Capitalogix

The New Era of Energy

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about oil production.  This week, I want to look at the current energy landscape. 

 

View the full infographic at visualcapitalist

Over the past several decades, there has been a massive shift in how we produce and consume energy.  This has been driven by the tech boom - as well as by climate awareness.

The practical realities of widespread tech adoption directly impact energy consumption.  For example, there are now over 7 billion people with smartphones.  As the population (and the number of gadgets and tech we use) grows, logically, so does our energy consumption.

Luckily, we're also getting better at powering them. 

On a different front, oil is still a meaningful and vital part of the energy ecosystem … but, now, it's being supplemented by multiple renewables. 

View the full infographic at visualcapitalist 

Over the last decade, investment in green technologies has helped the cost of renewable energies drop precipitously. 

That spurred a different set of products and use cases.  For example, we've seen the number of electric cars grow exponentially.  In 2011, there were approximately 70,000 EV units in the world.  Now there are around 16.5 million. 

This isn't a commentary on the environmental benefit of renewables; it is an observation about the direction energy is heading. 

And, just like with AI, despite being a space that's existed for a long time, it is still in the "early adoption" phase. 

Based on estimations, the IEA projects an 8x growth in EV by 2050.  This also means that we will use an increasing amount of batteries and rare metals.  Currently, China controls the supply chains and critical resource constraints. 

If our goal is to be energy independent, we have a long way to go ... Nonetheless, recognize that this creates massive business and investment opportunities. 

Onwards!

Some Cool "Futuristic" Tech You Might Not Have Seen

I joke that I have a "tense" problem. I spend a lot of my time thinking about what will be possible in the future. And once I know something is possible, in my head, it has already happened.

It isn’t a reality distortion engine … it is a reality creation engine.

For me, this is centered around the way technology is transforming the world and how it affects my business. 

Sometimes it's nice to take a step back and look at all the "quality of life" improvements. The gadgets that make you say "Wow!" … even though they may not benefit you directly. 

So, here are a few that caught my eye over the last few weeks. 

Augmented Reality Running 

In 2020, Ghost Pacer put together a pair of AR glasses that would give you a virtual running partner. The app would analyze the running route and the wearer's desired goals and set them up against a virtual runner who would push them to their limits. 

Last year, SNAP and Nike teamed up to create a new AR running experience as well. 

 

Spectacles via YouTube

This is a great way to get moving for those (like my wife) who benefit from a structure around their exercise. 

Magnetic Slime Robot for Healthcare

 

New Scientist via YouTube

Watching the video of this slime is somewhat uncanny. Its movements feel almost lifelike. That being said, the potential for this custard-like slime worm is massive. It can navigate narrow passageways, grasp objects, and more. There are already plans to use this to remove foreign objects from people.  

Functioning Hoverboards 

 

RIDE via YouTube

Multiple generations of kids have dreamed of hoverboards after watching Back To The Future. While it's not in homes yet, it is now a reality as seen in this video with Tony Hawk riding one. Unfortunately, since breaking into the scene in 2015 with a successful Kickstarter, I have not seen much from Hendo Hoverboard. 

Thankfully, they're not the only company in the space anymore. If you're willing to drop almost 15K, you can own a working hoverboard from Arcaboard. 

I remember when we used to go outside to play or exercise.

We live in interesting times!  

Where Are Children Being Born?

Everyone knows that children are our future. They're the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, and workers. Countries that are having a natural decrease in population due to families not having children will likely find themselves becoming less important on the geopolitical stage.

While the future is often hard to predict, here is easy “prediction” (that is much less of a prediction than it is simple math). In order to predict how many 18-year-olds there will be in a particular country in fifteen years, simply count the 3-year-olds there now.  Yes, there will be some death or migration … but it is an easy way to get a sense of some important mega-trends.

With that said, the U.S. saw many states with more deaths than births in 2020 and 2021. 

So, where are children being born?

India, China, and Africa all are seeing massive population growth. America is still net positive. It's also worth noting that India and China are topping the list because they already have such large populations. Their birth rates are actually slightly below average. 

On a longer term scale, it's also worth noting that population growth has been declining since the 1960s. Partly due to education, wealth, and the move from rural to urban living. 

Slowing population growth means a larger portion of the population is older. As median age increases, there are lots of potential economic consequences.

It's an interesting compounding of consequences. 

We'll see if the countries with the largest population growth have the economy and infrastructure to support that growth. 

Oil Production By Country in 2021

You could argue that we're in the middle of the first energy crisis of the 21st century.

While gas prices are finally on the way back down, the recent surge is driving inflation and has consumers thinking much more about where their oil comes from. 

When I last wrote about oil production, the shocking "secret" was that the largest importer of oil into the U.S. was Canada - and that most of our oil was produced within the U.S. 

via visualcapitalist

While the U.S. is the largest producer of Oil, OPEC is the largest organization. OPEC accounts for 35% of total production, with Saudi Arabia accounting for a third of OPEC's output. 

Almost half of the world's oil production comes from The U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Russia. 

Also, despite being the world's largest oil producer, the U.S. is still a net importer of oil. 

Supply constraints on oil - as a result of sanctions on Russia - are creating a price increase with skyrocketing demand from mid-pandemic levels. Combine that with OPEC refusing to increase production to meet demand, and you have an energy shortage. 

The U.S. has already started releasing barrels from its strategic reserves, and we've seen gas prices go down as a result, but it remains to be seen if our efforts will be enough to curb the shortage. 

What else do you think we should be doing?

Taylor Swift's Carbon Footprint?

I'm writing this from International Falls, MN (someplace I never thought I'd be ... ).  Meanwhile, one of the only less likely things, I can think of, is the article's topic.

Taylor Swift is known for being vocal about climate issues.  She was also just 'outed' for the 170 flights her private jet took last year.  The news came out after another celebrity was chastised for a 20-minute private jet flight.  Taylor claims that most of those flights weren't hers – and that she rents the plane out.  Knowing other people with private jets, that's believable. 

There are obviously bigger problems in the world today.  Nonetheless, I'm sharing this info anyways because the chart comparing her carbon footprint to the average person's caught my eye. 

via Reddit

I wonder how that would compare to the carbon footprint of non-celebrity private jet owners or manufacturers. 

 

US Spending in 2021

In a prior post, we looked at the Global GDP in 2021. Now, let's look at US Revenue vs. Expenditures in 2021. 

 

So, from the start, we can see a 2,770-billion-dollar deficit last year. The #1 expenditure was income security. For those who don't know, income security is an extremely broad spending category. It covers everything from tax credits and unemployment to housing assistance, foster care, and many other welfare programs. It's somewhat of a catch-all for services that help people get necessities. 

Surprisingly, the US pays more per person for healthcare than countries with nationalized healthcare. 

Looking at 2021 isn't the best indicator of America's spending history as a whole; there were a lot of one-time events - and a pandemic. Usually, the deficit isn't that staggering. 

via Congressional Budget Office

While the deficit may grow out of control, debt is a powerful tool - not just a liability.  Nonetheless, given our current economic situation, inflation, and rising interest rates, the strategy that got us here might not be the best strategy to get us where we want to go.

What are your thoughts? 

What Tasks Should AI Take Over?

One of the most common pop-sci questions about Artificial Intelligence is whether it will take our jobs.  

There's a lot of fear from workers about a future where their roles are taken. Gartner recently surveyed workers on what tasks they wanted AI to handle. 

Gartner via Statista

According to VentureBeat, some survey respondents did not want to use AI at work at all. Their reasons were privacy and security concerns. 

I think one of the tasks that will be thrust upon AI companies is to help workers understand that AI is not meant to replace or take over their jobs, but to help workers be more effective and focused on higher-value tasks. 

Onwards.

Understanding Data Breaches

In 2016, I received this e-mail from my oldest son, who used to be a cybersecurity professional.

Date: Saturday, October 22, 2016 at 7:09 PM
To: Howard Getson
Subject: FYI: Security Stuff

FYI - I just got an alert that my email address and my Gmail password were available to be purchased online.

I only use that password for my email, and I have 2-factor enabled, so I'm fine. Though this is further proof that just about everything is hacked and available online.

If you don't have two-factor enabled on your accounts, you really need to do it.

Since then, security has only become a more significant issue.  I wrote about the Equifax event, but there are countless examples of similar events (and yes, I mean countless). 

When people think of hacking, they often think of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack or the media representation of people breaking into your system in a heist.

In reality, the most significant weakness is people; it's you ... the user.  It's the user that turns off automatic patch updating.  It's the user that uses thumb drives.  It's the user that reuses the same passwords.  But, even if you do everything right, you're not always safe. 

Your data is likely stored in dozens of places online.  You hope your information is encrypted, but even that isn't always enough.  Over the last 17 years, 17.2B records have been "lost" by various companies.  In 2021, a new record was set with 5.9 billion user records stolen. 

VisualCapitalist put together a visualization of the 50 biggest breaches since 2004. 

Click To See Full Size via VisualCapitalist

InformationisBeautiful also put together a great interactive visualization with all of the breaches, if you want to do more research. 

Click To See Interactive Version via InformationIsBeautiful

It's impossible to protect yourself completely, but there are many simple things you can likely do better. 

• Use better passwords... Even better, don't even know them.  You can't disclose what you don't know.  Consequently, I recommend a password manager like LastPass or 1Password, which can also suggest complex passwords for you. 
• Check if any of your information has been stolen via a website like HaveIBeenPwned or F-Secure
• Keep all of your software up to date (to avoid extra vulnerabilities)
• Don't use public Wi-Fi if you can help it (and use a VPN if you can't)
• Have a firewall on your computer and a backup of all your important data
• Never share your personal information on an e-mail or a call that you did not initiate - if they legitimately need your information, you can call them back
• Don't trust strangers on the internet (no, a Nigerian Prince does not want to send you money)
• Hire a third-party security company like eSentire or Pegasus Technology Solutions to help monitor and protect your corporate systems

How many cybersecurity measures you take comes down to two simple questions ... First, how much pain and hassle are you willing to deal with to protect your data?  And second, how much pain is a hacker willing to go through to get to your data?

My son always says, "you've already been hacked ... but have you been targeted?" Something to think about! 

Can AI Be Curious?

“Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It's really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.” —Sebastian Thrun

We often use human consciousness as the ultimate benchmark for artificial exploration. 

The human brain is ridiculously intricate.  While weighing only three pounds, it contains about 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections between them.  On top of the sheer complexity, the order of the connections and the order of actions the brain does naturally make it even harder to replicate.  The human brain is also constantly reorganizing and adapting.  It's a beautiful piece of machinery.  

We've had millions of years for this powerhouse of a computer to be created, and now we're trying to do the same with neural networks and machines in a truncated time period.  While deep learning algorithms have been around for a while, we're just now developing enough data and computing power to change deep learning from a thought experiment to a real edge. 

Think of it this way, when talking about the human brain, we talk about left-brain and right-brain.  The theory is that left-brain activities are analytical and methodical, and right-brain activities are creative, free-form, and artistic.  We're great at training AI for left-brain activities (obviously with exceptions).  In fact, AI is beating us at these left-brain activities because a computer has a much higher input bandwidth than we do, they're less biased, and they can perform 10,000 hours of research by the time you finish this article.

It's tougher to train AI for right-brain tasks.  That's where deep learning comes in. 

Deep learning is a subset of machine learning based on unsupervised learning from unstructured/unlabeled data.  Instead of asking AI a question, giving it metrics, and letting it chug away, you're letting AI be intuitive.  Deep learning is a much more faithful representation of the human brain.  It utilizes a hierarchy of convolutional neural networks to handle linear and non-linear operations so it can think creatively to better problem-solve on potentially various data sets and in unseen environments. 

When a baby is first learning to walk, it might stand up and fall down.  It might then take a small stutter step, or maybe a step that's much too far for its little baby body to handle.  It will fall, fail, and learn.  Fall, fail, and learn.  That's very similar to the goal of deep learning or reinforcement learning. 

What's missing is the intrinsic reward that keeps humans moving when the extrinsic rewards aren't coming fast enough.  AI can beat humans at many games but has struggled with puzzle/platformers because there's not always a clear objective outside of clearing the level. 

A relatively new (in practice, not in theory) approach is to train AI around "curiosity"^[1].  Curiosity helps it overcome that boundary.  Curiosity lets humans explore and learn for vast periods of time with no reward in sight, and it looks like it can do that for computers too! 

OpenAI via Two Minute Papers

Soon, I expect to see AI learn to forgive and forget, be altruistic, follow and break rules, learn to resolve disputes, and even value something that resembles "love" to us.

Exciting  stuff! 

_______

[1] - Yuri Burda, Harri Edwards, Deepak Pathak, Amos Storkey, Trevor Darrell and Alexei A. Efros.  Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning
In ICLR 2019.

Billion ... With A B

Humans are notoriously bad at large numbers. It's hard to wrap our minds around something of that scale. We're wired to think locally and linearly, not exponentially (it's one of the reasons I love AI so much).

Here are a couple of ways to help you understand a billion dollars. 

via AskOpinion

Next, let's look at spending over time. If you were to spend a dollar every second for an entire day, you would spend $86,400 per day. You can do that for approximately twelve days if you have a million dollars. With a billion dollars, you can do that for over 31 years. Ignoring the difference between net worth and cash, Jeff Bezos could spend $9M per day for over 31 years.

If you make $100K a year, you can earn $1 million in 10 years. At the same rate, it would take you 10,000 years to make $1 billion.

Here is an example framed around spending money.  Imagine that someone making $50K a year decides to buy a laptop, a car, and a house. Now we're going to make a relative comparison of the cost of those items for people making a lot more than $50K per year.  To do this, we'll shrink the cost of the price of those items (to see the relative cost-to-income ratio). For a millionaire, a laptop might cost the equivalent of $100 dollars, a Porsche would cost $3,000 dollars, and a house would cost $25,000. Now, let's say you're Mike Bloomberg, and you're worth $60B. A laptop's relative cost would be pennies, a Porsche's relative cost would be less than 60 cents, and a mansion's relative cost would be around $500 dollars. You could have everything you ever wanted for a minute fraction of your wealth. 

For a different perspective, here's an interesting visualization from informationisbeautiful. It shows various examples of things worth billions of dollars – including the personal wealth of several billionaires. 

via informationisbeautiful

Okay, last one before I show a video ... 

Let's try explaining the concept of a Billion through time. Fifty thousand seconds is just under 14 hours. A million seconds was 11 days ago. A billion seconds ago from today? 1990. Pretty crazy. 

Here's a video from the 1970s that helps you understand scale through the power of tens – and an exploration of our universe.

 

Hope you enjoyed this.  Let me know what you think.