Category: Uncategorized

(Airbus hydrogen-powered aircraft rendering. Photo: Airbus/Zuma Press)

About five years ago, Airbus made a bold bet: The plane maker would launch a zero-emissions, hydrogen-powered aircraft within 15 years that, if successful, would mark the biggest revolution in aviation technology since the jet engine, the WSJ’s Benjamin Katz reports.

The plan raised eyebrows because the technical challenges of the way they were going to do this were huge. Engines would need to be reconfigured to run on hydrogen which would need to be stored in liquid form at minus 423 degrees F. The heavier fuel load and equipment would reduce both seat capacity and range. And then there were the safety concerns exemplified by the 1937 Hindenburg disaster.

The company settled on hydrogen-fuel cells to generate energy for electric motors. But fuel cells are extremely heavy, and the plan required a radical redesign of the airframe and propulsion system which would carry only 100 passengers about 1,000 nautical miles. Plus, as the picture here shows, it is a propeller driven design, so it is certainly not going to fly as fast meaning passengers are going to find their flights longer. This is all just wrong.

The company has spent more than $1.7 billion on the project, according to people familiar with the matter, and over the past year they concluded that technical challenges and a slow uptake of hydrogen in the wider economy meant the jet wouldn’t be ready by 2035. Notice they also failed to admit that hydrogen was going to cost them more than conventional aviation fuel. This was greenwashing at its best, and a complete lack of fiduciary responsibility on the part of senior leadership.

But I blame the scientific and engineering community who knew better. The whole idea was just wrong-headed. That is, until you look at their motivation as the article points out:

“Airbus also had a commitment to a major shareholder—the French state. The company had been a major beneficiary of a Covid-era government support package for the aviation and aerospace sector of 15 billion euros, equivalent to roughly $16.6 billion. The deal required Airbus to spend a portion of the money on bringing green aircraft to market by the 2030s.”

That’s all you need to know. $1.7 billion looks like a small fee to get back $16 billion!  Greenwashing at its best … always follow the money!

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted the future of AI can be shaped to produce maximum societal benefit, rather than replace humans in society. Technology has already begun to reshape workforces in industries ranging from coding development to apple farming, but there’s still uncertainty about what exact role AI will play in the economy. Mathematicians call this the objective function used in optimization.

Very simply, the purpose of the objective function is to define the net benefits of all independent variables under our control and seek the best portfolio of decisions that will lead us there. Objective functions can be developed to predict economics, environmental, and societal goals to mention just a few. The electric utility industry used this approach for decades to decide and justify the elements in both the supply and demand side portfolio.

Well, according to one Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, we’re doing it all wrong. Sendhil Mullainathan says humans can choose what kind of technology it becomes but by contrast, it is now uncoordinated and self-centered on the developer perspectives. AI tools are being evaluated, developed and deployed based on their capability for automation, not their capability for augmentation, Mullainathan says.

The MIT professor says companies like OpenAI and Google could evaluate their newest models based on their ability to help people, not their ability to automate processes. That framework, he argues, could help ensure that AI becomes what Steve Jobs called a “bicycle for the mind”—a technology that amplifies humans’ inherent abilities and streamlines their efficiency.

Nice try Professor Mullainathan … our free markets defy such ideologies.

Worse yet, bad people are defining the objective functions, which are largely to deceive, rob and steal from innocent citizens. The evils of this world have been the drivers to innovation right behind space and defense. Don’t you remember that porn drove the video cassette and DVR business and will drive the deep fakes to virtually eliminate the actors and actresses in that business.

Meanwhile we argue about digital rights and NFTs as if the market was listening to us. We are lambs being led to slaughter, by those who have jumped on the technology already.

Remember this simple adage: if something is free to us, the ones “giving it to us” are likely taking advantage of something we did not understand had value and/or as individuals could not acquire as value. They are indeed giving it to us …

EPR stands for Enhanced Producer Responsibility.  GreenBiz has rightfully pointed out that the food industry is embroiled in a reporting transition where the food products we see at retail will be tagged to indicate how they result in food waste.  The idea is that producers should have full responsibility for the journey of their food and its packaging from beginning to end.

This makes sense on some level of course.  If you make the mess, you should clean it up.  But it fails to ask and answer the question about why the mess was made in the first place.

By analogy, if you play paintball and mess up public property, you should be the one to clean it up.  But the bigger question is whether you should be allowed to play paintball on public property in the first place.  Shouldn’t people be restricted to playing paintball in places designed for that?

Just as an aside … I hate paintball, but know others love it, so far be it from me to suggest you shouldn’t play.  But I have every right for you to follow the rules and not expect others or society to clean it up.

So, what is ECR?  I changed the word Producer to the word Consumer.  After all, might we be better off pushing consumers to move away from convenience foods and take more responsibility to eat fresh produce?

I know … wouldn’t this hurt jobs and the economy?  Sure, but these products are not good for society in the first place.  In some ways they are no different than the production of cigarettes.  Yes, I do know it is not at that level of health harm, but the point is they are NOT good for us.  They just taste good.

Isn’t it clear now that our societies’ problems are being made worse by the salt in prepared foods?  Yes, we are now more interested in composting and returning to a more sustainable food cycle.  We all want tomatoes that taste like tomatoes and enjoy picking those pea pods as snacks?  However, we have now become a society focused on convenience rather than responsibility.  We want the privilege to eat whatever we want.

We also seem to prize and are willing to pay more for organic foods, trusting our suppliers to be honest that they are indeed produced that way.

Please realize then that big business is once again using all this as a side show … if you failed to catch that prior blog, here is the link to it:  https://captain-obvious.com/the-side-show/

There are times when I truly wonder whether we really believe you can incentivize creativity. I hear of adult education classes on subjects like creative thinking and innovation implying it can be taught like math and science. I have even run into “ideation meetings” where the presumption is that if you put enough intelligent people in a room and facilitate a discussion about a problem, a creative solution will emerge. Frankly, I call these meetings group gropes. Creativity is more like art than science … and most people simply can’t draw.

Plus, having been in all too many of these meetings, let me remind everyone that the process of using consensus is conditioned into modern minds and will almost certainly result in the dismissal of truly creative ideas because the group simply “can’t see beyond their own perceptional difficulties.” 

Then, you run into people who think that if you present enough puzzle challenges to people they will “think outside the box.” I applaud the idea of demonstrating that most people are trapped in their thinking and have been conditioned to “color within the lines of a picture.”  But the critical thinking skill is still not going to emerge in most cases.  Most people just don’t get it.

The culmination of some of these concepts can best be summarized by the joke economists love to tell about a bus full of them that veers off the road and is heading down into a deep ravine to their certain death. Despite all this the economists are happily cheering because they believe such an intense need will certainly result in someone, or something emerging as a solution to rescue them.

So, what is my point in this blog? Let’s take Elon Musk … a brilliant person who happens to be a rare breed of innovator. Not only can he enunciate the creative idea, but he can also bring capital and people together to solve the problem. He could have simply stopped with the EV but went on to redefine rockets into space. Not all his ideas are necessarily workable immediately, but he is also not done yet. Give him time. Let him work his magic.  Don’t expect him to be popular.

Steve Jobs was another who proved the point that along with genius comes failures. This is all a part of innovation. Finding why things don’t work is sometimes more valuable than success. See Post It Notes for example … a glue that wouldn’t stick.

Our modern attitudes about success trick us into thinking the process of innovation is just like a production model, implying you just push for speed and use incentives to get people to pull together. No, you stop and consider what you have learned that didn’t work and then move forward trying different ideas.
We seem to believe we have already found the right ideas and all we need is to push harder. No, we need to step back from the situation and listen to the few people who truly are critical thinkers. Most of them are not raising their hands in the air to gain attention, so they just sit on the sidelines.

Why? Because most people today are more interested in shooting them down, rather than listening and working together to make things work. Why risk your inner peace trying to help the current band of ideologues and their fantasies?

Engineers are trained to be especially careful defining the problem we are asked to solve. In all too many cases, we have to dig deeper to see what lies behind that problem that may be the root cause, rather than to plough ahead chasing symptoms. That is where we are today. We are chasing symptoms and then voting on a batch of bad ideas thinking we have picked a winner. Albert Einstein said it best:

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

An article in the New York Times offers a wonderful, if not chilling, review of the war in Ukraine using drones.  Here is the link: https://tinyurl.com/NY-Times-Drone-Warfare

The military approach to conflict and outright war has changed irrevocably, and much faster than the underlying questions in ethics and moral hazards have been asked and answered.  Plus, we have been naive to assume our adversaries will play by the same rules we use.  It is ironic that we Americans think this way given it was our renegade ragtag army using “jungle warfare” that defeated the British.

We used to think of drone warfare as high altitude unmanned vehicles dropping hellfire missiles.  The movie I suggest you watch is Eye in the Sky.  At first, it would appear to be just another movie about our battle with terrorists … but I see it is a much bigger set of questions it raises. Take a look for yourself and decide: Click here to view the trailer.

As in all of life today, things are complicated. Are we OK with targeted assassinations as a standard part of a mission?  Are we ready to use autonomous drones with facial recognition to do that?  Perhaps more importantly, will our enemies do this?  And, if so, can we detect and block those attempts?

We all think of secret service agents protecting key people in dark glasses with earbuds communicating with surveillance and control centers.  Why do we think this is enough today?  Haven’t we learned anything from the Chinese viruses … we are all in the cross hairs of nefarious agents.  It wouldn’t take much to poison us all using our water supplies.

Modern movies about existential threats focus on alien invasions, while we assume our aliens here on this planet are seeking asylum.  Take a fresh look at the Middle East and tell me how we are going to bring about peace on earth.  Do we really think hostage releases of 30 Hamas combatants for each Israeli citizen sends the message that either side should seek peace?  Is this going to heal the wounds and millennia of hate?

Can we just stop and work through some basic questions?  Are we the savior of the world or are we mostly interested in the wellbeing of our country?   I hear Trump wants an “Iron Dome” like that of Israel.  That assumes we are at risk with the ICBM weapon.  The movie Top Gun Maverick seems to be prescient: Are we going to fund conventional warfare when drones may be better.

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

If we are not ready to face these questions and act it will be too late since our adversaries are eagerly seeking this type of capability … and may soon have it.