Money can't buy everything

BEYOND THE HEADLINES
Apple Car

Sometimes it’s easy to fall into the belief that with enough money you can kind of do what you want. Well, last week Apple, who have enough money to make most countries look poor, proved that this isn’t the case.

What happened?

Back in the days when Steve Jobs ran Apple, there were rumours they would build a car. While not the natural next step of most technology companies, the factors that go into making a great car did seem to align well with what Apple do incredibly well: great design, super robust products and optimising difficult manufacturing processes.

The idea, however, was put on the back-burner as the company focused on the launches of the iPad and services - which were both enormous successes.

Around 2014 the idea came back into the frame and this time they were serious. Launch: Project Titan. They were going to build the iCar Apple Car.

10 years on

Fast-forward 10 years and it would be fair to say the project has been a complete failure. They have spent billions of dollars (they won’t actually disclose how much) and thousands of staff hours to only shutter the project.

Why does this matter

Well, if you want to read more about the specifics go here. But I think there are 2 key takeaways here:

1. Making cars is unbelievably difficult even with boatloads of money

The average phone has about 700 different components. The average car meanwhile has about 30,000 different pieces - roughly 40x. Not only this, but if somebody drops a phone and it breaks it’s annoying but it doesn’t really matter all that much. If a car breaks while travelling 70mph and hurts/kills the people inside, it not only has a huge humanitarian cost but could cost the manufacturer billions. A company that makes airbags for most of the world’s cars went bankrupt after a failure - read here.

2. It’s hard to turn a supertanker

Not only is building a ‘normal’ car incredibly hard but to compete now and in the future, autonomous driving has to be at the centre of what you do. This adds a whole additional layer of complexity.

If you think about what a car/computer would need to know to be fully autonomous it is almost endless…..is that person about to step onto the road? Is that car about to merge lanes? Should I drive slower as the sun is low and in everyone’s eyes?

To a human, the answers to these questions come naturally after experiencing these situations and your neural net (brain) learns patterns over years and years. But getting an artificial neural net (AI) to do this is crazy difficult.

Watch the first minute of this video for a laugh on how many times Elon has said we were on the precipice of getting self-driving cars:

My point here is that the companies that achieve these incredibly difficult things are not usually companies that are governed by the bureaucracy and weight of being a trillion-dollar company, but instead are normally the start-ups with nothing to lose.

Sure, Apple probably doesn’t care that much if it lost a few billion dollars, but it’s not a great look and just goes to show money doesn’t solve everything!

SPACE
Mice in space

My understanding of space travel is pretty much based on Dune, Star Trek, and Star Wars. Get a bit of spice, enter hyperspace by using the hyperdrive and Bob’s your uncle: Space travel. 

It turns out space travel is horrendously complicated. Humans have evolved for 100 million years to live on Earth, so changing our environment, to say… one with microgravity, like in space, means things begin to go wrong. 

Our bone density begins to deteriorate much faster. On Earth, you lose bone density at about 1% a year, but in space it's about 1% a month. If we want to make humans interplanetary, we need to figure out a way to get us to another planet without looking like the Ant people from Men in Black. 

The answer is fake gravity. How do we create fake gravity? Is there a switch? Or a gravity machine? Nope - we spin really fast.

Researchers from NASA, Harvard, and the Japanese Space Agency put mice in small centrifuges whilst in Orbit to simulate different amounts of gravity. It turns out that some gravity basically prevents all bone deterioration which is a huge discovery.

When humans embark on the 7-month journey to Mars, we might be able to get them there fit and healthy. Read more here.

POLITICS
Bye Bye Tik Tok 

So it turns out capitalism in China doesn’t work like it does in the West, and this is not a good thing for us. China has embarked on a 40-year journey of welcoming  “free” market dynamics and the invisible hand into its economy. This has resulted in a crescendo of new companies that have taken the world by storm. 

One of those is ByteDance - the parent company of TikTok. However, over the past 5 years as relationships with China became more fractious, the Chinese Communist Party has had a back door into its biggest businesses.

ByteDance collects data on millions of Americans and it has become increasingly clear that ByteDance couldn’t guarantee that this data was not making its way into the hands of malignant actors, despite many assurances. 

As a result, a bipartisan bill has been put to US legislators that gives TikTok 165 days to divest from its Chinese owners or face a ban on all US app stores. The app is already banned on all government devices.  As Chinese and US companies disentangle themselves, the cost of conflict decreases as they have less to lose, and given the US’s desire for onshore chip manufacturing, the history of symbiosis between these nations has begun to immolate further.

Watch below to see TikTok CEO try and answer some tough questions from US policymakers recently:

Some great questions exist around, where else does Chinese surveillance exist (AI research, biotechnology etc)? What other Chinese-affiliated organisations are US legislators going to go after next? And most importantly, how does China respond?

CHART OF THE WEEK

The US and EU were growing at about the same rate until 2011, but since then there’s been a pretty massive divergence….