YangWang ! Global Competitiveness, Gen AI and an Optimistic 2025 US Case (no, really, optimistic)
The Disjointed Content Leading to a Recipe for Success
(Stick with me, we will fly through this seemingly disjointed list and bring it all together at the end)
The Croton Aqueduct - 1842
Infrastructure Poetics - (it's a real thing)
YangWang - (mind blown - worry meter goes into the red)
US National Competitiveness - Proverbs 16:18
Polarization and Optimism (no, really)
Triple Inflection Point - Gen AI / AI, Jobs, The Election
2025 Imperative and A Better US Future
The Croton Aqueduct
So that's a picture of the Croton Aqueduct, which was finished in 1842. As happens with foundational infrastructure, it created a massive positive wave of secondary impacts, helping NYC become NYC. For hundreds of years, Mexico City, the marvelous city of my birth, was not only the biggest metroplex in the Americas but had by far the most advanced and well-planned infrastructure.
The ripple effects of Croton were huge. There was no aqueduct and no adequate supply of drinking water, or functioning sewage system. Also, due to water problems, there were two cholera epidemics and a huge fire. The second epidemic killed 3% of the population. Think about what that does to growth plans.
All that with a technology that was 2,000 years old (aqueducts). There is also a story of Aaron Burr and financial malfeasance tied to this and an amazing engineering/construction one but both stories are for another time.
Infrastructure Poetics
Infrastructure Poetics is a field I had always known about and never heard of.
I first heard about it from the smart folks at The New School via my wonderful daughter, Esther Beryl Redshaw. It explores how infrastructure—such as roads, bridges, railways, and utilities—carries not only functional importance but also cultural, social, and political significance. It helps you think through the multiple change waves that foundational infrastructure creates.
Croton Aqueduct, the US highway and railroad systems, the internet, and Gen AI/AI are all infrastructure-level causes of massive rippling change.
Yangwang - a word most of you have never heard
BYD is a Chinese battery company that later expanded into EVs and Solar Power. It has $83B in annual revenue and grew 42% last year. It has a 15% market share globally in EVs versus Tesla's market-leading 20%. Tesla sales were down 9% over last year.
EVs are not just cars; they are nodes in an electric power grid and an IP network. They are essentially buckets of computing, storage, networking, and sensors with wheels, and their value will be increasingly related to that.
Think of their 'storage' as digital, physical, and energy, all in a mobile bucket chock full of intelligence, including what it can absorb from its sensors and get from the networks it plugs into. Think differently about that from an infrastructure poetics perspective. These are longer cars. They are tools and solutions.
A month ago, I posted an article about the power grid work (think charging stations) done by China in Addis Ababa (the one in Ethiopia), making it have 600% more EVs and charging points than Phoenix, a city of comparable size/population despite Addis Ababa having 20x less money.
Two weeks ago, I wrote an article about the number two power company in the UK teaming up with BYD to connect EVs with two-way chargers to houses. Thus, your car can power your house, and more importantly, you can optimize your electricity spend and sell into the grid. Yes, BYD is also huge in solar, although England and solar, am not so sure ...
Like Infiniti to Nissan and Lexus to Toyota BYD has launched a luxury/upscale brand.
It is YangWang - that name will need work before it goes big in the US.
This short video shows their SUV and high-end supercar—both in production—and they will shock you. The SUV (hybrid) actually floats and can 'drive' in a deep river for 30 minutes, so off-road capabilities are covered. It also has a built-in karaoke machine with a microphone—what could possibly go wrong? Didn't James Cordon have a bit about karaoke in cars? These cars look brilliantly designed, are bonkers powerful, and are massively cheaper than comparables. The sports car is maybe 3 - 5X cheaper.
Here's someone (a Brit) in this video who is perhaps a bit overly enthusiastic about discussing the two vehicles, but it's worth a quick look.
Ten minute video:
All this EV stuff is important. Remember Infrastructure Poetics.
Think of a USA 10 years from now with limited electrical infrastructure for EVs and 70% of the cars still gas-powered, while in key markets we sell into and compete with, it is 90% EVs. In those markets, new innovative ecosystems are tied to those electrical grid mobile IP-infused nodes. Current US sales trends, customer sentiment, power grid, and charging infrastructure trends fed into a model do not yield great numbers.
Only 1% of cars on the road in the US are EV's. 24% in Norway. 7% of new car sales are EVs in the US, 90% in Norway. The Norwegian government has smart incentives that caused this. Yes, Norway, where 24% of their GDP is from oil and gas.
Changing infrastructure at scale is not something you can do in a year or two. But in not doing it, you never harvest the positive secondary changes spawned from that.
US National Competitiveness - Proverbs 16:18
France, the UK, and China have done an awful lot of 'infrastructure', policy, and smart concrete things over the last 15 years or so to improve their innovation ecosystems.
China with AI, in particular, and France/UK with the startup scene—there's no denying how much they have moved forward. No matter how much you love our current state of innovation in the US, you have to worry about that.
A decade or more ago, a top, legendary tech leader from the US was talking with President Macron about what it would take for them to have a vibrant innovation/startup ecosystem. He said it would take a decade or more and would require a serious multipronged approach. Marcon said 'd'acc', and they went after it. (that's all the French slang I know).
Okay, there's more to that, but essentially, they went after it and did a solid job. They maintained a long view for a long time inside an execution focus, which is a great combo. Today, seven separate, well-funded parts of the French government help their tech innovation ecosystem advance. They coordinate well across them. They do things that have an impact now and have a long view, like Tech Next40/120 or the Tech 2030 program.
They are doing amazing things under the umbrella of public-private partnerships. A few years back, I gave a talk at Paris-based CIGREF, an organization dedicated to helping its members become more digitally savvy and effective. It is purposefully private enterprise and public administration focused and has broad membership from both. It was founded in 1970!
One of my proudest and then feel-like-a-dummy moments was back when Adm. McRaven took over Special Ops Command. He had a multi-day work session on innovation for his directs to kick off that assignment with four or five external folks. I was one of the externals, and it was a super proud moment. The dummy moment was in questioning whether they had actually called the right person. I asked why the most innovative fighting force on earth would want to spend those important first days on innovation. The answer was simply because the enemy was catching up and becoming more innovative...a little voice in my head said, 'Duh'.
Most often, Proverbs 16:18 is misquoted as 'Pride goeth before a fall'. What it actually says is 'Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall'.
Yes, destruction. There are very similar things in half a dozen religions that I know of.
We need more humility and more paranoia about those in our rearview mirror catching up, especially in tech and all things AI.
Every large tech shop I have worked with could have benefited from a bit more humility. I think it is the same story at a national level.
As good as things are, the level of worry about the next decade and national competitiveness is not enough. Worse, in my mind, there should be huge excitement about what we could do in the next 10 years if we really focused on outpacing the rest of the world.
The focus would be on the force multiplier and infrastructure level. I am not talking about aqueducts but the modern analogs of that in talent supply chain, tech infrastructure, power grids, knowledge infrastructure, biotech, materials science, quantum, etc. We should just do a far better job of leveraging national assets and having productive public-private partnerships.
Under that umbrella, better leverage of the university system in the US , especially the state school system, the national labs, DoD, heck, even the USPS. Yes, the USPS is the 40th largest 'company' in the US and could be an innovation launch pad and 'big brother' to twenty differently focused incubators. Existing federal dollars going into urban areas could better leverage innovation.
We need to bet on this like our GDP per capita trend depends on it... because it actually does. Declining GDP per capita over time, especially with increasing polarization, has led to very bad things historically (20+ examples in the past 150 years).
Polarization and Optimism
Big change doesn't just show up any old day. Often, it is on the back of a pivotal dislocation amidst massive polarization.
Dr. Peter T. Coleman. is a Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University and the Director of the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution. Dr. Coleman has extensively studied intractable conflicts and political polarization, mainly how complexity science can be applied to these issues. A key element is that polarization can serve as a catalyst for change.
I am optimistic that global competitive pressures, geopolitical stress, a summer of shockingly destructive climate activity, and the percolating polarization in the US, especially around politics, will be enough to spawn a step change in course.
I am optimistic that post-election, there will be a case for a Kennedy Moonshot/Eisenhower Manhattan Project scale focus on driving modern infrastructure changes, policy/fiscal-focused improvements, and a huge leap forward in public-private partnerships. I am optimistic that this can be anchored in serving and being in global markets AND building a long-term job creation machine for the next decades. It can kick off with a big new jobs infusion. Two things that are at best today are haphazard.
The idea that long-dead Adam Smith's Invisible Hand will compete against intentional work in this domain from France, the UK, and China is just absurd.
I am hopeful that new models for public-private partnerships can be largely funded publicly and left to run privately without external political oversight. This will require smart thinking around selection, tenure, and trust. I would trust the leadership of the Council on Competitiveness in DC to pull together a team and manage a chunk of the US development budget today with no other oversight than their own good consciences. I would trust five of the national lab's current directors plus five execs stepping out of business to do the same over a science acceleration public-private partnership fund. Heck, even throw in a few retired congressmen. There are some salt-of-the-earth people with cabinet-level experience. I know several flag officers whom I would trust to be in any part of this. I even know a few VCs who would be great in this, putting America's real interests first. I am not implying that there are only a few good VCs; I just don't know a lot of them with regard to this stuff.
Triple Inflection Point - Gen AI / AI, Jobs, The Election
Luckily, we are fast approaching a big fork in the road. We have no choice; it is coming.
The first inflection point is Gen AI, and broader AI is on the cusp of changing everything.
In three ways:
It will eliminate work for sure, and that eliminates jobs. Think about healthcare admin, entry-level law school graduate work, the marketing department, product development, radiology work, the boring quotidian bits of scientific research, content creation, graphic design, software anything, customer support, BCG consultants, financial analysis, and HR. If I make those 15% to 30% more efficient then i probably need 15%- 30% less people. Those who say it won't eliminate jobs, just make people more efficient, have never run a P&L. Even worse, if some companies become way more efficient and agile, they then put that into product/service enhancement and price/promotion and kill your company or eat it. When you merge two companies, you really don't need all the other company's accounting, HR, and finance teams. More jobs are gone. This is not happening next Wednesday, but it has started and will accelerate for the next five years.
Foundational breakthroughs and the opportunity to design brand-new business models create jobs. In times of tech upheaval, some of the biggest winners are those innovating at the module level. For breakthroughs, just look at what Alpha Fold can do for disease understanding, drug discovery, and broader biotech.The same thing is happening with AI in materials science, which will have massive ripple effects. There are twenty other domains where AI is a massive can of gas on the innovation/breakthrough fire.
If approached properly, this tech will revolutionize capability creation for humans to the capacity needed for these jobs. We must have a dispassionate look at skills capacity, talent supply chain, and our competitive future.
The second inflection point is the need now for better incomes/acquisitive power in the US population. The trends on poverty, especially child poverty, are abominable in a country as rich as the USA, but any emotional/social linkage aside, it is really bad for the economy and the future we are talking about. Inequities in education, opportunity, possible lifetime earning, healthcare, and food supply are all things our competitors really hope we keep really screwed up so they can out-compete us in the global market. Having those as structural outcomes of your economy without doing anything about is the soccer equivalent of kicking the ball in your own net, on purpose, just dumber than dirt.
There will be new jobs and new challenges, but we must retool and restructure the talent supply chain to accommodate them. We can do that quickly. I have seen it done in a fast cycle way in an amazing microcosm in northern Mexico.
The third inflection point is the election, and again, I am optimistic that out of the massive polarization, there will be a constructive outcome enabling a power structure that can weather the storm of change pragmatically and take advantage of the times, our head start, and all the marvelous assets we have. This doesn't mean automatically everyone is fine, and everyone sees eye to eye. It means a new mandate can be given, and if those in power do a good job and have broadly distributed positive, inclusive impact, then we do eventually all end up in a better place. Humans can't take conflictive polarized environments for extended periods. Very few can maintain that pitch and fervor. Many just grow really tired of it and wish it would go away. We don't see it clearly because the ones that revel it in are loud and seem more than they are, on both sides. They care about jobs/income/costs to live, the kitchen table and what's on it, and the opportunities for them and the next generation. That is what they really want to worry about.
2025 Imperative and A Better US Future
So, there is a very positive path forward, but it will require a significant course correction and the making of some bigger bets in better ways. It will require new ways of thinking, teaming, leveraging, and executing.
Luckily, we have three stark inflection points right in front of us that may push us in the right direction.
I am optimistic. America does exactly this kind of thing; it's part of the brand.
p.s. Also, we will hopefully soon have smarter social media that lets you monetize yourself rather than the platform monetize you. The new platform wins because it actually values your time versus intentionally tricking your brain into overuse. It will be architected to not create increased depression, loneliness, suicide, eating disorders, misogyny, and that hate thing. With GenAI/AI, it's really not that hard technologically. The hard part is leadership embracing real positive human impact, kicking butt in the market, and making money being complementary, not either/or. But you monetizing you versus others monetizing you will be a global trend with increased intelligence in systems. The credit card and the advertising industries will get hurt by that.
