I am all in ... The Edge of Tomorrow

... my bets on the future ...

As you may or may not know, I scrape the news. My scrapers create files which are processed by the Natural Language Processing aspect of Artificial Intelligence. Then, I automagically create Knowledge Graphs from the contents to discern possible actionable insights. The most powerful insights come when I have two concurrencies of the same subject, item or noun, but with different knowledge graphs attached to each instance. This is the secret sauce that bring different memes together into a possible new knowledge synthesis. It doesn't work all the time and I discard a lot of files. But when synchronicity does work, it is quite powerful. I was into the Age of Prediction before the term was coined this week by the Illuminati who meet regularly at Davos.

So what do I know now from literally hundreds (maybe a couple of thousand, I don't keep count but I am going to now) of articles that I have processed? I do have a lot of meme pollution -- absolutely useless crap that belongs on the compost pile of the brain. But there are ideas that get formed that are contrary to what I think is logical deduction and inference, and they do cause me some cognitive dissonance. Electric Vehicles and what powers them is one such aspect.

Electric Vehicles And Hydrogen

Elon Musk may be eccentric, a blowhard, a narcissist or just plain egotistical. However he does have two attributes that put him above most human beings. He can reason correctly in a lot of cases and he can have a vision, create a plan, enact that plan and grow the vision to change society. His second attribute is that he is The Great Implementer. He can take the plans arising from his vision and make them so. He has done it several times, which beats all odds. But he has been wrong several times as well. So when you want to bet against Elon Musk, you are taking a big chance.

Tesla has made its mark on society with electric vehicles among other things including spacecraft. The car company is now more valuable than General Motors. The technology that Musk chose to power his vehicles, was the lithium battery.

A precursor technology could have been used, was the hydrogen fuel cell. For all intents and purposes, Elon made the right decision to go battery. First of all, you don’t need to go to a filling station and hydrogen filling stations are few and far between. As of January 2021, there were 45 publicly accessible hydrogen refueling stations in the US, 43 of which were located in California. (I do not have later statistics). You can plug your Model S into your home power. Secondly, hydrogen is explosive. Remember the Hindenburg Zeppelin disaster? Get into an accident, the tank ruptures, a spark ignites and you will be doing inverse skydiving if you are not in pieces all over the road. Thirdly, there is a problem with long term storage of hydrogen in a metal tank. The molecule is so small that eventually the hydrogen atoms will eventually work their way through the steel tank over a long period of time. After all of this, you have to make the hydrogen in the first place, even though it is the most abundant element in the universe. Elon Musk called the hydrogen fuel cell, “the hydrogen fool cell”.

Because of all of this, there are only a relative smattering of hydrogen vehicles around. Currently, there are only two production hydrogen-powered cars on sale: the Toyota Mirai and Hyundai Nexo. There are more hydrogen-powered cars and vans on the horizon, with brands such as BMW, Land Rover and Vauxhall all planning new models within the next five years.

So I am going all in on hydrogen, even though I am willing to bet that most electric vehicles of the future will be lithium battery driven. Why? Because of the supply chain. A value of $732.3 billion in gross freight revenues (primary shipments only) was generated from trucking, representing 80.4% of the nation’s freight bill in 2020. This translated 10.23 billion tons of freight (primary shipments only) transported by trucks in 2020, representing 72.5% of total domestic tonnage shipped. Get this: Lithium batteries for truck hauling heavy loads are impractical on an enterprise scale. The battery would need to be huge to haul heavy loads and a significant fraction of the energy in the batteries would be required just to move them down the highways. Drivers can clock in anywhere from 80,000 to 110,000 miles annually.

Hydrogen fuel stocks are currently in the toilet. In 3-5 years, they will be the hottest growth stocks on the market.

Web3 Will Die

While posting content on LinkedIn, one of my posts that went viral, was an article quoting Elon Musk that Web3 was bullshit and would never happen. This really ticked off the crypto and blockchain maximalists. Web3 is defined as decentralized Internet on the Blockchain. Millions upon millions of dollars of venture capital has been poured into its possible development. Proponents of Web3 state that with Web3, it will bring in an era of online privacy so that Facebook, Meta, Google et al will not be able to harvest your personal information and data-rape you.

When I was discussing this with an older relative, he had an insightful response. I’m paraphrasing, but this was his thought: “I recently shamed my granddaughter for spending $8 on avocado toast. Then I tried it and it was delicious. I tweeted that on Twitter just for my 40 followers of family and friends. Why would I want that bit of information stored simultaneously on over 10,000 nodes around the world?”. Can you imagine the energy required to store a post about an old guy liking millennial avocado toast after throwing shade on it?

So what is the answer? If you are a follower of mine, I have already alluded to the next incarnation of the internet. It will be:

The Edge of Tomorrow

Simply put it is Edge Computing. Edge devices were invented to aggregate IoT (Internet of Things) devices like thermostat settings and various sensors and pass them on via the Internet to a server for processing and action. Well, they became the little computers that could. They are now full fledged servers. The servers are powerful and coupled with Storage As A Service, they will beat the cloud for computing. Gartner predicts that by 2025, edge solutions will process 75% of all data created.

Now tiny edge devices are capable of machine learning, artificial intelligence and almost everything else that servers are able to do. Wanna do face recognition from an edge device? Imagine your NEST doorbell identifying friend or foe. You can see the code for it here: https://review.mlplatform.org/plugins/gitiles/ml/ethos-u/ml-embedded-evaluation-kit/+/HEAD/docs/use_cases/object_detection.md

You will need a Arm Ethos-U55 microNPU from here: https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/ethos/ethos-u55.

When you combine edge devices with storage options, you have re-invented a decentralized internet AND decentralized social media.

In a sea filled with technology whales, finding blue ocean opportunities can feel impossible. With edge computing, the field is wide open. With a cheap edge device, a free Software Development Kit, some knowledge of how to write a web server from scratch, you can be the next unicorn Zuckerberg or Musk for less than $500 in supplies. Write apps for the decentralized edge web servers.

I love this Brave New World. I am all in.