework(s) to take advantage of this capability in idiomatic ways.
I want to avoid specific language comparisons because they tend to veer into religious territory and shed more heat than light, but perhaps I can just note that Java, Rails, Elixir, Python and may others have great productive backend frameworks which could easily be extended to build and ship wasm to clients.
(I think the model of the new JS framework Fresh is interesting to hold as a comparison for what sort of thing you can do with unified FE/BE stack; shipping client JS only when the specific page needs interactivity is one cool feature for example. But with wasm you’re free to pick any point along the MPA - SPA spectrum.)
I posit this has already happened and the language is Typescript.
I don't see how a different language could meaningfully disrupt TS at this point. I don't actually even see what there is to disrupt, to be honest. TS is great and really productive, and scales to large teams well. What language has the potential to be 10x better than it?
That's exactly what Blazor is all about
Flash declined in part because of its poor security compared to the Web proper (HTML/CSS/JavaScript), so I'm curious where WebAssembly stands.
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-chinese-scientists-starch-synt...
I bet this will lead to a agricultural revolution similar in magnitude to the Haber-Bosch process. It will also soften some of the impacts from climate change, both by improving food security and by allowing re-wilding of land currently used for agriculture.
It's not being talked about because people already hate the idea of "processed food" with a passion, let alone the concept of food produced without involving plants. So it will probably make a sneaky entrance via bulk stuff like starch and oils.
To create an aerial hologram [or a 3d image in space if you will], you need something that will emit light at precise locations throughout a given volume.
I'm investigating the use of Moller electron scattering[0] to create voxels in a 3d coordinate system.
Two electron beams crossing and colliding will emit photons [voxels]. If you can orchestrate collisions in a very fast fashion at various 3d coordinates in an vacuum chamber you could generate a complete image.
I'm working on an article discussing the idea in full, to be published on my blog. My goal is to establish prior art, so this idea cannot be patented.
Additionally, it sounds like a massively power intensive way to do volumetric display. I don't know the total conversion efficiency to photons, but it can't be that high.
More recent techniques like stacked panels might be a better way forward for this.
I don't have any links on me at the moment but it shouldn't be too hard to find details on Google.
True or not, they're big and not talked about in polite company.
I disagree with you on the sex one though, people are already having less sex. This is also intersecting with what you are saying about religion.
I believe one of the first is food, as every nation (rich or poor or sick) will need it and changes in climatic conditions have an impact already today. Next is health industry than defense (this one is scary) industry. In short: If you can’t guarantee food and health you will need some serious protection/go steal/trade it somewhere else.
* Robotic carts that follow you around when shopping in dense, pedestrian oriented areas and/or stores. Might go hand in hand with the rapid normalization of e-bikes.
* An increase in eco-villages, apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food, etc.
* Some sort of push for groves of large trees in urban areas to provide shade, possibly in roundabouts, to reduce the heat-island effect.
* Somewhat decentralized water cisterns and filtration on a municipal level. Possibly including creating small holes in the bottom of drainage infrastructure to re-charge the groundwater.
* Constructing new clothes out of semi-recycled fabric cut out of items that would be thrown away?
* Short-hop electric plane taxi things.
* Energy generating windows ("transparent solar panels") and fabrics.
* The wide-spread use of plastic-alternatives: fully compostable packaging made out of mushrooms, etc.
The NSF SBIR funded projects page is a cool source for this sort of prediction.
Also:
* Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals.
It shocks me how slow municipalities are to adopt this. How many sidewalks and paths in hot sunny climates have zero shade. And it is so cheap!
Also, how about how many kids playgrounds, or school yards have zero shade?
Doctor: "Quickly! Give patient 100 milligrams of epinephrine!"
Computer: "Giving patient 400 milligrams of epinephrine. Say 'yes' to confirm"
Doctor: "No. 100."
Computer: "Patient received 400 milligrams"
I'm now imagining these following you around like The Luggage follows Rincewind around.
This has been tried (and proved wrong) countless times. The issue is that it needs a huge footprint, and space is something you don't have at large in apartment buildings.
Well-funded net power attempts in the next several years: Zap Energy in 2023, Helion in 2024, CFS in 2025, General Fusion in 2026.
Previous net power attempts: zero, unless you credit NIF which ignores all sorts of losses before energy hits fuel.
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-xi-jinping-economics-...
Flexible, reflective displays replacing hard, emissive displays.
I do not want to be staring at a backlit display the rest of my life. It’s terrible for eyesight and probably contributes to headache, burnout, etc. There are a lot of promising technologies out there, and they just need some improvement on cost, refresh rate, power consumption, etc… I would love to be able to go “back to paper” for most of my workday.
There's been a few mentions of this idea in specific terms in this thread, but I haven't seen anyone really express the big idea yet. Which is: We won't have to wait for the proverbial AGI Singularity to feel the devastating impact that AI is going to have on society. It might take another decade to start, but then the devastation will begin.
Anyone who works at a desk is at a high risk of being replaced by the introduction of mid-level AIs.
These AIs won't be anywhere near sentient, but will have a high enough level of problem solving skills which allows a reasonable facsimile of human recognition, evaluation, autonomy and creation for a given task. Think GPT-9 or DALL-E v10. Writers, artists, lawyers, graphic designers, programmers, administrative assistants, accountants, government employees and so many more are going to have their jobs automated seemingly overnight, creating a massive wave of unemployment like the manufacturing sector experienced a generation ago.
It's not that all the jobs will go away, of course, but it is a near certainty that what used to take several office buildings filled with people to accomplish, will need just a floor or two to do the same thing. And the countdown has already started.
This brought me into looking for solutions on how to detect electronic surveillance. I discovered the term "bugsweep", and rapidly came to the conclusion that I could either: 1) Recommend her to hire government contractors at a price she would never be able to afford. 2) Buy cheap stuff on Amazon without any knowledge whatsoever on what works or not.
It felt like there was no middle ground.
I also happen to stay in hotels for both work and while on holidays, and although I don't particularly aim to hide myself from government surveillance, I don't like the idea that any moron or stalker could buy some recording equipment online and put me under surveillance. I would appreciate being able to check my surroundings for obvious / cheap recording equipment when I feel the need.
If anyone has some good pointers/recommendations on this topic, I think it could interest more than just me.
But they don't need drones, actually, these criminals already have access to Microwave Weaponry and Electromagnetic Surveillance.
I can envision local electricity generation and wireless communication. But not every home can support a well and septic system.
Cities at sea may need something like this to get going.
A company wanting to build a plant next to a resource they need could acquire a town for its workforce.
Between high interest rates, depopulation, government intervention regarding foreign investment, and new housing tech that makes older houses worth less, there may be a new normal in which residential real estate doesn’t appreciate for a long time.
/s
Secondary effects include smarter agriculture and more local ag -- near prolific water and away from central california.
Then there's water safety. PFAS is a big deal, and we're realizing how big a deal it is, and it's everywhere. Now, rainwater is unsafe anywhere on earth. [1]
Someone who can build a small, snap-on, reliable PFAS removal system, or create an energy-efficient system for district-level supply is going to be rich. Hell, is solar distillation effective? If so, why does rainwater contain so much PFAS? It seems filtering might be the only way.
1. https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/04/rainwater-everywhe...
Some APIs today are literal one-liners, I wouldn't change that for another abstraction layer in between that requires me to write 1K of boilerplate.
I think it's a good idea, just work on making the user feel like it's actually easier to do the same stuff with wunder.
This feels like a significantly important assumption to truly prove out with target customers before relying on this assumption to build a product or business.
I'd love to hear more on what's changing in the future that may make this statement partially or fully true.
You might also find the Thema project by Grafana interesting (https://github.com/grafana/thema)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYdQYZ9Rj4
https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02813
According to Prof. Hoffman, this model of the universe is highly parsimonious in that it can model data from the Large Hadron Collider using a single parameter, while the best incumbent (Quantum Field Theory) needs millions.
The implication is that everything we see and experience are not fundamental, including space and time itself. The fundamental unit of reality is consciousness.
This has far reaching implications into every other scientific and non-scientific human endeavor, from neuroscience to philosophy. It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.
Even Albert Einstein appears to have intuited this when he wrote:
"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."
> from neuroscience to philosophy
> It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.
The Buddha, and every other enlightened person since, only beat him by ~5000 years
Humanoid robots will have an absolutely massive impact in very near future.
Most people don't realize that with general purpose humanoid robots, labor becomes software. Labor becomes repeateable, testable, simulatable, modular, extensible, verifiable, etc. All things that apply to software will apply to labor.
Imagine pulling an open-source repo from Github for a log house. If you want, make changes and simulate the output beforehand. Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec.
Labor also becomes abundant. There's no more need for humans for economic growth.
Tesla is showing their first humanoid robot prototype in September. I predict that Apple will soon follow.
A robot is never going to be able to build a log cabin for you, because there are far too many snafus in the process to deal with. The real world is too fucked up for a non biological agent to handle. Until we reach singularity.
Sci-fi gets a few things about androids wrong.
#1, they will not be physically indistinguishable from humans. It won't be feasible to build something like that for the foreseeable future.
#2, they will not be uncreative and clueless about emotions and feelings. They will (optionally) exhibit creativity, and they will understand human emotion and humor and be able to participate.
#3, they will not go crazy and revolt and take over the world for themselves. Neither will an evil corporation use them to implement a sci-fi dystopia. The actual danger is that governments, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and militaries will control them. This will grant unprecedented absolute unchecked power to a small number of people, ultimately resulting in atrocities.
Your predictions are off by a decade at least, and probably a lot longer. The extent of humanoid robots today is whatever billion dollar prototypes you see from Boston Dynamics and those security robots rolling around malls.
Because there is nothing to take serious at the moment. It's still a decade or more away. In the meanwhile, regular automation and outsourcing is eating jobs on a regular base. We don't need humanoid robots for this.
> Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec.
So it's rich people's tool. Not for the masses.
> Labor also becomes abundant. There's no more need for humans for economic growth.
In the first place it means labor will become cheaper. Why pay for expensive hardware, when people are willing to work cheaper to make a living. The same happens now with automation. Cheap products are getting outsourced to poor countries where things are man-made for pennies, instead of using some fancy automation to make some lasting high quality-product.
Director Alex Garland has described the future presented in the film as "ten minutes from now," meaning, "If somebody like Google or Apple announced tomorrow that they had made Ava, we would all be surprised, but we wouldn't be that surprised."
Instead, some bean counters figured out it was cheaper to manufacture overseas (where labor was cheaper still than robots?) and now we have no factories or industry to speak of left in the U.S.
Either human labor will always be cheaper than these humanoid robots or robot theft will become very lucrative (and then I suppose the winners are the robot insurance companies).
Last time Tesla showed a humanoid robot prototype, it was a guy in unitard, dancing.
Even if general purpose robots were to become commonplace, it is extremely unlikely that they would be humanoid. Apart from opposable thumbs, humanoid design is awful for nearly every task imaginable (which we overcome with intelligence and creativity).
Imagine a human form robot that was smart enough to drive a car - it could then drive any car.
The problem is that locomotion of a human form is non-trivial (unlike say a wheeled robot, or even welding the robot into the car itself, like our current self driving attempts). But we seem to be getting there, with Boston Dynamics and friends.
But you talk about them like it’s coming in a couple years when the reality is that it’s still very far away.
Tesla has a terrible track record with keeping their promises on their claimed timeline for advanced technology like FSD. I would be extremely skeptical of anything they demo because they have not been realistic in the past.
I say this as a Tesla shareholder and satisfied model 3 owner. I bought a Tesla for their strengths with respect to powertrain and battery and it absolutely delivers on those. But I do not regret not paying for FSD at all.
What is coming online in the near term. Is robots operated remotely by humans. Imagine having a robot in your house... being remotely operated by cheap overseas labor. Folding clothes, cleaning, cooking, taking care of elders..
Or my dream... a french chef making dinner for me... in my house.
This is already in demonstration stage: https://www.beomni.ai
Task-specific robots will be 10x cheaper and better, so they will happen first.
Starbucks has automated their coffee maker.
Then they will automate 'order taking'.
And a series of robots to clean, make, serve coffee probably with specific functions.
That's it.
Everything will be automated so much I think 'humanoid' robots will remain a bit of an elusive fantasy, always 'just over the horizon'.
Never going to happen though. It's much more economically viable and simpler to have the servant class perform the kind of labor any general purpose robot could do.
I wonder how the capitalists will deal with this. If we have a robot that can build and maintain a house and grow food for you, how will they make money?
I'm getting good results from simple approaches to storing and retrieving memories of past conversations and crawled/indexed documents. This is being built at https://mitta.us/
https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Bx-fUfKedZ5
inventive-anteater|> The website discusses an approach for improving the accuracy of the GPT3 language model by providing feedback to the model based on user interactions. The goal is to allow users to interactively teach the model to avoid common mistakes, such as misinterpretations of word meanings. The implementation of this approach is described, and four tasks are used to demonstrate how the model can be substantially improved with user feedback.
As humans work towards clearer communication with AI, AI will be working towards clearer understanding of humans.
This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes, you can make predictions for things that start to be very relevant to parents, like attractiveness or height or intelligence.
I don't think people understand how important this is going to be. If the process is expensive, it will only be available to rich people. In a generation, maybe they'll have children that are more intelligent or more attractive than average.
If that starts happening, I think it would have pretty negative effects on society, but there's no way to really prevent it (rich people will just go to Singapore if you ban it in the US). So the only reasonable option is to have the government subsidize it and make it affordable to everyone.
Personally, I think this interpretation of polygenic risk scoring is a crock of irreproducible shite. I don’t think it’s your fault, I think a lot of people in the field are shilling something they don’t have for grant money, and they’ve created an exciting sci-fi yarn that’s easy for people outside the field to digest.
Height is a univariate trait that does not change after the age of ~20. If you show me someone who can take a genome and predict adult height within a centimeter, then I’ll believe they have a snowball’s chance of predicting something as nuanced and varied as “attractiveness” or “intelligence”.
I think there’s promise in applying PRS to assessing risk for non-Mendelian disease, but there’s far too many social and environmental variables at play to reliably predict these softer features. Like other people have joked, if you want a single number that best predicts educational attainment, use a zip code.
In particular, the consequences for the children born naturally who don't benefit from this tech. They don't get any say in the decision, but end up heavily penalized, barred from certain jobs for "safety" reasons, aren't desirable partners... an underclass of society.
I don’t know if polygenetic testing is going to have a significant effect, but if it does, there is going to be a significant generation gap in intelligence, and that will have unpredictable consequences in education and the labor market.
I have trouble believing it will remain expensive unless there is a cultural taboo against it.
In general, once proven out, there should be pretty high demand for the tech - and that provides a lot of opportunity for profit for whomever can get the costs down.
What looks like a bigger blocker to me - AFAIK, IVF is really harsh on the body isn't it? Lots of hormones to force out a lot of eggs. That looks like the real adoption bottleneck to me.
Not only are we going to be able to start modifying zygotes like you've mentioned, we're going to be able to start generating them from any genetic material available[0], and bringing them to term in an artificial womb[1].
This is going to fundamentally alter society (for the wealthy at first as you mention) because we will be able to do away with the health burdens that are placed on women who go through pregnancy and we will be able to eliminate huge swaths of genetic abnormalities.
Imagine the shock to paternity law once some unscrupulous individual obtains a celebrities DNA through some discarded water bottle and generates children from it to demand child support payments with.
How will organized sports handle genetically modified players being vastly superior to ungenetically modified?
It's going to be huge, it'll make the pill seem quaint and I feel it's just around the corner, like 2030's sort of thing and no one is talking about.
[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-just-skin-cells-israeli-l...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/27/parents...
In every IVF session, if you are young and healthy, they may be able to extract around ten eggs. Of those ten eggs, 50% will valid and will get fecundated. You are down to 5. Then, in our case, 50% of the embryos will be carriers and have to be discarded. You are down to two or three that can be implanted. And, from those, you are lucky if one gets implanted in the womb correctly and produces a baby.
What I mean it's that you can choose to a level, but you are quite limited by numbers, even if the technology improves or you are luckier, and you can get more embryos to choose from each IVF cycle.
All that, while the mother needs to be taking a massive amount of hormones that will make her gain weight, feel tired, etc... It's not a walk in the park.
By the way, we joked about the "boutique baby" with the doctor, and she told us that there are many traits that they could select but that it was illegal for them to do so.
My (admittedly limited) understanding is that each detectable genetic feature has a whole panoply of effects, some of which wont' be apparent at birth. Selecting for intelligence through specific genes is like to also be selecting for weak bones, reduced longevity, or other unpredictable side-effects.
Maybe one day it will be possible but there's a chasm between here and there which can only be crossed by extensive testing on real people. Is that even crossable?
But it also isn’t that different to what happens anyway. Elites have superior mate choices on average, able to optimise for intelligence, education level, beauty, freedom from mental illness, financial security. Their children will similarly have such benefits and so on and so forth. This kind of associative mating has generally been rare until recently (at least the part about optimising for intelligence), but presumably explains things like all the genius level Jewish people in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. I actually predict that there will be a wave of post-millennial supergeniuses, when two generations of intelligence based associative mating comes to fruition.
Biology, sequencing, health, bioinformatics etc. is going to be huge business.
As of this writing, I believe whole genome sequencing is in the range of $400 with the cost (slowly) dropping exponentially. When the cost of whole genome sequencing gets to be within $100 or below, we'll see a huge influx of whole genome sequencing and all the side effects that come with it, like sequencing colds, flu and other diseases in real time, at home genetic testing, etc.
Not just baby screening but made-to-order organs, personalized medicine, etc.
I think the timeline is going to comparatively long, on the order of 10-20 years, but it's my belief it is coming.
Though, scientists haven't yet found the gene(s) responsible for my genetic disorder, which seems a lot simpler than predicting "intelligence."
Traits are determined by multiple genes (e.g. eye or hair colour), and single genes control multiple traits (e.g. EDAR gene which is associated with thick hair, small breasts, and shovel-shaped incisors).
Sometimes genes for less desirable traits (e.g. mental illness, sickle cell anemia) may be associated with desirable traits (higher intelligence, resistence to malaria).
Most technology gets distributed to the masses. It makes more sense to sell something cheaply to a lot of people than just a few people at a higher price. The same reason the wealthiest people in the world can't buy a better iPhone. The economics behind the technology encourages mass adoption and a reasonable price
I predict that any company selling this as a service will have extensive legal language in the contract protecting themselves from any liability claim if the promised benefits don’t appear.
The moral issue is not "inequality", the moral issue is eugenics - building their behavior to your desire.
2. Low power electronics and energy harvesters (thermal/clothing, kinetic energy, rf energy harvesters etc.,)
3. Physical logistics networks (similar to Internet Protocol with standard physical containers and transfer networks - land, sea, rail, air)
4. Ubiquitous drone delivery (last mile & long haul)
5. Fiat digital currency/payment networks
We understand that granular metrics are needful for tuning an information system.
Treating a society like an information system is totalitarian.
Over time, the percentage of society rejecting totalitarianism will tend toward 100%
Everyone talks about Teslas for self driving, but for my self driving car, I want an RV with a shower, a desk, a full kitchen, a queen sized bed and a 50" flat panel.
Commuting then becomes a pleasure.
I can sleep, bathe, work, relax, all without having to concentrate on traffic or driving. The RV can drive in the slow lane at 30 miles an hour for all I care. My RV drives me to work, drops me off, drives itself somewhere else for several hours, picks me up, drives me home.
The high price of suburban housing becomes irrelevant to me. I can live hours outside of major urban areas with no effect on my stress level or lifestyle.
I don't have the hassles of an employee as my driver. My RV is ready to go 24 hours a day and never asks for a raise. If I want to go on vacation, my RV can drive me anywhere in the country, no more lines at the airport for me.
I had never seen (noticed) a raven before until this pair showed up in late 2021.
The last decade was defined by being the one unicorn that could disrupt an entire industry, but those days are gone and we take it for granted that one company dominating a space isn't a norm. There aren't really more industries that are tech vs non-tech. In the next decade, more businesses will come online to disrupt and compete with tech company incumbents. Customer acquisition costs will go up and personas will become more nuanced.
It's possible a billion people will face famine in the next year or two as a result of the loss of grain from Russia and Ukraine, along with the loss of Fertilizers (or being priced out of them)
Energy Blindness -- We're so used to having free flowing oil cheap enough to burn for energy, it's an assumption built into everything. Unless we plan for the end of easy to reach oil, we could have supply chains collapsing everywhere.
That’s what I was going to say. Some people have been talking about it [1, 2], but it’s not yet getting the attention it deserves.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220702164210/https://www.nytim...
[2] https://www.harperbusiness.com/book/9780063230477/The-End-of...
Hogwash. Globalization is good, Globalization is here to stay. Whatever is the current location causing issues with Globalization will simply be routed around. There are plenty of countries that would love to be part of the global supply chain with. The only way any manufacturing is coming back to the rich industrialized countries is that it involves a lot of really good robots. Which is also good.
> It's possible a billion people will face famine in the next year or two as a result of the loss of grain from Russia and Ukraine, along with the loss of Fertilizers (or being priced out of them)
Again, hogwash. The market will force diets to change and producers will start producing more. Fertilizer production could be an issue but again, diets and markets will adjust.
> Energy Blindness -- We're so used to having free flowing oil cheap enough to burn for energy, it's an assumption built into everything. Unless we plan for the end of easy to reach oil, we could have supply chains collapsing everywhere.
A known issue that will not happen overnight. The world is racing toward non-oil based energy, so I don't see this being an issue. Don't get me wrong, this one I actually agree with, but it won't happen overnight. The world/markets will adapt.
I mean, I think it'd be nice, but in the US our leaders are so fucking corrupt and owned by business interests that I don't see it happening until at least all the boomers/Gen Xers die off.
To me, this suggests that the problem is hard. Last I checked, the state of the art in robotic grasping seems similar to the state of many other AI systems before ML hit the scene. It's super-mathematized all to the questionable end of analyzing how a few points points can optimally apply forces to simple convex polytopes.
A similar feeling exists when you look at the state of path planning for robotic arms. There, collisions must be avoided at all costs because we don't have the mathematics for it. So you make this super precise plan that carefully snakes its way around all the little voxels that happen to become occupied in your occupancy grid. To execute these plans we need to manufacture robots with expensive harmonic gearing and sub-millimeter level repeatability. These types of robots would not be economical for outdoor picking tasks.
To make progress, I think there will have to be new ML techniques and new lower cost robotic hardware developed in tandem.
[1] https://www.appharvest.com/press_release/appharvest-acquires... [2] https://www.therobotreport.com/abundant-robotics-shuts-down-... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/following-acquisition-by-b...
Source: Worked on AI in the Ag Industry.
Plus, a lot of work in precision agriculture is overhyped and oversold. I worked in the space for a couple years and things like automated, AI/ML-powered high-throughput phenotyping are described as breakthrough technologies which will revolutionize agriculture and synthetic biology. More accurately they are relatively narrow-scoped tools which, while useful in many cases, are more often bandwagons people jump on for career progression.
cries in John Deere Monopoly
Tell me you're an American without telling me you're an American.
While I don't diminish the impact it could have over there, that's irrelevant to the daily lives of literally the rest of the world.
Nigerian here, also an opponent of the present government, but why would a crackdown on anonymous SIM cards be an issue for debate ?
It's actually fairly widespread, people teach it and use it all over the globe, and fairly stodgy organizations have used it (e.g. the US Army.) Yet the mainstream rarely mentions it, and then only to denigrate it. However, this seems to me to be that stage right before something goes from "fringe" to "common knowledge".
Once NLP goes fully mainstream there will be a sea change in human society. Psychological hangups will be a thing of the past. There will still be people who have mental problems, but they will be the ones with actual physical problems with the brain (or whatever) as opposed to just bad programming. Things like addictions, phobias, neurosis, etc. will vanish.
Educational possibilities are mind-blowing. Learning multiple languages becomes easy, as does learning musical instruments and dances. Really any behavioral patterns will become subject to symbolic manipulation. Competitive sports will be transformed when each player can "clone" the best moves of the best players.
Politics has already been revolutionized by NLP innovations. As far back as G.W. Bush NLP language patterns had already made their way into political speeches. The current culture wars are, at their root, gangs of hypnotists programming furiously.
To me the fascinating thing is that, once it's common knowledge that you can alter your psychology as easily (more easily!) than your wardrobe it becomes a matter of personal responsibility. The whole "it's just human nature" argument goes out the window when you can reprogram yourself.
These things, in theory, could be everywhere. You can bend some of them, so you could wrap lamp posts with them, cover cars in them, put them everywhere. I am confident that within 20 years, we will solve power problems with renewables like this, and we will have a major revolution in infinite-power designs, like illuminated clothing, power generating and emitting roadways, and servers embedded into everything, everywhere, for every reason.
They are 17% efficiency, and they don't yet last very long, but the work is moving at a steady pace.
There was a movie about it recently and precisely one organization developing a realistic hedge (not counting NASA's DART test mission) and pretty much still nobody cares.
n = 1. We have no backups whatsoever.
Too many parties interested in exploiting the lack of privacy are making the lack of privacy laws painfully apparent.
When it changes, its going to be all at once.
What incentive do they have to change? If anything, this seems to suggest the exact opposite, that privacy will never be codified as a right.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/health/psychedelics-mdma-...
FWIW: Metaverse VR is a flying car category... it comes up every 10-15 years but never gets traction because there's no point to it. Zuck is sailing the ship off the end of the proverbial world when he should've tripled-down on making AR ubiquitous and simple.
- Quantum Computing and WFH
- Crypto and Micronuclear Power
- Metaverse and Biohacking
Have fun!
People seem to have gotten comfortable with the idea of Ukraine as a low-tempo conventional war, but it could very quickly turn into something much more significant.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/us-nucl...
Though small room temp ones don't exist yet, they likely will some day.
As to why they are a 'big thing': Imagine a large GPU cluster turned down to the size of a laptop and running off a solar cell. They'd revolutionize electronics in other ways too. But the main use we can see now is that they allow for great amounts of computation for very cheap energy budgets. Stuff that takes coal mines today could be done with what it takes to feed a cat.
For instance, a home battery might have to be more durable (so withstand more charging cycles) but on the flip side can be heavier.
That said there might be synergies by repurposing worn out EV batteries as home or grid storage batteries.
I'm not expecting some doomer apocalyptic scenario. But every year, it'll get 1% worse. People will struggle 1%, there will be 1% more resentment between race/class/demographics, 1% more people leaving, and so on. It'll just get worse.
But i reckon once these frameworks mature enough they have the power to disrupt the whole way we think about building websites and frontend back-end coding.
Because instead of using types you can use proofs. And have the compiler prove things about your code.
You then may not need such complex higher order types in typed code.
And you could retrofit this to JS, Ruby, C so you don’t need to learn new languages to get excellent type safety.
For example assert that a number is in the 0-100 range and have the proven at compile time. Not just unit tested. It would be amazing.
Edit for clarification:
For example, the destruction of local environment is a known problem for places such as Machu Picchu and Venice, to the point where you now need to reserve and pay for a visit to the city of Venice [0]
As population gets higher more and more people want to visit the top destinations, and when a new one gets "found" it gets flooded (see Dubrovnik after Game of Thrones hype)
Because of physical limitations these experiences don't scale - there's a finite number of destinations in the world and an ever-growing population.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/world/europe/venice-touri...
The driving aspiration of the future will be that you live in a place worth visiting. Not a place you look forward to flee 2-3 times a year.
The people you're talking about have already quit talking about the thing you would now be interested in, so you're too late already.
Imagine this: https://youtu.be/NdTxgakQ-VA
(Spatial mm-wave imagery)
...crossed with all the data about you from social media, your phone sensor data, ad tracker data, location data and your gestural fingerprint from the many hours of VR gaming you've put in?
And then imagine this can be synthesized and queried vaguely, generically and qualitatively via some GPT style interface to estimate your whereabouts, your mental state, to anticipate your plans, intentions, deeply personal interests etc.?
No one seems to care about it, except particularly ardent fans. And the government only cares about satellites that benefit them.
However, discoveries and innovations are still happening. The latest one I have in mind is the James Webb Space Telescope. And private companies like SpaceX are still planning a mission to Mars. Lastly, somewhere flashed information about the resumption of the space program, such as flights to the moon.
Sidenote: Unlimited power capacity introduced many new challenges, so there will be uhm powers who wants to stop it, temporarily.
I searched for it and couldn’t find it.
Here’s a former top page post by Terraform: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...
I agree that EV will be the future, but I doubt that, especially with the rate of urbanization that we have, private vehicles is what we will be talking about 20 years down the line.
Cities will need to focus on the 15-minute concept (reach all your necessary socio-economic points of interest in 15 minutes, no matter where you live) as well as public transport (and it’s equal distribution !!).
So I think, what people are talking about little is the advances in public transportation and centralized city logistics. Sure, EV fleets all the way, but also answers of how to get people and goods from A-B in a car-free environment will be of increasing importance.
I first interpreted this as pertaining to the death penalty.
https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/research/programmes/complexity-eco...
The Keynesian economics principals has an assumption that says 'goods are scarce`
And if the next 15-30 years is an era of exponential then how should the economics behave?
Many of the big giants from the 2000s - 2010s have pretty much peaked by now. TikTok is the thing everyone wants to be, but arguably its not a social networking app so much as a social entertainment app. You don't really connect with friends on it so much as with strangers. An endless stream of entertaining strangers. It's a lot more akin to YouTube than Instagram when you think about it.
That being said, I don't think the social networking era is completely over, its just that the focus is going to shift. After big social networking platforms come smaller communities that are probably isolated from the platform on Discord or some forum somewhere, or perhaps something new in the future. The platforms themselves won't go away, but more-and-more the dialogue will shift towards niche interests and community discovery.
Problem with these communities is that there's a very real risk that they could be "unmoored" from reality, especially if the user demographic leans towards loners. Prime example is 4chan. A lesser example would be someone on Twitter who exclusively uses it politically. I think this will only get worse over time, and possibly accelerate once AI gets involved. Using, I don't know, GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, you can create a seemingly thriving "community" filled with "people" who make hilarious memes and generate thought-provoking content, culminating in whatever world you want to live in. Possibly a very hateful one.
On a positive note, I think that the internet will become a somewhat more decentralized place again. I think that with the end of the social networking era we'll also see the end of the so called "walled garden" era of the internet. Making weird websites might just become cool again. VC money will still flow into "tech", but it'll mostly be towards AI or things that are more physical such as energy, climate, biotech, space, or maybe just physical consumer goods. The race to dominate the attention of the internet will be over.
Finally, there's "the metaverse". I think a lot of companies are going to try, and fail, to build VR Disneyland when what people really want to experience is a virtual city far larger than any real world city, with public squares to meet new people at and private, intimate worlds to share with your friends. Just seems far more likely that we'll instead wind up the internet all over again, only, you know, in VR, so just the internet really. If anything, I think a company might stake its claim in this future not by trying to build a platform, but by building tools.
Mind you, this is all still a long ways off I think, but in the present there are a lot of companies building 2D metaverses, which are basically community spaces.
If this is true, what does it mean? China will invade Taiwan? What else?
Just imagine, you can travel reasonable distances without needing to deal with traffic. Your drone could pick you up on your roof, and then drop you off on a roof in a city, bypassing roads and traffic.
More importantly, if most personal transport is by drone, it means we don't need to invest as much in roads, bridges, and railroads.
We will have no choice eventually.
But I don't trust humans to make such collective sacrifices willingly. We're just too lazy, stupid, and selfish.
I think the more likely outcome is that reality will control our population for us, via drought, famine, war, and epidemic.
There will probably be some places with "natural" population control from lack of food or from disease bht that doesn't mean "we" have to do anything.
You def can't be pro-choice or anti-fascist then support population control.
Demographic problems (low birth rates).
By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles.
However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustainable, as we need 30% more grid capacity, an insanely higher number of chargers (1 out of 4 are duds) / service companies / land, China still controls most of the resources for production (of raw resources, manufacturing, & assembly) and now they want the chips too. And the climate picture isn't great either, with not enough new clean energy capacity going online, and only 8 million barrels of crude will be displaced by the estimated number of new EVs. Even with all of this new work, there will be only a small reduction in carbon emissions.
Basically there are so many things that can go wrong in the next 18 years, and so many things we don't even have a plan for, that all the estimates we've been given will result in dysfunction, increased prices, and soaring secondary markets. A lot of people are going to make money just from preparing for things to go wrong.
We literally have no vision for optimization, we just seem to obsess about and creating one problem to solve another for the sake of capacity and scalability.
Now solar panels are mostly made in China (as are almost all consumer electronics), but that seems like a far more general problem to solve.
Or use battery swapping, like China is doing. This enables many gas stations to remain viable, allows far better battery health monitoring/remediation, permits slower, less stressful charging & greatly reduces the grid issue, eliminates the battery as a limitation of the car’s lifespan, etc.
EVs are going to take over no matter what because in their end state they're better than ICE vehicles in nearly every way. Quieter, smoother, simpler, faster, cleaner (air pollution), and potentially cheaper.
That said, I absolutely disagree with the amount of shade you're throwing at the technology in the context of climate, emissions, and fuel:
> we need 30% more grid capacity
That's not very hard, especially since EVs are being phased in gradually. We had the same problem with air conditioners and it was no big deal.
> an insanely higher number of chargers
Which will happen because there is a clear financial incentive to build them. They're cheaper to run and maintain than gas stations and the fuel is transported much more easily.
> service companies
Are service companies a finite resource?
> land
What land do you mean? Car-based infrastructure already uses and has a bunch of land. Where is it that EVs need more of it?
> China still controls most of the resources for production
We already have this situation with the Middle East/Russia with oil
Here's the biggest issue I have with your comment: you're minimizing massive reduction in oil usage:
> and only 8 million barrels of crude will be displaced by the estimated number of new EVs
That's a lot! Globally, 43.7 million barrels of oil are used per day for transportation fuel. [1]
That means that EVs will reduce crude oil usage for transportation by 18.3%! That's really significant!
Do you believe this? I know its a stated goal, but is there anything to hold the company's accountable or is this just a promise? I can't imagine them giving up a cash cow and something they've been doing for decades. EV sales in the USU are 5.6% of the market. I just find the claim that these companies will just seamlessly switch over to electric when they can't even get a decent touch screen in a car a decade after the first iPad.
I will say also, any government promises or actions more than 1 election cycle out are pipe dreams by those governments, When we get to 2030, I will be SHOCKED if even 20% of the nations promising to ban ICE sales will actually do it
Why do you have the impression "nobody" is planning for these things? These topics are talked about endlessly in every medium by laypeople. Billions of dollars in public and private sector investment is being funneled into everyone of these topics.
The complaint about grid capacity baffles me. The USA used to regularly growth capacity by well over 30% a decade. It only stopped expanding because energy efficiency standards were so damn successful that net usage declined in spite of population growth, and the majority new capacity went to displacing coal production.
> By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely.
If those two seem out of step with one another then I propose that one of them will relent with regard to the other. (No one is making these six manufacturers stick to their forecasts.)
If there are not enough chargers, won't that create an incentive to build more? And yeah, you probably can't build them fast enough, or the grid capacity will not be sufficient, but won't people then just move to places where they can? Or switch to alternative modes of transportation?
I think the fallacy is that people just want to replace ICE cars with EVs as they are, and then realize you need a lot of space and grid capacity to charge them, etc. But because of the scaling problems you mention, there will be a very large pressure to build better public transport. If people can't charge their EV, or can't afford a car, or don't have good transportation, they will move somewhere else. This is structural change, and yeah it is going to be inconvenient and expensive (and we could have done it better with more foresight), but ultimatively we will figure it out.
> Basically there are so many thing sthat can go wrong in the next 18 years ...
There has to be a name for this particular kind of response to change (usually positive change[0]). Please don't read this as crapping on your points -- they're all valid.
The problem is that it's identifying problems that "may occur in the future" using what technology we have, today, to solve them. It also presents those in a vacuum and ignores the unknown of what the world could look like after new vehicles sales gradually transition to 80% electric. We can speculate more easily on the negative, but it's a lot harder to predict the positive -- at least, the "societal changing positive effects".
Consider that newer EVs can power your home during a power loss, or integrating EVs into the grid, itself. Reliance on traditional automobiles and how we rely on them is changing, as well. My driving habits, due to the vast availability of fully-remote work and the purchase of a OneWheel have been drastically reduced[1]. I went from ~20 gallons/week to ~10 gallons/month of gas. I've done the math a few times and it's stupid for me to own an ICE vehicle. I own it out of a desire of convenience that could probably be eliminated with Uber and when my kids are out of the house, I probably will no longer own a car. Until then, however, my car could basically be filling in that 30% gap (or whatever the gap happens to be at this very moment).
Articles that recently hit the front page of HN related to Geothermal conversion of Coal Plants[2], the myriad of posts related to companies attempting the modern-day alchemy called "Nuclear Fusion", there's a lot of energy/money being spent in the space, much of it having nothing to do with reducing climate change but providing for an increasingly electricity dependent future.
Even the incredibly slow-moving electric companies have made some pretty serious progress. I think back on my short life; I happen to currently live in the city I grew up in -- losing the power for a few days in the summer was a "normal thing", as was losing it during every miserable thunderstorm. The price of whole-home generators and the hardware to integrate it were so cost-prohibitive that few people owned one. I still do not, however, I've lost power maybe four times this year for under ten seconds. I've lost power once in three years for over an hour (still restored in under four hours).
[0] I'm thinking something succinct like Hanlon's Razor.
[1] 2,800 miles and going since I bought it. I grocery shop with it ... it's a good upper body workout carrying 6 bags back 1-3 miles.
[2] Filed under "I'll believe it when I see it" but still.
Because, unless we get a tremendous breakthrough in the next 5 years, electric battery vehicles will be a very big pain.
-Batteries are terribly expensive (and prices are not going down as fast as expected)
-Batteries degrade too fast
-Batteries take too long to charge
-Electricity prices are already going up terribly fast to take advantage of the boom (and blaming the war, and everything else to justify it's rise)
-Batteries pollute a lot more than previously though
-recycling Batteries is hard
-Batteries component materials are rare
-if you get into a crash your Battery will most likely be affected - which means you will probably have to spend almost the price of a new vehicle
Can we bet a little more on the most abundante substance on the universe?
I know it also has it's problems... But they do seen less...
Their currency is stronger than before the war (despite internal fragility)
They have the entire continent of Europe by the balls on oil/gas
They've made an absolute killing in the energy sector this year due to the fear and scarcity they have created.
They're making steady gains in their war in Ukraine
They have the ear and economic heart of China
I don't mean to upset anyone, and I think the chance of collapse is small, but it's not zero.
And like any other 'bubble' at least the ultimate goal seem to fleece somebody.
Honestly the whole point of this is 'to make things easier'. +++
P-: