Interesting talk on

Your generation is moving

from ownership to access

From markets to networks

From consumerism to sustainability

From market capital to social capital

Essentially saying, we need to increase the aggregate efficiency of our economy, and all components of them, infrastructure, how it’s used, energy sources, food consumption — all of it.

Europe is doing this. China is doing this. America hadn’t really started doing this at the time of recording, although I’m guessing this is the direction for Biden.

We took fossil fuels out of the ground, we made a shit tonne of growth off of that, or at least half of the world did — the other half lost out — they lost out — and richer countries exploited their resources — to achieve huge rates of growth.

But now the infrastructure that we’d built for the 2nd industrial revolution needs to be modernised. In poorer countries, this infrastructure wasn’t even built. It is actually a lot cheaper and easier to build new infrastructure from the ground up than to modernise and update existing infrastructure. And so poorer countries could get a quantum leap in terms of growth, in comparison to richer countries.

Time is running out for climate action. We need to act. And countries are starting to wake up to this. Partly for economic reasons, partly for ethical ones. But the bottom line is that the marginal cost of producing energy through green sources is plummeting vs carbon fossil fuels. Fossils have plateaued in terms of their efficiency. They are finished- and greens are on an exponential curve. It’s moving really fast. And so selling fossils will get harder and harder, because it’s just way more expensive to power your industries with those resources. And the sun never sends a bill.

This simple fact — and the fact that solar panels are reducing in cost means that anybody can soon become an energy producer and supplier. Producing your own energy, getting paid for it — for doing nothing whatsoever, because it’s all automated — this is a game changer. The moral “saving the planet” stuff is getting placed by the practical “saving the bottom line” — because companies not using efficient and cheap sources of energy — and reusing bi-products /or reselling them to others — they will get left behind — because their competitors outcompete them. The next question on everybody’s lips becomes — “how can we make what we do more efficient?”. And so having value chains through which you can pass things on which you don’t need — these become vital components of new practices.

Furthermore — the zero marginal cost thing — this extends to regular average joes. Putting your content out online — to one user — or one billion — zero marginal cost. This is huge — because when this gets into big data — analytics — more and more — the playing field levels out.

Another interesting thing was something I read on twitter — which was this:

The key thing is infrastructure — this levels the playing field. Social programs create jobs and new initiatives and economic safety nets create a feeling of security enough to take risks — and so drive growth.

Another thing — companies are changing. Car companies are changing to energy companies. And energy companies are changing to network providers (this last part may be incorrect, check to see etc).

But this is shifting of the sands. Things that were originally important, now are no longer important. There will be a huge shift in the employment sector. Jobs will change, because the companies’ functions will change — because their value prop has changed- to capture new value — because the old good or service they were providing no longer creates value for people.

That’s all businesses really are — helping people. How can you help people? Great, sell it to them.

Anyway. This infrastructure change could be accompanied by changes on the roads. Fewer cars. And more ride-sharing. Cars that would be driving might be collecting their own data, stored and secured in a decentralised way. And then sold, on a decentralised marketplace.

Trust networks create the conditions necessary to fit devices to cars — because peoples’ privacy is protected, while they gather the data. The sensors work for them, not someone utilising the data to watch them.

Furthermore, big data analytics can then take this data, and use it to make things more efficient in real time — take traffic for example — using traffic for the roads- rerouting cars in a game theory type scenario, whereby roads are clear, car seats are utilised (i.e. less empty cars with just one person inside). They could also be used more long term to analyse flows and recommend road changes/closures/adding new bus routes etc.

Lorries become big data centres — or nodes participating in new networks. And their drivers become data scientists — handling the data, while their lorries drive themselves.

And the best part is — the efficiency savings from the changes in infrastructure mean that the whole thing pays for itself. Loans are had — equity is given — and it repays itself over time with improved efficiency.