Future Imperfect #28: Lining up for iPower
Welcome to Future Imperfect! This week I’ve been following Apple’s energy utility play, emerging solar fuel technologies, “must-watch” algorithmic sci-fi films, and the decline of public spaces.
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Lining up for iPower
It looks like Apple is expanding their business…into energy. Why, you ask? 9to5mac has some thoughts on the subject.
Given Apple’s expertise and huge commitment to using renewable energy to power its operations, it is no surprise that it wants to ensure that its solar farms generate sufficient power to meet its needs. Because the sun only shines during the day obviously, Apple needs to shift its generation and its usage. Data centers need to go 24/7. Apple Stores are open in the evening. Apple has alternatives for this at its campus (see Fuel Cell generation below) but if it wants to operate 100% renewable, it has to “trade” overcapacity during the middle of the day for “net-metered” energy during the evening or cloudy days.
But that’s not all—there may be blue sky opportunities further afield:
What else could come out of the subsidiary ‘Apple Energy’ company? With Apple’s electric car project still in development, a recent report highlighted Apple’s interest in charging stations for ‘refueling’ their future EV (and other EVs?) so it’s possible this project could be a focus of Apple’s energy experts in the future.
Why does this matter? Apple fans might not be able to line up for this new initiative, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important for the business. You’re going to see more and more organizations like Apple with large physical footprints look into solar, especially now that the solar investment tax credit was extended (with a gradual step-down) through 2023. Color me skeptical on the second part of that—it makes enough sense for Apple to be going in on a solar development project without considering its EV work.
Liquid light
Of the criticisms of wind and solar energy, the challenge of transferring intermittent input stands out. When the sun isn’t shining, or when you need to take that energy on the go, how are systems effectively storing it? Enter solar fuels (via MIT Technology Review):
When I visited Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in March, Frances Houle, the deputy director of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, showed off one of the center’s latest advances. It is a device that breaks down water into hydrogen and oxygen in sunlight. The lab’s researchers had previously used artificial light to drive the process; this was the first time they were doing it with natural light. Fixed to a thin metal stand on the roof of the center’s building above Berkeley, with a spectacular view west across San Francisco Bay, the small device has a solar cell that supplies the energy needed for a chemical catalyst to split the water. At the top of the device, pure hydrogen bubbled up.
Created in 2010 under Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, the center, commonly called JCAP, has an audacious goal: to create fuels using only sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water. Done economically, that would be a Promethean achievement, representing a huge step toward solving the two outstanding challenges in shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy: storing large amounts of energy for later use, and powering forms of transportation that cannot easily run on batteries.
Sounds great right? What could possibly go wrong? Enter government mismanagement!
In the last year, though, JCAP has made a significant shift in direction. The Department of Energy renewed its funding last year at $15 million a year, nearly 40 percent below the rate for the previous five-year period. What’s more, DOE officials instructed the scientists to refocus their efforts away from making devices that could be commercialized in the next several years and toward basic scientific research on the complex processes underlying artificial photosynthesis. JCAP’s original goal, according to the 2010 announcement of its founding, was “to develop an integrated solar energy-to-chemical fuel conversion system and move this system from the bench-top discovery phase to a scale where it can be commercialized.” Now its mandate no longer goes beyond the discovery phase.
Why does this matter? As the article notes, “JCAP is a case study in the promise and the perils of long-term federal funding for energy technologies.” It’s not as if no one else is working on solar fuels—the article calls out startups such as Opus12—but JCAP had a working prototype in its sights, and got defunded instead! It’s a great reason to get angry on a Saturday morning.
A strangely moving algorithmic film
Have you heard about Sci-fi London? It’s an annual film festival dedicated to pushing the boundaries of the sci-fi genre, and this year was no exception. Ars Technica covered one of the most unique projects—Sunspring:
Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks — it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.
As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like “He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor.” Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room. “As soon as we had a read-through, everyone around the table was laughing their heads off with delight,” Sharp told Ars. The actors interpreted the lines as they read, adding tone and body language, and the results are what you see in the movie. Somehow, a slightly garbled series of sentences became a tale of romance and murder, set in a dark future world. It even has its own musical interlude (performed by Andrew and Tiger), with a pop song Benjamin composed after learning from a corpus of 30,000 other pop songs.
Why is this important: Throw Hollywood screenwriters into the giant bucket of “jobs to be taken away by the robots.” Sunspring is a literal mess, but it’s an original literal mess that’s more entertaining than half of what came out in the sci-fi genre this year. Sign me up for more from Benjamin!
Rediscovering the third space
Are we in the midst of a public space crisis? That’s the question Zenovia Toloudi asks in The Conversation, amid an increasingly flawed transition to online-only debate.
Welcoming public spaces are in decline — at least, those that exist in the real world. Increasingly, debates that once took place face-to-face happen on the internet, on Facebook, Twitter and countless other digital forums and platforms. You might say the Squarespaces of the world are replacing public squares.
But if the internet is a democratizing place for debate — one with unprecedented capacity to draw people together — it is also one with flaws. The challenge, as I see it, is to fuse the advantages of both real and virtual spaces, while limiting the pitfalls.
Gone are the public squares of Classical-era Athens, or even the traditional meeting spaces of pre-20th century America. Today, public spaces are increasingly scarce, so people turn to the web. Although the internet has made us more globally connected than ever before, it comes with significant drawbacks.
Contrary to what some may think — social media does not necessarily foster a stronger democracy. New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman has arguedthat social media can initially act as a powerful voice, but does a poor job keeping momentum and effecting actual change. This is evident in the aforementioned hashtag example: Even if #ThisIsACoup trended globally, it didn’t accomplish much beyond expressing anger, and it failed to influence the negotiations between the two sides.
Social media has also been shown to reinforce polarization and hate speech. Look no further than the echo chamber phenomenon, where people tend to listen only to those who share their beliefs, and the trolling of strangers.
Moreover, social media is still not sufficiently accessible to scores of underprivileged people. Pew Research has shown that in the United States, although the number of low-income households using social media has risen, those in higher-income households are still more likely to use social media.
Why does this matter? Toloudi calls out a project of hers called Parrhesiastic Play, an attempt to create opportunities for interaction and dialogue in public spaces. While I think this is an interesting approach, I’m more invested in figuring out how to improve dialogue on our websites and social platforms. I don’t think our society is going back to a world where Athenian public squares are the norm—instead, why don’t we figure out how to introduce the best of that forum into the spaces we currently inhabit online?
Time travel as real estate opportunity
What happens when gentrification meets time travel? You get Trojan Horses, the latest short story from Terraform:
The past is like a foreign country: They have weird McDonald’s specials there. Here, it’s a burger with olives and larks’ tongues; it’s called the McTrojan Deluxe, which makes it sound like there’s something sneaky hiding inside it, which if you hate olives is true. I hate olives. But they also serve wine, so I’m drinking lots of wine. It’s unpleasantly packed in the restaurant, but then, it’s packed everywhere.
The McDonald’s special in 5th-century Mongolia, where I went to a conference last month, is some kind of unspeakable meat patty. That’s what they call it — the UnMcSpeakable Meat Patty. To me it looked and tasted a lot like a regular McDonald’s burger, but maybe that’s the point. People don’t want to feel uncomfortable or out of place when they go on a trip, especially if they’re going for work; work trips should be easy and predictable, the same tastes and schedules and climate control smells and creepily stiff bed linens no matter what time period you’re in.
Rome has some cool attractions, at least. You can go to an authentic vomitorium, for instance, or watch the Roman Senate debate a point of law — which is almost the same thing, really. Of course it’s just a show for the tourists, but most of the re-enactors are real Romans, born and bred here, though of course it’s been decades since there was a Roman who remembered the pre-colonial era. And my company manufactures the historically-accurate marble for the Senate facade, and the bronze for the statues, and the the easy-wash tile for the vomitorium floor. AccuSpackle: You’ll Never Know The Earth’s Mineral Resources Were Depleted™.
GIF of the Week: A … screw tank? Don’t want to see that coming for me…
Weather Forecast: Windy with a 42 percent chance of Brexit (and an awful tragedy in Birstall)
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