Edition 22

Robots, Bread , 3D Printed homes, Sofas are falling apart and lets think about Barcodes for a bit

Mar 20, 2024

Bit of a different format this time, shorter, sharper, easier to write.

Things I enjoyed reading recently

1- I liked this piece about the future of Barcodes.

We often forget that the most boring things typically change the world the most; the shipping container, barbed wire, salt, the barcode.

What I also find weird is how much of the world is based on limitations of the past, like the idea computing power or data storage is expensive.

In theory barcodes could contain far more metadata than just SKU and price, it could have expiry dates, nutritional information, sizing, colors, recycling information, links to instruction manuals.

If we imagined a bit harder credit card statements along could almost know everything about everything we owned. What a fun world that could be. So so so many huge companies could be founded on this alone.

2- Europe's largest 3-D printed building is underway.

I love the idea of 3-D printing houses, but the reality is it's generally a terrible idea.

It creates more problems, and doesn't really solve any. For a start the structural frame of any building is a remarkably small part of the cost and time. Rather than using it to make cheaper homes and buildings it would be better to use it to make more interesting designs.|

So it's nice to see people at least use 3-D printing as a way to be more imaginative about the most otherwise boring structures, like this data center. Like so much of the world, the notion “first we shape our tools, then they shape us” (then they shape the world) continues to be a uniquely insightful frame to get the world.

I’m still designing my house in Miami and pondering using 3D printed concrete, like an idiot, so if anyone wants to consult with me, raise your hands.

3- Businesses weren't ready for electricity or digitalization. Here's how they can get AI right

I never recycle old posts, but this time I’m going to make an exception.

In 2017 I wrote this for the World Economic Forum, and I thought it was excellent, prescient and too long. HBR and many other outlets refused it, but this year posted lots of pieces that echo the precise same lessons, that extracting full value from groundbreaking technologies lies not in integrating them into existing business processes, but in completely reimagining business workflows around what they mean.

If you read only one piece of mine this year, please make it this one. Not that it’s perfect, and not that this thinking was predicting a predicament that wasn’t obvious to many.

4- Democratization of Retail turbocharged

Amazon is using generative AI to make it easier than ever to become a “retailer” ( whatever that means in the age of dropshipping, affiliate models and ghost inventory).

I have no idea why this is a good thing, especially not for customers.

Sometimes making things hard is a good barrier to quality. Sometimes having people think is good. We don't need more things to buy with less thought behind them, and the same way that we don't need more people to apply for jobs , nor for more people to make websites for bad company ideas. We need to use AI to improve what we make and do.

5- Dodgy reporting on EV’s continues

The Hertz CEO left recently, he’s believed to have resigned.

Off the 300 articles about this, they all suggest he was fired, and that he left because of a spectacular backfire after buying a boatload of Teslas. The use of “after” in all reports suggest causality when it’s just chronology.

The narrative is thus:
- EV’s are bad, nobody wanted to even rent them.
- Hertz is screwed because they bought EV’s they can’t sell.
- The CEO was marched out for such a disgraceful call.

I’m far from a Hertz fan, the entire sector is as mess, but I loathe this sort of lazy reporting.

Hertz is suffering as much as all other car rental firms, their results are similar to competitors and the issue is they all have huge expensive debt to service
The “loss” from selling off Teslas isn’t massive, it’s at the most 10% of their annual revenue
The “loss” came from Elon slashing car prices, in a market where all cars fell in price following shortages from 2021
The CEO was an expert in financial engineering, designed to bring the company out of bankruptcy, it makes sense once this is done, they depart to be replaced by an operations leader, who actually knows how customer facing businesses should run.
I do also think renting EV’s to people who have never used them before is a really really dumb idea, without better onboarding.

I' only care about this because often in life I think the way the news is reported has absolutely no linkage to reality, and we find ourselves in lazy narratives caused by clumsy journalism, that other people use for more stories.

6 - Robots are everywhere this week

Somehow this week my feeds have been full of humanoid robots, these make no sense to me at first. If you want something to move things fast, or that are heavy, you don’t start with a people shaped object. A robot like this is as stupid as the first horseless carriage being a animatronic robot in equine form. The rush to make these robots seems like three things.

All manner of companies desperate to maintain hype and share prices based on the relentless need to feed the media machine with new news about AI. Realistically far more useful, but far less impressive robots have been around for 50 years.
A need for seemingly any legacy company facing tough times to signal to the markets that they are doing all they can, hence photoshoots with logos and futuristic color schemes.
The realization that most of the built environment was constructed around the physical needs of people, and that it's far easier to insert a robot of human shape into it than to rebuild the world around the physicality of better robots. Which raises interesting questions about how digital transformation really works. We prefer fast, easy, inefficient fixes, over building new systems with far greater paybacks.

Little ones

1- Ideas of social status and the colour of your bread go back to Roman times, who knew? A more interesting piece than expected on Bread

2- Drone docks - Most of my time I think the drone delivery is a complete waste of time, and some thing that only existed as a way for Amazon to misdirect the media , but sometimes I see something like this and I'm not so sure I'm right. It’s great engineering, if nothing else.

3- I always find pictures of Clickbait farms, oddly interesting. How much of the digital world is fake, I would suggest far far more than you would ever imagine.

4- For some reason I enjoyed this piece about how badly made sofas are these days. I wonder sometimes if we’re on the edge of an “Arts and crafts” like movement of the 1920’s. Where we get fed up of cheaper but useless, and focus on pride and quality.

5- Its funny cos it’s true, lots of companies are failing to do vital things because people won’t answer the phone. I really wish companies could embrace WhatsApp for business. Meanwhile I find it nuts that the very most important documents in the world are only mailed to us, not emailed. When will institutions wake up to tech thats only been around 25 years.

6- One of the companies impresses me the most is Walmart, they continued deep digital transformation seems to be enormous in scale and rally celebrated, this is one small example of the kind of press releases of real change they announce every single month.

7- Lots of interesting videos of Humanoid robots are found here

8- One of the learnings of Elon taking over Twitter was that he turned out to be far more unhinged than we expected, the other was that maybe companies can be about 20 times smaller and still work OK. Slowly middle managers are vanishing, and perhaps this is why.

9- The High Five is way newer than we think

10- What happens when you use bots to apply for jobs.

Thats it for now.

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