Grurray

In the Future We Will All be Slaveowners

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Or so they thought in 1957 in this Mechanix Illustrated exposé.

The description of the robot valet and cook makes it seem like dependence would make us more of a slave to the technology then the other way around, but the robot cars and drones are closer to the mark. I can’t imagine anyone waving amicably at today’s red light cameras, although many drivers would probably welcome the hail of bullets fired in their direction.

The robot reporters prediction was about 50 years too soon, but we’re now starting to see them for statistics heavy topics like fantasy sports.

The most amusing part is about GE’s role in the upcoming cyber serfdom.

Most remarkable is General Electric’s new Yes-Man, a master-slave manipulator of incredible dexterity. Any movement the human master makes with his hand, even lifting a finger, is faithfully duplicated by the powerful slave machine. In a fantastic demonstration, Yes-Man fixed a girl model’s hair-do and applied cosmetics, all with the gentle touch of a woman’s hand.

Of course, it took awhile, but we know now that the GE Yes-Men did in fact come into existence and took over the entire company. For the past decade they apparently had the same short term forecasting skills as Mechanix Illustrated.

According to the article, this was all just a walk in the park for cybernetics pioneer Dr. Norbert Wiener who envisioned the Age of Robots unfolding before us. Well, he didn’t exactly deliver the Jetsons, but Wiener did leave us with some insights to give us some pause in our pursuit of a future with digital autonomy.

Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists.

In short, it is only a humanity which is capable of awe, which will also be capable of controlling the new potentials which we are opening for ourselves. We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die.

Crude Unglued

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The big news in the financial world for the past few months has been the dramatic drop in oil prices. Since June oil has lost nearly 50% of its value and is now at a price not seen in over five years during the depths of the recession. Although the signs have been around for a while, the sudden and protracted decline has taken everyone by surprise. We’re now seeing all sorts of explanations, justifications, and ruminations about what it all means.

Aside from homeowners in the Northeast who heat their homes with heating oil, the big impact on most of us is the lower gas prices to fill up our cars. If you’re like me, unless there is some big news about it, we really don’t notice fluctuations at the gas pump. However, when prices drop this much, it’s hard not to notice something is up. And in this case, that something is we have more money left over when we pull out. For most of us it’s certainly a good time of the year to have that kind of pleasant surprise.

A lot of people, unfortunately, don’t see it that way. Some of them think that lower prices aren’t such a good thing. I guess some people can’t get into the holiday spirit.

The esteemed liquidity expert and chronicler of the debt crisis John Mauldin has just dispatched a report on the oil price’s effects on overall growth. There’s a lot of information here, muddied somewhat by the gratuitous inclusion of the tinfoil hat brigade at Zero Hedge, who’ve never met an economic event they didn’t think was going to cause the collapse of Western Civilization. Here’s the important takeaway:

Employment associated with energy production is going to fall over the course of next year. It’s not all bad news, though. Employment that benefits from lower energy prices is likely to remain stable or even rise. Think chemical companies that use natural gas as an input as an example.
I am, however, at a loss to think of what could replace the jobs and GDP growth that the energy complex has recently created. Certainly, reduced production is going to impact capital expenditures. This all leads one to begin thinking about a much softer economy in the US in 2015.

Thankfully, Mr. Mauldin dismissed the more ridiculous assertions going around that the drop in oil is a replay of the subprime credit crisis, but that does still leave us with a picture of the energy industry facing serious problems. The emergence of fracking has been an absolute boon for those communities sitting on shale oil and gas fields. One would expect their fortunes to be reversed when the price of oil drops.

One immediate area that is starting to see some signs of life since oil dropped is employment of young workers. Now, kids in retail and entry level jobs may not restore confidence in those who see collapse of mighty industries around the bend. On the other hand, all the consternation lately about the rise of the machines, technological unemployment, and the lack of relevant job skills has a lot to do with companies unwilling or unable to invest in training unskilled and entry level workers because it’s simply not affordable. Kids getting jobs again is definitely a step in the right direction to correcting the mismatch. Except in overly regulated states, that is.

Unlike every other state in the United States, California increased its minimum wage on 1 July 2014, just as the employment situation was about to improve across the entire country thanks to falling oil and fuel prices. No other state has likewise implemented an increase in their minimum wages during this period.
By arbitrarily increasing their minimum wage from $8.00 to $9.00 per hour in July 2014, California’s politicians effectively jerked away the prospect of finding employment from its job-seeking teen population at a time when it would have its best chance at doing so in years, while also damaging their prospects for increased future earnings. All by making it too costly for the state’s employers to employ them profitably.

Which tells us the real danger to growth isn’t the natural movements of markets but the unnatural manipulation from government.

As for where the rest of the growth is going to come from to offset the decline in energy sectors, if the oil industry existed in a vacuum then there would be something to worry about. However, the fact is they sell to other industries and to consumers who will have more money to spend. Period. It’s not just petrochemical industries either. Car companies and heavy equipment industries and airlines and shipping companies and on and on and on.
Why some people choose to ignore these benefits and obvious upside is somewhat baffling. Luckily I’m here to let them know: absent some other unforeseen shock, lower prices will definitely and absolutely create more jobs then it will destroy. End of story.

But what about the energy industry? Surly lower prices will bankrupt it, end the American energy renaissance, and enslave us all to Arab Petro-Sheiks forever, right? It turns out that immense capital intensive projects like oil drilling take a long time and aren’t as responsive to price fluctuations. North American production is still expected to grow in 2015, mostly because there’s no alternative. The easy oil coming from Saudi Arabia that everyone believed was close to or at the peak is still probably running out. Sticking a straw into the ground and slurping up oil was great while it lasted, but it really is increasingly a thing of the past. That’s not a bad thing as new technologies naturally spring up to replace it and introduce innovations that bring the price down where it probably should be in the first place.

Likewise, high prices encourage the discovery of new technologies that allow explorers to find and recover previously untapped reserves of oil. And high oil prices encourage the development of alternative sources of renewable energy, allowing us to shift away from the use of hydrocarbons altogether. In the graph, we can clearly see how these incentive effects worked to bring oil prices back down in the 1800s and the 1980s. Most likely, these same incentive effects will work to push oil prices lower in the years ahead.

For years there was manipulation and a geopolitical premium on the price of oil. Now prices are dropping because the market is actually working correctly again. Let’s welcome it and allow it to continue.

Narratives, Scenarios, and Strategies

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“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”

-George E.P. Box

Models, predictions, and forecasts are always wrong, or, more accurately, they’re never completely right. That’s obvious since the map can never truly be the territory. Some are better than others, but no matter how hard we try and how much information that we gather, we’ll never construct a representation of reality better than the real thing. That being the case, forecasts therefore reveal more about ourselves and our present state of mind than anything about the future.

The Research Feature in the fall issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review, “Beyond Forecasting: Creating New Strategic Narratives” (link here – requires a one time registration or purchase Kindle article here for a few dollars), concerns a certain type of forecasting called scenario planning. The authors studied a tech company that was being hit hard during the 2001 economic crash and needed to find new strategies to navigate the rough seas ahead.

Their research revealed that

“future projections are intimately tied to interpretations of the past and the present. Strategy making amid volatility thus involves constructing and reconstructing strategic narratives that reimagine the past and present in ways that allow the organization to explore multiple possible futures.”

These explorations of possible futures, more commonly referred to as scenarios, are stories intended to describe possible futures, identify some significant events, main actors, and motivations, and convey how the world functions.

The authors note that constructing forecasts based on these methods usually doesn’t work very well because the future is uncertain and often unfolds in a way that is very different from current trajectories. The current paths are comfortable and familiar, so they are difficult to deviate from. Constructing scenarios of the future actually first requires constructing paths that connect the past, present, and future. The narratives are those paths.

”In comparing strategy projects within CommCorp, we found that the more work managers do to create novel strategic narratives, the more likely they are to explore alternatives that break with the status quo. In other words, to get to an alternative future, you have to create a story about the past that connects to it.”

Predicting, prognosticating, and prophesying have been around since time immemorial. The modern version of strategic scenario planning can be attributed to Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute and his “thinking the unthinkable” about nuclear war by taking into account non-linear, disruptive changes that lead to an uncertain future. The first to bring scenarios into the business world was the pioneering strategy guru Pierre Wack at Shell Oil who coined the term. Wack was a colorful and imaginative individual who took Kahn’s insights and repurposed them to affect the quality of judgment rather than quality of predictions.

Among the many books, case studies, and articles on the Shell planning department, I just completed The Essence of Scenarios: Learning from the Shell Experience, a history of the scenario group culled from interviews of former members. Pierre Wack helped found it and headed it throughout the 1970s. The book concerns the entire history from then until the present, but it devotes a large part to Wack’s work and legacy.

In contrast to Kahn’s theories, Wack was less concerned about decoding uncertainty or getting predictions right and more concerned with making future uncertainty more relevant to the present situation.

“Wack was interested in scenarios as a way to ‘see’ the present situation more clearly, rather than as a basis for knowing about the future. The value of the scenarios is not in better forecasting what ‘the’ future will be, but in encouraging already smart people to learn by ‘seeing’ the present situation afresh, from the perspective offered by plausible, alternative futures , in a process that Wack termed ‘disciplined imagination’.”

With an emphasis on present adaptation instead of future clarity, their first attempts happened to be nicely prescient. Their November 1971 scenarios covering “Producer Government Take/World Economic Development” and their January 1973 scenarios for “Impending Energy Scarcity” presented different tracks for oil prices including: a low slow growth scenario based on the continuation of past agreements with producer countries, a track that the corporate leadership expected; and a high price growth scenario which factored into concerns that producer countries were reaching limits to how much more capital inflows they could absorb.

These scenarios involved explorations for prices through the late ’70s into the early ’80s. It’s important to keep in mind that, in keeping with the notion that they weren’t meant to be exact predictions, the high price track scenario still ended up being off by a factor of 20 as oil embargoes and inflation pushed prices higher than anyone could have imagined. Despite the fuzziness of the numbers, however, presenting a possible future far off from what was expected shifted thinking outside the company’s comfort zone.

There was some initial skepticism from top executives, but the scenario planning helped the company to think differently and conditioned them to adjust in flexible ways that they wouldn’t have considered previously. Consideration of the high price track eventually led to Shell investing in nuclear and coal which helped offset the political turmoil and price shock that would arrive in the mid ’70s.

“In October 1973, the first oil crisis began to unfold, and the entire organization became aware of the possibilities that scenarios offered. The 1973 scenarios report had provided a new frame of reference the mindset of the oil producer countries. This new frame was significantly different from the usual analytical frame the mindset of an oil company. The scenarios had enabled Shell executives to rehearse the future as a thought experiment rather than a crisis exercise. When the crisis actually occurred, Shell was able to collectively re-interpret the turbulent situation and to respond much faster than its competitors.”

In order to be taken seriously, the Shell scenario team had to relate to top management how the oil producers’ situation related to their own situation.

“In September 1972, Wack gave what those present remember as a three-hour, enthralling performance that was based on an image of the six scenarios as a river forking into two streams, each of which divided into three tributaries. The insight about hither oil prices and possible energy crisis… were integrated into one of these scenarios.”

This technique demonstrated the narrative of how the high price scenario was linked to Shell’s operations and how it could have sprung forth from Shell’s past. The key was teasing out the culture, values, and qualities of the past that could make that future plausible.

Similar re-interpretations of the past are what the MIT researchers found were most successful for their tech company. It wasn’t that they provided better predictions, but it helped provide a unifying vision and get everyone to buy into course changes that didn’t seem to fit before.

“the crash in the market for its existing products had forced everyone at CommCorp to reevaluate the company’s historical strategic trajectory. This questioning enabled one manager to reinterpret CommCorp’s history, not only as a provider of big-ticket hardware for the backbone of the Internet but also as a provider of communications technologies across the whole network. By seeing the company as all about “communications,” the manager was able to propose a project for improving access at the “last mile” of the network. This reinterpretation made a radical shift in a future vision possible: CommCorp could provide small-ticket, standardized products as well as customized, high-end technologies.

The narratives and scenarios became a way to define the company as it was today and illustrate a more coherent organizational structure. This is possible because of the rich potential of examining the past.

“strategy making is not about getting the ‘right’ narrative. It’s about getting a narrative that is good enough for now, so that the organization can move forward and take action in uncertain times. This recognizes that strategy will in some ways always be evolving and “emergent.”

Everyone loves to try to make predictions, but the real value lies in re-evaluating the past and restructuring past trajectories to provide for a launching point to navigate into the future. This “re-programming” the past is the way to deal with an uncertain future. Instead of forecasting futures that merely extrapolate from the status quo or futilely fighting future models that conflict with conventional mental maps, the use of narratives, scenarios, and strategies provides ways to create stronger and more harmonious models of the present.

The First Rip in the Iron Curtain

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Hungarian Freedom Fighters in 1956

Today is the anniversary of the start of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising..

In contrast to David’s previous discussion about young European women abandoning Western civilization, in Hungary that year women were fighting for freedom and to be part of the West.

In Budapest last week . . . the Russian masters and their desperate Hungarian puppets faced a new and formidable foe. The city’s women, some of whom had fought earlier at the side of their men and then had bitterly buried the men who had fallen, suddenly banded together in a series of fresh demonstrations of defiance.

“Only women are wanted this time,” they shouted as they joined up in the streets. Then, ignoring the ominous presence of security police and Russian tanks, they marched with flowers and flags to a service commemorating their dead. The men doffed their hats in tribute as the women paraded past and joined with them in the stirring words of a forbidden song—“We shall never be slaves.”

Despite the fact that the uprising was crushed by Soviet tanks in the following weeks and months, the oppression eventually eased to the point where Hungary came to become one of the “Happiest Barracks” of the Soviet sphere. Thanks to those brave young men and women, freedom eventually found its way through to the rest of Eastern Europe.

The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy

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This year has seen many historical anniversaries, and one that has gotten some recent notoriety is the 90 year anniversary of the planned obsolescence of the light bulb by an industry cartel.

How exactly did the cartel pull off this engineering feat? It wasn’t just a matter of making an inferior or sloppy product; anybody could have done that. But to create one that reliably failed after an agreed-upon 1,000 hours took some doing over a number of years. The household lightbulb in 1924 was already technologically sophisticated: The light yield was considerable; the burning time was easily 2,500 hours or more. By striving for something less, the cartel would systematically reverse decades of progress.

It’s even more notable because last week three pioneers in LED technology just won the Nobel Prize.

We all know about the efficiency standards for light bulbs that are effectively banning incandescent bulbs in slow motion. I’ve noticed during my usual stops at the home improvement stores that the choices for the vintage bulbs are fewer and farther between, and the prices for what’s left are creeping up.

The promise of the new standards is that the new LED lighting is far superior. While it’s much more expensive, the steady drumbeat of the diffusion of technology is supposed to reduce the costs, eventually putting them within reach of the common household.

The costs have indeed dropped exponentially, but that’s undoubtedly been helped by government aid and deliberate shortages of the old technology. Besides the federal standards, every state has some sort of efficient lighting rebate program that artificially decreases the price. Tax breaks and other incentives have encouraged manufacturers like GE to expand production in the US and create a few hundred jobs, which, although nice, don’t quite make up for the thousands they shipped to China during the Great Light Bulb Leap Forward. How much of the price gains can be attributed to Moore’s Law type improvements and how much to government supports is a legitimate concern.

Now there’s some question about how long prices are going to keep falling going forward.

In stark contrast to the promised dynamics that the technology is supposed to follow, LED prices actually rose considerably last month.

In contrast, 40W equiv. LED bulb prices were up 14.3% in the U.S. market. Manufacturers including Cree, Philips, GE and other renowned brands have raised prices for certain products in the U.S. market.

Because of industry consolidation, the top ten LED manufacturers now control 61% of the market. That much control brings pricing power over the market, and they are apparently now using it.

With green energy executive orders on Obama’s agenda and the unelected EPA issuing mandates, the oligopoly is sure to get worse with permanently higher cost per lumens the possible result.

The LED industry, taking a page from the incandescent bulb industry so many years ago, is discovering the key to the rent seekers’ success – competition is for losers, and unfortunately sometimes so is progress.