Predicting Our Future

If a trillion dollar market opportunity exists, you can bet the people at Google are thinking about it. Within X, Google’s most secretive lab, they’ve been working on solving the problem of how to make building construction more efficient in order to deal with the world’s severe and worsening urban housing shortage. By the year 2050, the global population is expected to grow by 2.2 billion people, and 90% of that growth is expected to take place in cities that are in dire need of new housing. In China, one company has figured out how to deal with this challenge by prefabricating components for skyscrapers inside of a factory.

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Google & Flux

When you hear the word Google, you first and foremost associate it with search. You have a disagreement with someone: let’s Google it. You want to know where to vacation: Google it. You want to know what a company does: Google it.

But if you’ve been watching Google over the years, you know that Google does much more, than well, Google. There’s Gmail and Google Hangouts and Google Apps and Google Drive. The relationship between these offshoots became so obvious that Google just decided to brand them collectively as the “G Suite.” Somewhere along Google’s path of phenomenal success, the company decided to start working on some super interesting and hard problems that are really unrelated to the company’s initial mission of organizing the world’s information. The founders of Google have become so invested in developing other businesses that the company is no longer called Google. In January of 2016, the company was renamed Alphabet, with Google becoming just one of their subsidiaries.

Calico is Alphabet’s biotech subsidiary that is focused on extending human life. Verily is Alphabet’s life sciences subsidiary. One of their projects is to develop contact lenses for diabetics that are able to determine when a person’s glucose levels are running high. And then there is Google X, now referred to simply as “X,” the secretive think tank within Alphabet pioneering projects like the driverless car that will one day make the act of driving obsolete.

On the website for X, the mission statement reads: “We’re a moonshot factory. Our mission is to invent and launch ‘moonshot’ technologies that we hope could someday make the world a radically better place.” Google can be very secretive about their work, and this is ground zero for where their secret projects are born. X’s stealth projects have one of three outcomes: they are elevated to a division within Google and made public, they are spun out to become a separate stand-alone company, or they are killed.

To date, the only company to ever come out of X and be spun out into a separate entity is Flux. I spoke with Jen Carlile, a Co-founder of Flux, who initially joined Google as a software engineer in 2010.

Jen Carlile: “The way that Google X works is they identify what they call ‘world scale problems’ and then put a group of smart people together and say, ‘try to come up with a solution for this that can be tackled within a 10 year time horizon.’ So our big hairy problem was urban population growth. And the Google X leadership recognized that the pace at which we’re building buildings and with the way that we do it now, we’re simply not going to be able to keep up with urban population growth.”

In 1803, just 3% of the world’s population resided in urban areas. I have this romantic image of living in the 18th century in a glamorous European city. But as it turns out, if you lived in a city in the early 1800’s, you were part of a minority. This was before the Industrial Revolution had caused massive migrations from the country to cities where factories were located. The result of these massive migrations? By 1900, 14% of the world’s population was living in cities. In 1950, the percentage of the world’s population that lived in cities was 30%. And then in 2008, for the first time in the history of the world, the percentage of people living in cities equaled the percentage of people who lived outside of cities.

Here’s where it gets interesting. As of 2016, there are 7.4 billion people on the planet. 2.2 billion people are expected to join us by the year 2050, and 90% of this growth is expected to take place in cities.

It’s really hard to make sense of what the...

The most influential companies in lighting are reimagining one of the most fundamental features of our homes: the light switch. Will the smart home of the future understand our lighting needs without us needing to flip a switch? In the fourth episode of a 7-part series on the future of the smart home, Andrew explores whether there’s a place for light switches in the future of smart lighting and why the winner of the space is far from obvious.

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Is The Light Switch Doomed?

What are the benefits of having your home’s lights on the network? The most obvious use case is that, when you’re away from home, you can turn your lights on or off. But you can also imagine how a really smart system knows that, when you get into bed, it should turn off the lights in the rest of your house. Or you can imagine how, in a security context, if a sensor on the outside of your house notices suspicious movement, it might turn on the lights to mimic your presence.

In the case of smart lighting, the fight for supremacy won’t simply be a function of user interface or distribution. Instead, the winner in smart lighting actually might be based on which company possesses the right vision determining how your entire lighting system is set up.

Today, you walk into a room, and if you want the lights on, you’ll flick a switch on the wall. What is the ideal way that this should work in a smart home? Would you find it easier to take out your phone, open an app, and turn on the light from there? Maybe not, if you’re walking into the room and you have to dig your phone out of your pocket. More likely, if you’re sitting on the couch and too lazy to get up, that could be a particularly useful instance where you might want to tell your Amazon Echo: “Alexa, turn on the lights.”

What if the room just knew you were in it and turned on the lights for you? Could we ever get to a place where there would be no light switch in the wall and the home would simply understand our intentions before we articulated them?

Neil Orchowski & Lutron

If you want to retrofit your lights by connecting them to the network, it would seem logical to do this by replacing the box that contains your light switch to include some receiver and transmitter within the switch so that you can control the switch remotely. The market leader in light switches and dimmers in the United States is a company called Lutron.

Neil Orchowski is Lutron’s Product Development Manager for Strategic Alliances. Caséta Wireless is the name of their lighting control product line. When I spoke with Neil, I wanted to understand all the different components of Caséta Wireless and what the integration with an existing lighting system would look like.

Neil Orchowski:
“Caséta consists of a few basic building blocks. . . . We have dimmers, we have switches, they all communicate wirelessly through what Lutron calls our ‘Clear Connect wireless technology.’ That would be like WiFi or Bluetooth or Zigbee or Z-Wave.”

Zigbee and Z-Wave are wireless communication protocols that are similar to WiFi and Bluetooth, except that these transmitters and receivers require very little power.

Neil Orchowski:
“From there, you start your smart home with Caséta with what we call our Pico Wireless Control, which is a wireless remote control that happens to also mount to the wall inside that same wall plate that you might use for your dimmer. If you want to add a three-way location for controlling your lights from anywhere else in the room or in the home, you add this Pico to the wall, put a wall plate around it, and now you’ve created a smart three-way application that didn’t require a calling an electrician, pulling wires, cutting drywall, etc. For some people, that’s smart.”

Me:
“The way that works is, if I did not have a third switch somewhere else, it’s essentially a relay. . . . Is that right?”

Neil Orchowski:
“Exactly. Imagine a hallway where you come in from your front door and there’s a switch at the start of the hallway and you walk down the hallway to where your bedrooms are and maybe it wasn’t wired to have a switch there. But that’s really where you want to control the lights and turn the lights back off so you don’t have to walk all the way down to the end of the hallway. You could hire an electrician to pull wires and install an analog switch there or use this Pico remote control, which is wire-free, battery powered, 10 year battery life, that then wirelessly communicates to that dimmer at the other end of the hall providing you that easy, convenient, new control of your lights. . . . What if you have guests visiting your home and your guests don’t have an app where you can control your lights through the app? When they walk out that door, they want to be able ...

In a 2016 testimony addressing the House Committee on Space, Science & Technology, Dan Wallach warned that the country’s voting infrastructure was vulnerable to hacking by foreign governments. Computer scientists have long spoken of the dangers of electronic voting machines, and now they’re warning against adopting online voting. But is there a fundamental difference in the way that academics and entrepreneurs approach the risks and benefits of online voting? How might the introduction of online voting change the way that we conduct American elections?

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An Exercise In Frustration: Testimony Before Congress

Dan Wallach is a Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. On September 13, 2016, he testified before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology for a hearing entitled “Protecting the 2016 Elections from Cyber and Voting Machine Attacks.”

Dan Wallach: “My main message for you here today is that our election systems face credible cyber-threats from our nation-state adversaries, and it’s prudent to adopt contingency plans before November to mitigate these threats.”

Professor Wallach is one of the nation’s foremost experts in researching electronic voting systems. During his testimony, he addressed the real concerns posed by Russian hacking of DNC emails, and also pinpointed where hacking might occur in the presidential election that, at that time, was less than two months away.

Dan Wallach: “I believe my top concern is the voter registration systems because they are generally online. If it’s online, it’s accessible from the internet, and if it’s accessible from the internet, it’s accessible from our nation-state adversaries. . . . If you can selectively or entirely delete people who you’d rather not vote, the current provisional voting system can’t really scale to support a large number of voters who are filling out affidavits and following that process.”

Dan suggested we invest more in computer backups and be prepared to restore data from those backups if the original voter registration lists became compromised or corrupted. He also identified a second area of vulnerability around whether our adversaries can get malware into our electronic voting machines. His solution? We must replace our aging electronic voting machines with either “next-generation” optical scan systems or new touchscreen systems, both of which would have paper trails for subsequent auditing if there were allegations of fraud or tampering so that it’s much more difficult for outside actors to manipulate them.

Dan is not a fan of the electronic voting machines we use in our elections, but at the time of the hearing where replacing the machines was not an option, his recommendation to Congress was for aggressive contingency planning in case it became evident that the machines were tampered with or disabled.

The Biggest Risks To American Democracy

While a day doesn’t go by without a news story about Russian influence on the election, Dan Wallach’s worst fears about a direct hacking of the election seem to have gone unrealized. Experts generally agree that the votes cast weren’t tampered with and that Donald Trump, while losing the popular vote, did in fact win the Electoral College, and was rightfully inaugurated in January as the 45th President of the United States.

At one point in the hearing before Congress in September, 2016, Dan addressed the issue that was most of interest to me in regards to the future of online voting.

Dan Wallach: “As a quick note, our immediate future should not include internet voting.”

And while Dan acknowledged that someday Internet voting would definitely happen, he emphatically tried to shut down discussion of it for now.

Dan Wallach: “It’s hard enough to protect the online systems that we already have. Moving additional voters online increases the risks.”

Dan described to me the enormous risks the country faced from hacking, and based his conclusions on Internet voting upon those risks. But what about the risk of a disillusio...

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a little over a half of the voting age population cast their votes and the candidate who won the presidency lost the popular vote. Is the problem with low U.S. voter turnout due to culture or lack of accessibility? Without amending the U.S. Constitution, is there a way to use technology to improve voter turnout and overcome the effects of the Electoral College?

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SaneBox sorts through your email and moves all of the trivial stuff into a different folder so the only messages in your inbox are the ones you actually want to see. They also have a feature called BlackHole where you can relegate a sender’s messages to obscurity. For Predicting Our Future listeners, visit sanebox.com/future and receive an extra $25 credit on top of their two-week free trial.

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Every time I see a protest against Donald Trump, I wonder whether the protesters were there when progressives needed them most — namely, on Tuesday, November 8th, 2016. On the day of this last Presidential election, only 54.7% of eligible voters showed up to vote. Is it only now that people have seen Trump’s policies that they have begun to recognize the import of that election? Should we expect more people to show up to vote in the 2018 or 2020 elections? I would certainly hope so, but if history is any guide, we shouldn’t just expect an excited electorate to turn out in substantially greater numbers than they have in the recent past.

Scholars have been grappling for some time with why so few Americans show up to vote. Many argue that the Electoral College has the effect of rendering many votes in the United States meaningless, so people figure, ‘Why vote should I vote if my vote doesn’t count?’ Others suggest that if we made voting easier, we could increase turnout. In my new podcast series on the future of online voting, I set out to explore how to defeat the Electoral College and also how to make voting easier. Here’s what I found.

Getting Rid Of The Electoral College

The American Electoral College comes from Article 2 of the Constitution, which provides that each state shall elect a number of “electors” equal to the number of congressmen and senators from that state. We have a total of 538 electoral votes: 438 congressmen (that includes 3 from the District of Columbia) plus 100 senators.

It’s difficult to identify any redemptive aspect of the system today. The voting by electors, and not by the general populace, was designed as a safeguard to prevent an “unqualified” individual from taking the highest office in the nation. In the near term, I’m ruling out the possibility of abolishing the Electoral College. Because the Electoral College is a construct derived directly from the Constitution, its abolishment would require an amendment to the Constitution.

In order to pass a Constitutional amendment, you need to have a bill passed by 2/3rds of the members of House of Representatives and 2/3rds of the Senate, in addition to being ratified by 3/4ths of the state legislatures. To give you an idea how difficult it is to pass an amendment, the last amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1992. It required that any changes that Congress voted on to amend their own pay would not take effect until after the next election for members of Congress. When was this amendment first proposed? On September 25th, 1789. The last amendment that passed before this was the Twenty-sixth Amendment in 1971, which lowered the voting age to 18. Suffice it to say, it’s really hard to pass new amendments.

Eliminating The Electoral College Through State Legislation

There is one creative solution being implemented by some states that would have the effect of completely eliminating the power of the Electoral College without actually abolishing it. The formulation for this state legislation comes from John Koza, a former professor at Stanford and a computer scientist who drafted the original National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and is Chair for National Popular Vote.

John Koza: “Over the years, I followed the Electoral College and all of the strange things that happened, the near-misses, and of course, the 2000 election. And I also became aware of the fact that presidential campaigns were totally concentrated in a handful of battleground states so that the vast majority of Americans were left out of the presidential campaign. And those two thoughts came together with the idea that the states, since they have the exclusive control over the presidential elections, could change from our current winner-take-all system — which is what allows second-place candidates to become President and whic...

Have we hit a tipping point for residential construction where the cost and quality of a factory-built home always compares favorably to the cost and quality of a conventionally-built home? Are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists beginning to train their sights on this mammoth industry? In the sixth and final episode of a series on the future of homebuilding, Andrew discusses how entrepreneurs eager to disrupt this space might conceive of building and financing a modern homebuilding factory.

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If you’re a startup, apply for DigitalOcean’s Hatch program, where if selected, you’ll have access to their cloud for 12 months, in addition to technical training and mentorship. You can also go to do.co/predictingourfuture and ask the sales team for a free trial.

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SCG Heim – The Factory of the Future

If you’re interested in what the process looks like to build a house in a factory, you can get a pretty good idea just by searching on YouTube for the company that owns the factory. Most companies engaged in this type of manufacturing are proud to display their factories’ capabilities in videos. Amazingly, most of the factories in the United States are not what you would typically associate with the image of a modern factory. Inside of a huge hangar, you can see lots of people manually moving house components from one location to another with relatively few machines in sight. There’s an assembly line, for sure, but it looks more like what you’d expect to see in a factory from 100 years ago than something you’d associate with a modern factory operated primarily by robots.

If you look outside of the United States, you can find much more advanced homebuilding factories that are more evocative of the robotics-driven future that automotive factories like Tesla and Toyota have already made into a reality. The factory that most impressed me was the SCG Heim factory in the province of Saraburi in Central Thailand, northeast of Bangkok.

SCG Heim is a joint venture between The Siam Cement Public Company and Sekisui Chemical Group. SCG is the fourth largest company in Thailand, making chemicals, paper, cement, and building materials. Sekisui is a Japanese chemical company that also has a housing division. While I couldn’t get anyone from SCG Heim to speak with me for this podcast, the robotics visible in their video reflected as impressive a manufacturing process as any I had seen. They use light gauge steel for framing homes with fully-automated robotics supplied by Kawasaki. I read online that the factory has the ability to produce 1,000 homes per year.

In a factory run by SCG Heim, or even Tesla, you see giant machines with arms moving parts that are welded together by other giant machines with arms. So it’s easy to imagine if someone were going to literally copy this kind of automated factory for producing housing modules, the materials they would be using to frame the homes would be steel or aluminum.

Except, here in the United States, we have a long history of building our homes from wood. And with good reason. Unlike many other parts of the world, North America has a relative abundance of forests that can be harvested for wood. You can also generally expect the cost of labor to be cheaper if you’re framing a home with wood, as compared to bricks, for example, which is much more labor-intensive. So what would a factory with robots look like that makes housing modules out of wood?

Weinmann

Weinmann, located in St. Johann, Germany, sells more machinery worldwide for this type of homebuilding factory than anyone else. There are currently 5,000 Weinmann machines operating in 150 homebuilding factories worldwide. Weinmann won’t just sell me the machines for my factory. They’ll design the entire factory for me. Hansbert Ott is Managing Director for Weinmann and has worked at the company for 25 years.

Hansbert Ott: “We are building not only the machines. We produce the machines [here], install the machines in our company, make the test runs with the materials with the customer, and then the customer signs and says, ‘That’s fine, that’s OK.’ And then we are shipping the machine to the customer. And with our guys, we install the machines. Also, very important, we make the training, the education for the operators on the machines, and we are doing more . . . to be there during the production, to help and educate people for the customer . . . so that they have our support, so that they learn how to prefabricate elements and to deliver this high quality on-site.”

If I were going to build a factory, and I h...