Fixing the Future

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Reimagining Public Buses in the Age of Uber Oct 08, 2020

Show notes

Marchetti’s Constant, named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, is the average time people spend on their daily commute, which is approximately a half-hour each way, all around the world. The average U.S. commute is about 27 minutes, up 8 percent from a decade earlier. But that averages people who walk 10 minutes to work with people who drive an hour; it averages people who have a quick subway ride and people taking two or three buses that run only infrequently.

But in the mind of another Italian physicist who has turned his attention and his career to transportation, we now have enough computing power—smartphones, AI, and the cloud—for a different kind of solution.

Tommaso Gecchelin, is a physicist and industrial designer. After studying quantum mechanics in Padua, Italy, and industrial design in Venice, he co-founded something called NEXT Future Transportation. For the past seven years there he has been developing a system of bus pods, one that in effect chops up a bus into car-sized pieces and has the potential to combine the best of commuter buses with the best of Uber.

The Problem of Old Code and Older Coders Oct 06, 2020

Show notes

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed any number of weaknesses in our technologies, business models, medical systems, media, and more. Perhaps none is more exposed than what my guest today calls, “The Hidden World of Legacy IT.”

If you remember last April’s infamous call for volunteer COBOL programmers by the governor of New Jersey, when his state’s unemployment and disability benefits systems needed to be updated, that turned out to be just the tip of a ubiquitous multi-trillion-dollar iceberg—yes, trillion with ‘t’—of outdated systems. Some of them are even more important to us than getting out unemployment checks—though that’s pretty important in its own right. Water treatment plants, telephone exchanges, power grids, and air traffic control are just a few of the systems controlled by antiquated code.

In 2005, Bob Charette wrote a seminal article, entitled “Why Software Fails.” Now, fifteen years later, he strikes a similar nerve with another cover story that shines a light at the vast and largely hidden problem of legacy IT.

Why Does the U.S. Have Three Electrical Grids? Oct 01, 2020

Show notes

Electricity is the key to modern life as we know it, and yet, universal, reliable service remains an unsolved problem. By one estimate, a billion people still do without it. Even in a modern city like Mumbai, generators are commonplace, because of an uncertain electrical grid. This year, California once again saw rolling blackouts, and with our contemporary climate producing heat waves that can stretch from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains, they won’t be the last.

Electricity is hard to store and hard to move, and electrical grids are complex, creaky, and expensive to change. In the early 20teens, Europe began merging its distinct grids into a continent-wide supergrid, an algorithm-based project that IEEE Spectrum wrote about in 2014. The need for a continent-wide supergrid in the U.S. has been almost as great, and by 2018 the planning of one was pretty far long—until it hit a roadblock that, two years later, still stymies any progress. The problem is not the technology, and not even the cost. The problem is political. That’s the conclusion of an extensively reported investigation jointly conducted by The Atlantic magazine and InvestigateWest, a watchdog nonprofit that was founded in 2009 after the one of Seattle’s daily newspapers stopped publishing. The resulting article, with the heading, “Who Killed the Supergrid?”, was written by Peter Fairley, who has been a longtime contributing editor for IEEE Spectrum.

Banking, Cash, and the Future of Money Sep 29, 2020

Show notes

We’re used to the idea of gold and silver being used as money, but in the in the 1600s, Sweden didn’t have a lot of gold and silver—not enough to sustain its economy. The Swedes had a lot of copper, though, so that’s what they used for their money. Copper isn’t really great for the job—it’s not nearly scarce enough—so Swedish coins were big—the largest denomination weighed forty‐three pounds and people carried them to market on their backs. So the Swedes created a bank that gave people paper money in exchange for giant copper coins.

The Swedes weren’t the first to create paper money—they missed that mark by about several hundred years. Nor will they likely be the first to get rid of paper money, though they may have the lead in that race. A few years ago, banks there started to refuse cash deposits and to allow cash withdrawals, until a law was passed requiring them to do so.

A new book about the history and future of money has just come out, imaginatively titled, Money. It’s not specifically about Sweden—in fact, those are the only two times Sweden comes up. It’s about money itself, and how it has changed wildly across time and geography—from Greek city-states in 600 B.C. to China in the eighth century and Kublai Khan in the thirteenth, to Amsterdam in the seventeenth, Paris during the Enlightenment, and the U.S. in the nineteenth century and cyberspace in the twenty-first.

It’s a wild ride that the world is still in the middle of, and it’s told in a thoroughly researched but thoroughly entertaining, and I mean laugh-out-loud entertaining, literally—I had to finish the book last night downstairs on the couch—told as a series of stories by one of radio’s great storytellers. Jacob Goldstein was a newspaper reporter before joining National Public Radio’s popular show, Planet Money, which he currently co-hosts, and he’s the author of the destined-to-be popular tome, Money, newly minted by Hachette Books.

Spotify, Machine Learning, and the Business of Recommendation Engines Sep 23, 2020

Show notes

You’re surely familiar—though you may not know it by name—with the Paradox of Choice; we’re surrounded by it: 175 salad dressing choices, 80,000 possible Starbucks beverages, 50 different mutual funds for your retirement account. “All of this choice,” psychologists say, “starts to be not only unproductive, but counterproductive—a source of pain, regret, worry about missed opportunities, and unrealistically high expectations.” And yet, we have more choices than ever— 32,000 hours to watch on Netflix, 10 million e-books on our Kindles, 5000 different car makes and models, not counting color and dozens of options.

It’s too much. We need help. And that help is available in the form of recommendation engines. In fact, they may be helping us a bit too much, according to my guest today.

Michael Schrage is a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School's Initiative on the Digital Economy. He advises corporations— including Procter & Gamble, Google, Intel, and Siemens—on innovation and investment, and he’s the author of several books including 2014’s The Innovator’s Hypothesis, and the 2020 book Recommendation Engines, newly published by MIT Press.

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