by Lucie Greene
Silicon Systems
Silicon Valley companies and individuals are starting to think systemically, like governments—except usually without the practical considerations of funding, existing infrastructure, and bureaucracy that hamper local authorities. Uber is imagining the future of transport as flying cars in a metropolis. Hyperloop One is redrawing the planet with trains transported on vacuum tubes and maglev (magnetic levitation) tracks that move at the speed of sound.
In so doing they are constructing a new vision of energy, human bodies, and newly designed space enclaves. Rethinking infrastructures. But reimagining modes of transport for the first time with a futuristic lens, the way that trains, planes, buses, and bicycles (evolved and iterated over the years) operate, in an attempt to add something bold and new. How much of this is really plausible?
Which is not to say that things do not need fixing. And one thing that this group shares is a proactive vision for the future that, in some cases, the government (and governmental systems) has lost, locked into a four-to-eight-year elective leadership cycle. Where the focus from transport to energy is on incremental change, Silicon Valley is looking to space to solve the energy crisis and is evolving twenty- to fifty-year plans. Where innovation in transport, the sexier kind, perhaps stopped with Concordes, Silicon Valley is attempting to transform this with sci-fi visions. As for its bid to solve aging and disease, time will tell. While many governments still cling to fossil fuels, Silicon Valley is pioneering to make sustainable energy affordable.
Which is in many ways exciting. But it’s a future increasingly being led by commercial interests. It’s new big ethical decisions being made by individuals free from constraint. It’s new frontiers being defined by Silicon Valley leaders, and all their inherent biases. Schools, trains, health-care systems, life itself.
It’s important to consider how this future will manifest—it is being built, and decided, faster than ever and in a very real way may come to replace the rapidly diminishing state. Just because they got to the future first, should they be the ones to decide what it looks like?
Forces of Tech
“We’re living in a time where moonshots can happen faster than at any other time in human history. And the evolution of the engineering skills, the entrepreneurial skills, and the access to resources and capital is in place where an idea like Hyperloop can go from concept to breaking ground and moving atoms within twenty-four months,” says Pishevar, Hyperloop One’s controversial former executive chairman and former managing director of Sherpa Capital.
Hyperloop One has recently rebranded as Virgin Hyperloop One after joining forces with fellow visionary entrepreneur Richard Branson. Pishevar resigned from his role at Hyperloop amid sexual assault and misconduct allegations that emerged in October 2017 (which he continues to deny). Branson took over as a board member, attracting $50 million more investment. Suffice it to say, when Pishevar and I met in late 2016, such troubles were far off in the distance. #MeToo was not yet a global movement. And he was all bombast, bravado, and confidence.
Pishevar at his peak was perhaps one of Silicon Valley’s biggest moonshot evangelicals. But his mantle of world-changing ambition continues to be taken up by other enthusiastic leaders. Meanwhile, the vision presented by Virgin Hyperloop One, and other Silicon Valley ventures from supersonic flights to driverless cars, seems to be making progress.
Sherpa Capital’s sleek offices sit a few floors above Market Street in San Francisco. In 2016, Sherpa Capital raised $470 million for two new funds, Sherpa Everest and Sherpa Ventures II. The company is behind Uber and Munchery, among others. In person Pishevar, like Musk, has the tendency to make statements such as “bend space and time” and “transport is the new broadband” with a degree of ease normally applied to giving street directions or ordering a beer.
A private company landing on the moon is just “proof that the next set of superpowers are going to be entrepreneurs, not nation-states,” agrees Naveen Jain, exuberant Seattle-based entrepreneur and founder of Moon Express, a space mining venture, and well-being artificial-intelligence company Viome, among other ventures. Jain is not one for understatements. This is a speech he’s become accustomed to making at events, in part, waving two fingers at what is usually a buttoned-up corporate audience. “So far only three countries have landed on the moon, and all three have been superpowers. Now we’ve become the fourth superpower. It doesn’t matter what the industry is. Entrepreneurs around the world are going to eclipse nation-states, and the things that used to be in the domain of nation-states are going to be accomplished by entrepreneurs.”
Jain is another walking soundbite, beloved for statements such as “It’s easy to predict the future when you’re building it yourself.” He often refers to an entrepreneur-built future where disease is “optional” or “elective.” (Jain may be based in Seattle but has a long history in Silicon Valley, and embodies its ethos.)
Jain even believes Silicon Valley and its like-minded entrepreneurs could contribute to world peace: “Think about all the things we fight over. Water. Energy,” he explains. “All we have to do is make that accessible, affordable, and democratize and demonetize that. Once you do that, once things are in abundance, they lose value and people stop fighting over them. For example, we don’t fight over oxygen, because we believe it’s in abundance. The only time we fight over things is because we believe they are scarce, and scarcity is what creates value.” And this is where Silicon Valley and commercial forces are so powerful, he believes. “Cellphones started out as things only for the rich and famous and the Wall Streeters. And now the poorest person in Africa has a cellphone.”
On the subject of innovation, the government is not without its defenders. Outspoken economist Mariana Mazzucato, again, has frequently talked of the need to revise the damaging image of government as a sluggish Leviathan. She has pointed out, in fact, that like the internet itself, many revolutionary innovations in pharmaceuticals and the smartphone industry (from GPS to Siri to touchscreens) were government-funded. In her 2013 TED talk, she warned against underestimating the important role of government in innovation (particularly risky long-term innovation) and of the danger of fetishizing Silicon Valley’s transformative abilities. In other words: we’ve been giving Silicon Valley too much credit. She also said the juxtaposition “has huge implications even with this whole notion that we have of where, how, and why we should be cutting back on spending.”
But she’s pushing against a narrative in pop culture that seems only more drawn to Silicon Valley prowess. As well as a rapidly changing landscape in which Big Tech’s limitless millions for innovation are dwarfing that of the state.
This is partly due to an evolution within the Valley itself, Pishevar says, explaining that more private funding is now available to tackle big projects: “If you looked at the generation before—that’s Tesla and SpaceX—Elon had to personally finance and almost bankrupt himself and borrow money to pay rent to be able to save those companies,” he says. “Those companies went from 2002 to 2014–15 in terms of the full arc of execution. Whereas if Elon had started SpaceX, or even Tesla, now, he wouldn’t have had to finance it himself completely and would have been able to move things a lot faster than what was experienced. We’re seeing this generational change in the expansion of the speed at which you can execute really big ideas, and that’s exciting.”
And the thing is, many of these feats might now actually be achieved. Virgin Hyperloop One, at least visibly, seems to be rapidly coming together at a test site in Nevada. Its PR machine is in full swing—not a day goes by without a new proposal being announced to transform commutes from the Middle East to Europe. And these moonshots are being regarded with more reverence than before, too. But for all the headlines, Hyperloop has yet to truly materialize. At CES 2018, the annual Las Vegas consumer electronics show, a much-vaunted app simulating Hyperloop’s booking experience was launched.
Shernaz Daver is a Silicon Valley veteran,
chief marketing officer at Udacity, and advisor to Google Ventures, the venture-capital arm of Alphabet, Inc., which focuses on transforming life science, health care, artificial intelligence, robotics, transportation, cybersecurity, and agriculture. Daver believes technology and DNA sequencing will now be able to prolong the quality of life in later years. And this has all become possible only recently. “It’s been amazing to watch.”
Space is a fast-growing frontier in private enterprise. SpaceX grabs headlines, but Blue Origin is also winning contracts from NASA. Beyond headlines about colonizing Mars there are plans to mine asteroids for minerals and to commercialize space travel with reusable spaceships. Sending satellites into space for a variety of applications is a similarly growing market.
VR expert and NASA collaborator Jacquelyn Ford Morie explains that “there’s a huge network of companies: The Space Experience Economy, the Space Tourism Society, Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos’s company—they’re all connected. They all share stuff but they’re in competition too . . . Everybody is trying to raise the awareness and the speed at which these things are going to happen. All of that gives us a critical mass where things are going to happen. I think we’ll be on Mars in ten years.”
That’s just the beginning, she says. The Space Tourism society is looking at a multi-tiered, fully fledged space-travel industry, from Earth-based experiences and low-orbit excursions to actually constructing hotels and destinations in orbit—on the Moon and on Mars.
“There’s a theme park called Mars World which will be a jumping-off point for that,” says Ford Morie. “That’s going to be constructed west of Las Vegas. They’ve got their first $75 million and they need about five times that to do this entire thing.” It will, she says, not only be informative for the general public but raise awareness and excitement about space travel in a way that hasn’t been done before. “The space-tourism efforts are much broader,” she explains. “It’s not just sending someone up there for $40,000.”
Aside from tourism, the commercial applications are big. “Asteroid mining is going to be huge. It is going to help us with the fact that we’re digging up all the rarest metals at an alarming rate here on Earth. I believe we’ll be sending our garbage out there, too.”
In all of this, SpaceX in particular seems to have captured the imagination of many. Says Kosta Grammatis, an award-winning engineer and scientist whose first job was at SpaceX: “I graduated at twenty and wanted to be a rocket scientist. I wrote to SpaceX so many times about an internship. Everyone that works for Elon Musk works all hours—they believe in a bigger mission. It’s a joke often made, but it’s a bit like a cult. They’re all funny, smart guys. They remind me of what the young staff at NASA must have been like in the Apollo years—the average age was twenty-five to twenty-seven. They’re obsessed with getting to space and that’s why they work like dogs.”
And much of it is starting to become all the more real in the public mind, especially following Musk’s much-Instagrammed test over Los Angeles in late 2017, a bright-firing orb that on first sight many took to be a UFO.
Grammatis says Musk is impressively focused. “He was on a total mission not just to change the world but to bend nature.” Musk, says Grammatis, “takes too much credit for space travel and what he’s achieved, when one considers the government were big investors. But he’s had the ability to pick and back winners, so in essence he’s a king-maker in some ways . . . that, itself, takes vision.”
Bezos, like many others in Silicon Valley, sees space as the answer to environmental issues. We need to protect the Earth, he said at the 2016 Code Conference, one of the many tech summit shindigs populated by Silicon Valley execs, this one staged by tech news site Recode, “And the way we will is by going out into space. Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years . . . all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet.”
Which raises another potential meta what-if question. Forget Earthly geopolitics. How will the universe world order be organized if there’s a space resource grab and a new wave of Silicon Valley energy power magnates vying for asteroid territory? Does jurisdiction even exist in space? What happens when the Silicon States sets their eyes on the stars?
The Way We Move
Violet light bathes the sidewalks of Eighth Avenue at 6 a.m. as Manhattan stirs awake. Neon coffee shop, BBQ, and diner signs are flickering to life. A hunched army of commuters exit taxis, slamming doors with laptop bags forcefully lop-siding their gaits as they trudge to the illuminated escalator, descending into the heart of Penn Station. Is there anything worse than Penn Station at dawn? A line starts outside Dunkin’ Donuts as workers hustle to assemble chemical-laden carbs and warm caffeine stimulants. Penn Station’s gourmet options, much like its interior, are stuck in a time warp. Climb aboard the Acela express to Washington, DC and customers are delivered at high speed to the grander Union Station, via bridge and swamps, for the immodest fee of around $200. The unfortunates who cannot afford this joy are faced with the bus—lurching along the freeway for several hours longer, pulling into random parking lots along the way. To be dropped at unsavory points often at a time barely resembling the scheduled arrival at their destination.
America doesn’t have the exclusive on awful travel experiences. London’s District Line for a long time delivered some of my most favorite horror stories—an hour of being forcibly Gecko-shaped against condensation-covered windows, rattling from West London to groovy Shoreditch for around ten dollars per day—compare that to New York’s $2.75/ride subway. Trying to get onto the train at Clapham Junction, or the Northern Line in Clapham, the south London commuter belt during rush hour, is like a human game show. People actually jump against walls of human flesh, attempting to fit within crevices between bodies to make it onto coaches. And that seems tame by Tokyo standards where people are willingly shoved onto crowded trains as a matter of custom.
And that’s just the things on rails.
Somewhere along the way transportation got pretty awful. There was some innovation. Trains got faster. Planes got charging cords and individual entertainment stations. And in the Nordics, people luxuriate in clean, fast, efficident train systems. But the modes themselves largely stayed the same. (OK, if you travel on a Middle Eastern airline you can have a private four-poster bed with a hot tub, butler, and personal gym. But the rudimentaries are still there. It will still take fifteen hours to get from Dubai to New York.) Nothing, in other words, is reinventing what transport is.
An elaborately tiered system of domestic air travel has developed in the U.S., commodifying all aspects of comfort, space, or preferable location, and of course this is not unique to America alone. (Oxygen could be a five-dollar offering of the future. Meantime, anything other than the back-row aisle seat, toilet-line central, has an additional price tag.) That’s if you can get to the airport. In many cities you’ll need to pony up for a taxi or a bus ticket.
Cars, then, remain one of the easiest ways to get about, but they can be costly once gas, insurance, parking, and repairs are factored in—not forgetting the expenses and impracticalities of owning a car in urban centers. New alternatives to owning one are emerging. On weekday mornings, young millennials can be seen lining the streets of Manhattan, smartphone in hand, picking up ride-share services such as UberPool and Via. Uber has tested a $100 unlimited monthly subscription offer in Manhattan. It has become a credible commuting service for those who can afford it. (Interesting to consider what the displaced revenue may be doing to the beleaguered subway, which is reportedly planning to increase fares from $2.75 to $3 per ride. That’s happening alongside delays, headline-grabbing accidents, and breakdowns. It was estimated by the New York Times that the New York subway system needs a $100 billion investment to be repaired and rebuilt, ensuring its survival.)
The Pew Research Center released some interesting demographic data on Uber. It found that 29 percent of college graduates have used ride-hailing services and just 13 percent are unfamiliar with th
e term. Among those who have not attended college, just 6 percent have used these services and over half (51 percent) have never heard of them. Overall, 26 percent of Americans with an annual household income of $75,000 or more have used these services. For those living in households with an annual income of less than $30,000, just 10 percent have used these services and 49 percent are not familiar with them. The same study found that while prominent in urban centers, services like Uber are still relatively latent nationwide. Yet in areas where they are concentrated, their influence is powerful.
In other words, Uber may feel like a replacement to public transport in cities, but it is still used, and skewed, heavily toward young, educated, affluent consumers.
At SXSW 2015, Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist at Benchmark and another investor in Uber, spoke about the untapped market for transport in the U.S. “For eighty years, we’ve grossly underestimated the demand for transportation services. And we limited it at a city government level,” he said. He added that in cities such as San Francisco, use of Uber was five times higher than that of the existing taxi fleet. “That’s new demand,” he said, estimating that the full size of the market could be as much as ten times that of taxis. “At first it was just an alternative to taxis . . . But it’s started to compete with other things.”