Eli Dourado has a nice roundup.
Both Moderna and BioNTech have personalized vaccine candidates targeting cancer. Although called a “cancer vaccine,” the treatment is only administered once the subject has cancer—it isn’t preventative. The companies use an algorithm to analyze the genetic sequences of the tumor and the patient’s healthy cells and predict which molecules could be used to generate a strong immune response against the cancer.
He is optimistic about the Hyperloop. Peter Diamindis is, also.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The tone is optimistic. Years ago, I noted that the print publication that gives me the most optimism is Technology Review. The one that gives me the most pessimism is Regulation.
We can compare Eli’s post to what I wrote in 2005.
I wrote,
Is the new trend rate of productivity growth 3 percent or higher?
Obviously, it wasn’t. I was thinking about labor productivity, which is not the same as TFP, which Eli wants to look at. All productivity measures are dubious, in my opinion.
I wrote that cognitive neuroscience was the field of the future. I think I was wrong. It gets no mention in Eli’s survey.
I quoted the U.S. Department of Energy to the effect that by 2015 solar power would be competitive with traditional sources of energy. Eli says
The 2010s were the wind and solar decade. We observed stunning declines in the cost of both
I wrote about optimism regarding cancer therapy. We have seen some improvement, but “the emperor of all maladies” is still a formidable killer.
Finally, I wrote that mainstream media were losing attention as well as credibility. Actually, they figured out how to hang on to attention by dialing up the outrage and clickbait. They decided not to bother with credibility.
If I were a billionaire, instead of wasting money on non-profits, I would buy some land and try to build a start-up city. Build roads that work well with autonomous vehicles, and only allow autonomous vehicles–visitors have to leave their ordinary cars in a parking lot outside the city. Design and build an electric grid optimized for today’s technology. Make 5G available everywhere. Implement a set of protocols that allow all sorts of drones to operate without colliding with one another or with humans.
The key to a start-up city might be making it easy for people to interact with people from other cities. This could mean rapid transit in and out, or it could mean the use of augmented reality.
Perhaps in the future cities that have major impediments to livability will be at a disadvantage. It may prove easier to give people in other cities the amenities that they appreciate about NY or SF than it is for NY or SF to escape their downward spirals. Boston, Chicago, and Minneapolis will have a harder time convincing people to live with winter.
That is not a sure-fire prediction–it may prove no more prescient than my 2005 blog post–but I offer it as a possible future scenario.
In my mind, the number 1 issue of our time is Medicare. We’ve promised free, but very expensive healthcare to the elderly and we have limited resources to do so based on the age composition of our population.
Until technology can address this issue, then I’m extremely skeptical about the future. And, this skepticism makes me much less willing to reproduce, thus exacerbating the problem.
Drones and self-driving cars sound cool of course, but can the workers displaced by such technologies be readily re-deployed to providing healthcare services?
Also, improved cancer treatments and other therapies tend to extend life in the later years vs. limiting it. That only makes matters worse. Have a nice day 🙂
With all due respect, these are weak gripes. Of course, any productivity enhancement will displace workers, and any disease treatment will extend lifespan. Also, realistic outcomes generally fall short of rosy optimistic predictions, so I’d be wary if I were considering investing serious money in these ventures, yet overall optimism is a great thing.
What exactly is the batting average of the tech optimists? How have they been doing since 2000? Actuals / promises = ?
Just FYI – most of our shipments arrive next day, which is more than sufficient for what we need. What’s a drone or self-driving care going to do to improve upon this? Cut my shipping cost by a few dollars? Gee, thanks.
Meanwhile, we’ve got approximately $40 trillion in unfunded Medicare liabilities on top of the explicit outstanding debt. Do the math if you wanna understand this on a per household basis.
So yeah, I’m going to focus my attention on the latter issue as opposed to rosy projections of the tech optimists regardless of how weak my gripes may sound.
Reality is often closer to pessimism, but optimism is necessary to motivate and inspire.
The realist or pessimist in me would not invest large sums of my own money in stock in companies in these areas. But I appreciate the beauty of the ideas, and the motivation and inspiration this post provides without spending a dime. I advise that outlook to others.
I find it odd that both Kling and Dourado cite Tyler Cowen’s personal mood as a big change. If you are excited about longevity tech and hyperloop and all these technologies, were you not excited about these things a year ago or the past five years? I guess Tyler Cowen is like Joe Rogan or he’s a smart man’s Oprah for a certain clique. But, yes, this technology is more inspiring and optimistic than politics.
Hyperloop is an absurdity. Boring tunnels is extremely costly, which is why most of the NYC “subway” and London “underground” runs above ground. Tunnels are point-to-point while an airport let you go to any other airport.
It is the kind of things that excite those who have no understanding of the subject. But as TC would say, only libertarian economists are intelligent and know subjects they never studied.
You may be right. However I think Musk bought himself a tunneling machine and thinks he can do it on the cheap. His ideas in this area are radical – city tunnels that support electric cars only (no ventilation needed), and “highway” tunnels that are evacuated, with self-driving semis (trucks) running at 100mph with no wind resistance.
A vacuum tunnel is going to be a lot trickier than it sounds. Even assuming you can keep the tunnel from leaking, you will need to have pressurized containers for those trucks, or require all products to be resilient to -14 psi without rupturing. Both of those will add expense.
Further, cooling the electronic motors of the vehicles becomes an issue without air. Radiators and heat sinks don’t really work in vacuum. You can get around that with liquid cooling, but again, pricey and more prone to failure.
All that is probably surmountable in some fashion, but I strongly suspect hyper loops won’t be more than a curiosity in the 60 or so years I have left.
Jacques’ comments are what I have always thought as well. It’s inconceivable to me that a cross-country tunnel could be practical. Aside from the phenomenal expense of digging such a tunnel, can you really find a path where seismic activity isn’t a problem?
Yes, fast trains and hyperloops make me wonder, are they easier to build than speeding up getting into jets and if so why?
Is it that airports cannot be put where they need to be due to wind and noise.
America simply cannot build fast trains where there is high demand and which are both economical and conveniently located. It is so hard and expensive to build big new infrastructure, that tunneling is about all one can do, and it becomes at least financially plausible relative to any other proposed boondoggle.
That being said, keep in mind that at extremely low interest rates, a project that doesn’t suffer much depreciation or require much maintenance can be financially viable because it has a long, long time to use a small but steady stream of of modest profits to service and pay off its debts. Tunnels underground or through mountains are almost the perfect, textbook examples of such projects.
Arnold, the future of technology is in the hands of the barbarians, not of the puppets that are already working for them. Don’t waste your time taking points from a junior puppet who is applying to be the senior puppet with the barbarians. Please don’t spend the rest of your life in your house’s basement, get out and fight for your grandchildren.
BTW, I was surprised that you repeat your assertion about labor/TF productivity growth and then call the term dubious. Is Solow still torturing you? Maybe you should write 100 times “Solow’s macro was wrong and still is”.
If you are serious about start-up cities: https://prospera.hn/
“If I were a billionaire, instead of wasting money on non-profits, I would buy some land and try to build a start-up city. “
This happens every day nearly. New master-planned communities start construction nearly every day. There aren’t any autonomous cars available on the retail market, but golf cart communities can be found, and you can live car free in communities like Williamsburg. Planned communities are able to extract a premium because their bylaws protect the internet’s of homeowners much better than local government. In Maryland, huge planned communities and expansions open frequently. Columbia, Maryland dating to 1967 is the oldest planned community in the USA.
But by “city” I suppose you mean a high density mix of employer office space and residential quarters, something like the guest worker dormitories of Singapore. Or this: https://anno2070.fandom.com/wiki/Eco_Worker_Barracks. I doubt subsistence wage employees or their employers will be interested in pays premium to support ever more planners planning away profusely. Instead cheap housing is going to be even more in demand as surplus laborers and automation drive wages and living standards down to subsistence levels.
Somebody smart (sorry can’t find the piece but I want to think it was at New Geography) recently wrote an insightful piece on how the war on poverty and the ban on cheap housing, trailer parks, boarding houses, “slums” and the like on urban fringes did so much damage and need to be reversed. Idiotic green belts and worse “agricultural reserves “ like in Montgomery County, Maryland in the DC region need to get rejected and opened up for development thereby increasing the space available for more and cheaper housing.
Of course this article had a downside in that it glorified the high density achieved in many trailer parks. Apparently there is some “law” in economics or received wisdom that holds that if you cram more humans into a small space , you automatically transform them into higher productivity workers. Makes no sense at all but in the halls of Balnibarbi it is considered quite ironclad.
With the coming flood of immigrants and the covid-sparked reversal of once declining poverty rates, it might make sense for the hypothetical billionaire to invest in the normalization of informal housing. But selling ultra-low cost self portable housing units (think portable tiny houses a step up from tents) along with the regulatory changes necessary to accommodate them on public lands.
The proportion of the population in poverty is only going to grow as the green energy continues to impoverish ever greater numbers, new union demands legitimize ever more off-shoring, and public school indoctrination leaves ever more workers unqualified to do much of anything.
*A non-CCP affiliated comment. The author of this comment attests that he is not a
member of not is he affiliated with nor has he accepted anything of value from the Chinese Communist Party or its affiliates or from anyone who has or their affiliates.
Link to a similar article about legalizing low-cost housing:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/8/11/reclaiming-redneck-urbanism-what-urban-planners-can-learn-from-trailer-parks?utm_content=buffer4d577
Kling’s suggestion of startup cities is a pretty common idea normally called charter cities:
https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/blog
The idea has a lot of traction, and a lot of investment. The Marginal Revolution blog talks about this quite a bit. I find it interesting to read about and I hope to hear about successful outcomes.
I call them Romervilles after Paul Timer who boosted the idea. But some say the idea originated with Confucius in China. A start-from scratch greenfield city like Dr King proposes would have to get dispensation from state incorporation laws if it were to be the type of self-governing type of entity that most people think of as a charter city. Good luck with that, too many transaction costs. Rather than buying the land, it might be more feasible for the US Congress to authorize lease auctions of Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, or Bureau of Reclamation property tracts as economic development zones and offer regulatory and tax incentives for development of the tracts. This would stifle the opportunity for state and local shakedowns. I am not saying Dr King’s idea is bad, I am just pessimistic on the idea that there are people clamoring to live in a “Meet the Jetsons” city: China still has futuristic ghost cities that failed to draw inhabitants in the numbers originally envisioned: https://blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com/en/the-truth-about-chinas-futuristic-ghost-cities/
I’ve read a lot of reasons why China has these failed ghost cities. There have been other failed charter cities too.
I’m still optimistic about the concept. I definitely think lots of people would love to live in a Jetsons style city. I would in a heartbeat, until I recently have begun to deeply distrust big tech.
“If I were a billionaire, instead of wasting money on non-profits, I would buy some land and try to build a start-up city.”
Google tried this, quickly ran into political opposition, and eventually gave up: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52572362]. I’m not sure how much of the land Google was going to buy, but political activists generally seem uninhibited in telling landowners what they can do with their own property.
“Perhaps in the future cities that have major impediments to livability will be at a disadvantage.”
No need for speculation here. People are already migrating from NY and CA to South Florida and Texas. Indeed, there don’t seem to be many barriers for a hot NYC restaurant, museum, Broadway theater, etc. to follow its Wall St clientele to Miami-Ft Lauderdale. Unclear whether the migration will halt or reverse if NY and CA are ever able to rein in their toxic tax and regulation environment.
Maybe someone can explain the hyperloop to me. As I read the glowing predictions they all go something like this: “Within 10 years, the hyperloop will be able to safely move X people at Y speed for cost Z” – where bullet trains already in service today safely move more than X people at Y speed for a lot less than Z.
When you write “glowing predictions”, you already know you are reading optimistic exaggeration. Pessimism is often good for setting realistic timelines. Optimists are almost always underestimate the effort involve. Optimism is good for inspiration. The ideas linked should provide exctiement and inspiration.
As for Hyperloop: it’s a train that runs in a vacuum-sealed tube. Some skepticism is warranted; I’ll believe it is practical solution when I see it. But I enjoy the excitement and optimism regardless.
I’m happy for people to be seeking solutions, even speculative ones, to unsolved problems. My issue here is that it appears to me that they are seeking a speculative solution to a solved problem. For over ten years the Shanghai maglev has been clocking 430 KPH. No speculation involved.