The electric car cometh, part 2

TED just released a talk by Shai Agassi that is very related to my last post. In it, he lays out a convincing argument for the mass adoption of the electric car, including a system of battery-swap stations based on the idea of a separation in car ownership and battery ownership. It gets really exciting when he starts going over the successes he's already had with the idea, including in Israel and Denmark.

UPDATE: The Times magazine published a great article on Agassi. Here's a particularly compelling sentence:

Agassi figured that a company controlling a world network of charging stations would become so profitable so quickly that it could subsidize its customers’ electric cars, much the way mobile companies give out free phones to people who sign two-year contracts.

the future

Listening to Quirks and Quarks on CBC radio this morning, I was struck by how the host Bob McDonald casually comments on the steadily approaching environmental calamity. In one segment he refers to the collapse of honey-bee populations in North America as a "canary in the coal mine" for general environmental health, and in another he interviews a scientist discussing a study showing that climate change is killing our forests.

It occurs to me how often I swing from optimism to pessimism and back again when thinking about the future, depending on which kind of scientist I was most recently listening to. For example, last night I got excited about a TED Talk by a geneticist who claims that with more research we can: "solve our energy problems, reduce CO2, clean up our oceans and make better wine," and then suggests: "stay healthy for another 20 years and you'll see 150 maybe 300." Here's the talk:



In another, even more far-out Ted Talk, a futurist discusses the past 5000 days of the Internet and predicts the very sci-fi world of the next 5000. For example, the web seems to be on course to developing into one giant, integrated machine surpassing the human brain in complexity:



I think a lot of us live with a cognitive dissonance where we believe, on the one hand, society is moving towards some kind of technological utopia and, on the other, a Mad-Max type post-apocalyptic hell following complete environmental collapse. I think the balance between technological optimism and environmental pessimism are key parts of my generation. We waver between hope and excitement and a "what's the point, the world's fucked anyway," attitude. I suppose in the end it'll just come down to timing.