Deep Currents

The following is a straightforward summary of the central arguments and facts from The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. The arguments are set up to support a cavalier attitude about energy consumption, a position that is hardly tenable in light of the need for environmental conservation and climate-change mitigation, but it contains a great deal of useful background information on the subject of energy and a several worthwhile arguments.

Central arguments

• Energy sources are nearly infinite. The energy we can access depends on how effective we are at capturing it, which we can do better the more energy we have available to begin with. Energy supplies will continue to spiral upwards and prices will continue to trend downwards so long as we keep improving our extraction technology.
• The fact that we use almost all of our energy (80-95%) in the process of purifying it is not only to be accepted but celebrated. Purifying energy is what provides us with better quality of life and the ability to acquire even more energy.
• The more we use the power-switching chips to replace mechanical energy distribution, the more our electricity demand will rise, since they will not only replace existing power switches but also enable a new round of innovation. For example, cars’ power trains will soon become electric, allowing them to run off of both internal-combustion engines and battery-stored grid electricity. Much of the American factory floor will also become electric and robotic.
• When an energy-based technology increases in efficiency it becomes cheaper and as a result is used more widely than before. To achieve a net decrease in energy usage the efficiency gains of the new technology must outweigh the increase in energy usage that results from its increased use. The best example of this is the light bulb, the improvement of which produced a panoply of lights, radios, radars, and lasers whose use adds up to a massive increase in energy usage.

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This is my latest Monitoring and Scanning Report to the leadership of the Packard Foundation on behalf of the Monitor Institute as part of the “Philanthropy and Networks Exploration” (PNE), a series of projects exploring how our rapidly-developing understanding of networks can be put to innovative use in philanthropy. The reports alternate between collections of relevant links and brief overviews of related topics. (The report writing will be handed off to another person for the time being.)

Technology-enabled activism is known for mass movements and street protests, but it is becoming a tool for creating change in less confrontational ways. The savviest leaders are using the base’s enthusiasm and creativity to advantage, encouraging co-creation of the message, recruiting virally through games and contests, and in turn displaying increased authenticity and responsiveness. The savviest campaigners also know they perform a service that operates under tight constraints: they have a short time frame to tap into large numbers of people activated by an event, and they have to provide a relevant and productive outlet where taking action is both easy, fun and satisfying. This report will highlight some of the more recent examples that illustrate the trend. Continue reading

This is a straightforward summary of military historian Robert Kagan’s most recent book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. More to come in evaluating his perspective, but it’s worth noting that the book is endorsed by McCain and that his proposal for a “League of Democracies” has been taken up to one extent or another by both presidential campaigns.

Thesis:

• Democracies wanted to believe that all ideological and strategic conflict was finished with the end of the cold war
• But nation-states remain strong and continue to compete for stratus and influence
• Great power competition has returned among China, Russia, Iran, Japan, India, and the U.S.
• The old battle between liberalism and autocracy has returned
• The conflict between radical Islam and the West has also returned
• Democracies have been divided to date and it is time for them to unite and shape the future

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Just in time for the most expensive oil in history, a sleek little three-wheeled plug-in hybrid called the Aptera has come on the market. Made entirely of super-strong composites instead of steel, the maker’s claim is that it gets 300 miles to the gallon. (What that means for a plug-in isn’t quite clear, but that’s the line.) It’s thirty thousand pounds, an amount I hesitate to translate into dollars these days, and it’s got a knock-your-socks-off body design that reminds me of something from the Jetsons or Star Trek. Then again, if it’s power and speed that you’d like instead of efficiency, there’s also the new T-Rex trike that will take you up to 150MPH and beat a Lambourghini off the line…

The Global Business Network now publishes a quarterly publication called GBN: Bulletin and its second issue is now online. The content is partly an update on GBN’s recent work but is largely a series of interviews and book reviews on topics relevant to long-term change. Both of the boutiques that I’m a part of within the Monitor Group grew out of GBN, so my view may be colored, but I’ve found both of the Bulletins’ first two issues a deeply worthwhile read. This one contains:

• Workbook: featuring summaries of GBN projects with UNAIDS, COSE, the Chicago Urban League, and the SCI FI Channel; Q+A with Nick Turner, head of GBN in Europe, on the current financial crisis
• Network News: highlighting Clay Shirky, Amory Lovins, David Sibbet, Rafael Ramirez, Rusty Schweickart, Chuck House, and Mimi Ito
• Interview: Barbara Bylenga, president and founder of Outlaw Consulting
• Book Club by Stewart Brand: The Bottom Billion, Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, Power to Save the World, Daemon, and The Rise and Fall of Alexandria

With the Cold War over and a set of new autocratic powers on the make, now would be an opportune time for the U.S. to forge a “League of Democracies” for promoting unity among democratic nations and to push for democratic practices to be spread and strengthened worldwide. This is the one policy proposal that Robert Kagan makes in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, a highly educational tour of recent geopolitical history through the eyes of one of our foremost military historians and strategists. The book carries an endorsement on the back by John McCain, which may make you more or less interested in reading it depending on your affiliation, and his proposal for a League has been getting no small amount of airtime in McCain’s speeches on foreign policy. In May McCain wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times endorsing the idea, and yesterday that endorsement was backed up by two well-known Princeton professors of international relations, John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter. (The full text is after the jump.) There has doubtless been a flurry of debate among journalists, academics, and think-tank types over the question. Obama’s campaign advisor Anthony Lake has voice support for the concept but the campaign appears to have held back from issuing an official stance. This is the first big geopolitical idea in some time and the debate is interesting to watch. The concept has a lot of appeal, of course, but also raises many hard-to-answer questions. In particular, would there be genuine interest among other democracies, or would the demands of competiton among great powers come first?

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How should America use its power abroad? That’s a big topic, but Joseph Nye and Richard Armitage are big men whose answer may have an impact in Washington’s halls of power. “America’s image and influence are in decline around the world. To maintain a leading role in global affairs, the United States must move from eliciting fear and anger to inspiring optimism and hope.” This is the first sentence in A Smarter, More Secure America, published last November by their bipartisan Commission on Smart Power.

The report defines a nation’s power as falling into two general categories: its “hard power” is its ability to coerce with carrots and sticks while “soft power” is the ability to attract admiration. While we have traditionally wielded a mixture, since 9/11 President Bush has systematically ignored the importance of the latter, arguing that we can’t afford the niceties of compromise in the fight against al Qaeda and the late Hussein’s Iraq. This report calls for “smart power,” a return to the tradition of artful blending. The best way to pursue America’s interests, it argues, is to build and maintain its position in the world as the preeminent agent of good. Doing so is not a matter of high-minded altruism but simply necessary to combat terrorism and address the many serious transnational issues such as climate change, pandemic disease, and commodity shortages. (After the break is a bullet-point breakdown of the introductory overview.)

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Engineering kids are always up to something interesting in the lab. This team over at Stanford have created something really interesting: an autonomous quadcopter that can navigate around obstacles and stays stable no matter what. (In the video, they explain in five minutes of adorably labored academic-ese.) They’ve hit on the idea that an aircraft outfitted with four helicopter rotors can control its movement precisely in every direction, combined that with a set of sensors and set up an indepedent intelligent control system to run the thing. The video shows these little four-rotored platforms doing some very unique things: navigating obstacle courses, navigating a four-way traffic interchange, staying stable in high wind, and staying stable in the face of being shoved and hit with flying objects. They talk about using these things to find people lost in an avalanche, but it’s clear that they could be handy in a lot of other ways. (Surveillance comes to mind.) I also wonder whether the engineering continues to work for larger-scale vehicles that could carry cargo or people. If nothing else, I’d love to have their collision-avoiding AI driving my car on the highway once they work out the bugs. (Hat tip to Danger Room for noticing this one.)

UPDATE: Here’s a slew of related links from my colleague Brett Mitchell.

Similar to what you sent, but a different application (to track and observe specific targets)

I can’t find the site now, but they have also developed programs that control clusters of these helicopters to coordinate autonomously to put out wildfires which includes everything from picking up water from nearby lakes to optimizing where the various helicopters should drop the water to put out the fire in the shortest amount of time. (As you said, not hard to guess at the classified objectives behind this un-class research given the people that fund this stuff!)

Bipedal robot designed to recover wounded soldiers (actually out of the academic labs and into the commercialization phase)

Quadrapedal gas-powered robot designed to bring supplies to war-torn areas where wheeled vehicles can’t go

A spoof on the past video that is too good not to pass along:

A smaller battery-powered quadrupedal robot used to test more sophisticated AI on extreme terrain

A project that has brought you one step closer to avoiding collisions in your car

Technology to enhance soldier survivability (not AI)

Other sites with related research