ZD 24.29: Poking the Future
ZD 24.29: Poking the Future
If you poke the future with a pointy stick does it pop?
In this issue: Supply chain collapse; spotting and eliminating bottlenecks; interperting metrics; the slop era; live from MIT.
The Distilled Spirit
🚢 Supply Chain Collapse ()
Economies of scale have lead to very complicated and concentrated supply networks with a fundamental presumption of cheap and available shipping. Minor disruptions — such as labor issues on the US East Coast or attacks by Houthi rebels, can significantly impact these networks. Weather can play a role too; Hurricane Helene wiped out the world’s pure quartz sand supply. Lest you think this is all negative — Noah’s guests Yann Calvó López and Ben Golub examine some ideas about solutions as well.
🍾 How to Spot and Eliminate Bottlenecks
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Thorsten has been writing some great content of late. The Operators Manual is full of good advice. This piece is especially strong and focuses on a problem we all have — how to eliminate bottlenecks. He walks the reader through some techniques to identify and eliminate these impediments to productivity and throughput.
📏 Interpert Metrics Effectively (
)Numbers do not speak for themselves. You might understand the metrics around your operations, but your audience might not. As the world has started to drown in infographics, it becomes more important to put a solid framework and explanation around what your are presenting.
🪣 The Slop Era ()
Platforms are paying for viral content. AI has the ability to manufacture content. Demand meet supply — to the point you can go to viral slop school many places online. Journalists are worried how their work is getting included into training the next generation. Slop is here.
The Future According to MIT EmTech
MIT EmTech 2024 is the kind of place you can rub elbows with real, live futurists. I’m surrounded by smart folks, here is what they would like to share with you:
We are living through the real-time invention of a general purpose technology more like the steam engine or the internet than a passing computing fad. It will unleash the next wave — not unlike the steam engine enabling industry. Generative AI will rock the world more than it already has. Outcomes are bordering on unknowable.
Generative AI unlocks bioenginnering and generative biology. DNA is code and code can be generated like code. We can bioengineer machines in wayts unimaginable. I’ll start with organoids — small, manmade clusters of tissue simulating organs — that could be manufactured for various tasks as custom bio-software in a sense.
AI combined sensors is a logarithmic equation not a linear one. We have been challenged by both not having sensors capable of measuring what we want and interpreting data across massive clouds of sensors. AI solves both of those problems.
Sensors and bioengineering pair very well. Better than merely AI and sensors. You do the math.
AI lets us rethink materials — like biologically grown rather than smelted glass.
Gen Z reads articles in this order: headline, comments then article. It lets them pick up what it should be about, what critiques it is getting and then they can look at the materials.
Trust 1.0 was local — do I know this person? Trust 2.0 was vertical — is this a trusted authority? Trust 3.0 is horizontal — do I trust this screenname? Trust is evolving at the speed of the internet. Institutions are not evolving.
Overtly accredited sources are untrustworthy and unloved to people who like conspiracy theories.
Quantum computing is getting a lot closer — people are now using telecom-derived microphotonics to manipulate and transfer the qbits. This has opened the door to better form factors and much denser deployments. The old US steel factory south of Chicago is being reborn as a quantum computing facility.
Story has developed an interesting concept using the blockchain to build a system to share and compensate creators for IP without having to work out a content licensing deal on each step. I don’t see any real content companies embracing this but it is an interesting idea and a cool use of the blockchain for something besides speculation.