Tony Seba Disrupted by Five Years by Virus Mongers

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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The linked video is a 2017 presentation by Tony Seba about the coming solar, storage, and EV disruptions. While many forecasters are overly pessimistic Tony Seba might be either overly optimistic or he himself was disrupted by Covid-19.

I’ve been thinking about the changes at Tesla. There does seem to be a change in priorities but I also think the above news are greatly exaggerated by… never mind by whom.

For example, about the firing of the SuperCharger team. I’ve heard two versions:

  1. By opening the SuperChargers to competitors current locations need to be expanded to service the newcomers. This would justify reducing the expansion of the network in favor of beefing up existing sites. New sites require a lot more work and bureaucracy than expansion of existing sites.
  2. The other is that Rebecca Tinucci, head of SuperChargers, complained about the number of people she had to fire and Musk decided to fire the whole gang. Shades of X firings that didn’t turn out bad as predicted?

About the unboxing paradigm, ElonMusk said that Reuters was lying, that Model Redwood was still ongoing. What was added during the conference call is that parts of the unboxing paradigm would be incorporated into some current model production lines. One stark contrast between Tesla and legacy car makers is Tesla’s Agile Management of constant innovation in contrast with the legacy snail pace management.

But there is more, something much bigger. With the acquisition of sufficient computer power to crunch the huge volume of incoming data, the speed of improvement of FSD as seen with version 12 brought forward the ETA of Autonomous Mobility, a.k.a. RoboTaxi, a fact reinforced by China’s consent to allow Tesla RoboTaxi to operate in China.

Hardware is a Decreasing Returns business while software, i.e. AI, is an Increasing Returns business. If Autonomous Mobility is indeed near, it makes sense to pivot from being a car maker to being a technology business. Not just Autonomous Mobility but also humanoid robots, both driven by AI the soul inside mechanical devices. If the above is true it makes sense to funnel cash flow to Autonomous Mobility instead of to new assembly lines.,

Stasis is not progress!

Tony Seba Speaker | Why Conventional Energy & Transport will be Obsolete by 2030

The Captain

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Perfect post!

Seba has been ignored for a long time. LOL. Why? Because

  1. His predictions reach far enough into the future that he never gets the entire picture right – the future is too complicated for that (Covid, Putin), as illustrated by the multiple smaller scale errors (oil price and pipeline collaspes) in Seba’s video in Captain’s post. Big picture right, many details wrong.
  2. People simply could not and cannot process what Seba (and many others) were/are saying. The big scale vision is too disruptive for most to process it (outside of sci-fi).

We humans are now entering the biggest disruption of all, as the extreme disruptions of energy, communication, and transportation undermines the (evolving but not fast enough and so collapsing) ancient “controllingsystems” of religion /education /politics /governance. Although we hardly talk of it, all those language/mythic systems are undergoing convulsive transformations and deaths. I see that as the crux economic fact.

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