Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Steve LeVine

No One Is Prepared to Stop the Robot Onslaught. So What Will We Do When It Arrives?

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 14:01:08 -0400

You’ve heard about the robots—how they are on their way to vaporize the jobs of tens of thousands of bankers and brokers on Wall Street, in the City of London and in trading hubs around the world. How they are bent on inflicting similar mayhem in law and accounting firms, and in computer-programming pools.

How, if you wear a white collar, male or female, watch your back.

And how all that’s just for starters. Advances in supercomputers and the understanding of neural networks are combining to create a revolution in robotics, and companies eager for more profitability and cheaper production are ruthlessly grabbing the new technology to automate rote jobs.

Blue-collar workers—forget about it. The robots will kill off the positions of half a million oil-rig hands, up to half the industry’s workforce around the world, along with hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees, Amazon-ized by automated forklifts and other machines.

Then there are the drivers—the navigators of taxis and long-haul trucks, who make up some 17 percent of the adult U.S. work force, adding up to about 7 million people, to be replaced by robot cars if competition from Uber’s roster of of 1.5 million drivers doesn’t put them out of business first.

Fast-food workers—the hard-working teens, first-generation immigrants and return-to-work moms who are the bedrock of burger joints everywhere—are also on the firing line as ordering kiosks begin to take the place of human cashiers.

Estimates of how many jobs in all the robots will wipe out, and when, vary wildly. Economists say somewhere between 9 percent and 47 percent of workers in the West could lose jobs to automation over the next two or so decades. They forecast that as much as 40 percent of the Fortune 500—the companies as a whole—could vanish entirely within a single decade, driven out by algorithms. In China and India, meanwhile, they predict the disappearance of between 25 percent and 69 percent of jobs.

Industries have weathered massive disruptions before. Through two centuries of technological revolutions, positions eliminated in one sector have been replaced by even more jobs in others. Perhaps this time will be the same; or perhaps technology will overwhelm the capacity for ingenious humans to invent sufficient new businesses to employ the population.

Perhaps in a lot of cases, not entire jobs, but large percentages of the duties involved will be diverted to robot labor. Either way, it seems clear that change is coming. How quickly it unfolds is another matter. In the case of 19th-century British Industrial Age workers, historians note it took six decades for laborers to resettle and start to win higher wages once factory automation took hold. How long it will take workers to adjust in the age of mass-market robots is not known, but as in the early Industrial Age, they seem likely to face a drawn-out and agonizing transition.

A vocal minority says that, if we are prepared to accept the robots unchecked, we had better think again—not only because of the consequences, but because of the preemptive actions they could inspire.

“Do you think that people will just sit and let this happen?” asks Wendell Wallach, author of "A Dangerous Master" and a senior adviser at the Hastings Center, a New York-based research institute. “Truckers will shut down U.S. highways. You could see this in Europe, too. If societies don’t get ahead of this, we could get some real nastiness.”

Only, the world has looked at the potential for a robot onslaught, and decided not to resist. In interviews, American technologists and a long list of historians, ethicists and philosophers focused on science and technology told me in a seemingly unified voice they had yet to come across a serious proposal for an outright ban on job-stealing robots, and if they had, they would have thought it a bad idea, undoable, or outright absurd. A prohibition on robots “will impoverish everyone,” said MIT’s Andrew McAfee, co-author of "The Second Industrial Revolution."

But wait. In much of the world, we negotiate climate and nuclear arms deals; we regulate the spread of disease and firearms; we take diplomatic or even military action against dictators; and build defenses against cyberattacks by rogue nations. In all these cases, we are seeking a rational de-escalation of a perceived existential threat. Do the robots and their makers—in Silicon Valley, Japan and China—place our way of life in less jeopardy? And if they are as dangerous, are they truly unstoppable, akin to a force of nature?

Given the political havoc already wreaked in part by working-class discontent, can we do nothing to stop or even slow what seems a mechanized approximation of an army of marching Huns?

In February, the European Union did consider rules that, while not stopping the robots, would have the force of discouraging automation by compelling companies to pay compensating taxes and social security payments for jobs their robots wipe out. But EU parliamentary members balked even at this, adopting much milder language that exacts no retribution on the robots or the companies that use them. A pivotal dynamic in the vote seemed to be a reluctance on the part of the deputies to expose themselves to possible ridicule as Luddites.

The tableau of our times is anxiety over lost control over our lives and societies. But if you can imagine that sensation magnified twice, thrice, four times, you are starting to get at the potential danger in the new age of robots. That does not necessarily mean we must surrender. People are contemplating remediating actions short of stopping the robots outright. Many of the most interesting involve taking control of our own future. That is what the rest of this story is about.

This Is Not a Drill

In 1952, Kurt Vonnegut published his first novel, "Player Piano," in which he imagined a weird, heavily automated future in which the United States was led by President Jonathan Lynn, the blow-dried former star of a 3-hour TV show. At the apex of this hard-drinking, socially divided society, a tiny privileged elite of managers and workers possess skills that—for the time being—maintain their superiority to the machines.

But the unlucky multitudes whom technology has already replaced have just two occupational choices: the army or public works. In exchange for this labor, they receive a government salary, funded by a robot tax equal to what a company would have paid the worker who has been replaced.

People still have to pass the time, and the idle and purposeless masses generally do so by getting soused, drifting, gaming, carousing, divorcing, and, when it’s all too much, committing suicide. The men seem prepared for a fight at the drop of a hat. But at the very beginning, what they did not do was give up their jobs easily. When the soldiers returned from a world war to find machines had replaced them at work, they erupted in riots that had to be put down by force.

One of the main grievances in Vonnegut’s telling is the passing of outsized risks to take for outsized reward. A character grouses, “Used to be there was a lot of damn fool things a dumb bastard could do to be great, but the machines fixed that.” He goes on:

You know, used to be you could go to sea on a big clipper ship or a fishing ship and be a big hero in a storm. Or maybe you could be a pioneer and go out west and lead the people and make trails and chase away Indians and all that. … Now the machines take all the dangerous jobs.

The terrifying forecasts around robots and jobs have broadened the wave of popularity for dystopian literature. Along with George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis and Joseph Roth, interest has been rapt in Martin Ford’s "The Rise of the Robots" and "The Second Machine Age," by MIT’s McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, the director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.

It is because people want clues as to what the ominous set of circumstances will bring. Until now, the economies of the world have always created a sufficient number of new jobs to sop up workers displaced when technology has wiped out demand for a specific skill. It has been this way since the start of the technology boom in the early 19th century, the time of the original Luddites. A number of labor economists say there is no reason to think this time will be different: yes, self-driving cars will kill jobs in Detroit and Stuttgart, but new, currently unknown industries will arise to employ the displaced, these theorists say.

But a considerable body of scholarship is challenging that orthodoxy. The reason, says an opposing group of thinkers, is that, unlike other periods of technological upheaval, the current displacement is happening not in a single industry, but across economies; there will simply be too many people, in too many different industries, to soak up everyone. Eight and a half decades after he first posited a theory called technological unemployment, John Maynard Keynes may finally be right that new technology can be so powerful that you end up with wide swaths of the permanently unemployed.

With his portrait of the coming automation of massive classes of jobs, Ford paints a picture eerily similar to Keynes’ and Vonnegut’s. Data are not kept on how many jobs have been lost to robots and automation, but it’s generally thought to be as many as 5 million since the 1990s in the US alone (see chart below). In the future, according to a much-discussed study published by the US National Bureau of Economic Research, workers in the West whose jobs are eliminated by industrial robots—about three jobs per robot, the study estimates—may take a long time to find new employment, and they may never do so. The study, by researchers Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Boston University’s Pascual Restrepo, describes how, even when jobs are created, they are often not in the same places where they are lost, leaving behind the blighted cities and regions, with their opioid epidemics and other social crises, that feature so significantly in today’s political upheaval.

In response, you could hypothetically outright stop robots, by shutting down factories and halting robot imports from China and Japan, for example. But then “you close down what has been our main productivity growth,” said Wallach. That makes it a nonstarter. Yet, if you don’t do enough to curb the excesses of their impact, he noted, “you get productivity growth, but not equitably in life.”

There is no way to know in advance who will prove to be right—the techno-optimists arguing that, don’t you worry, the economy will keep churning out sufficient jobs; or the pessimists who say we are heading to a global employment crisis. Not generally a gloomy theorist, Wallach says even if you aren’t sure, the stakes are sufficiently high to play it safe.

“Most of us just have unease about machines taking over human destiny,” he deadpanned. Policymakers, he says, need to begin making a plan.

Meanwhile, Many People are Going to Figure This Out

All last year, Donald Trump and his surrogates beat a drum about the hollowing out of the U.S. middle class and the jobs that once supported it. In their telling, it was illegal immigration and catastrophic trade deals that caused the damage. In power, the new president’s administration has hewed to the same position. In March, Trump’s Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, said the problem of job displacement by robots is “not even on our radar screen” as it will only come “in 50 to 100 more years.”

But the Trump team’s claims were spurious. The U.S. is manufacturing much more stuff with many fewer workers (see chart below), mainly because of automation. As for Mnuchin’s remarks, they made him the subject of immediate, brutal public snickering. Larry Summers, who held Mnuchin’s job in the Clinton administration, compared his successor’s views on robots with “what global climate change denial is to atmospheric science or what creationism is to biology.”

A study released in March by consulting firm PwC estimated 38 percent of American jobs would be lost to robotics and artificial intelligence by the early 2030s; Germany would lose 35 percent, Japan 21 percent and the U.K. 30 percent. Newly created jobs will take some of the sting off these numbers, but the forecasts offer more confirmation about the general expectation of what is to come. That is, massive unemployment could be here in just a decade and a half, something worthy of a spot on Mnuchin’s radar screen now.

People on the trigger end of this coming jobs debacle have delivered perhaps the starkest warnings. Tesla’s Elon Musk and Google’s Eric Schmidt, whose companies are leading the auto industry into the self-driving age, have been ringing the alarm to get ready for the coming disruption.

In January, Schmidt said at first, the robot age will bring a job surge in factories, for example to develop self-driving vehicles. Robots then will begin to replace workers in larger and larger numbers, and create a potential crisis if not handled correctly.

“So we might as well assume it’s going to happen and make it work well,” Schmidt said. A month later, Musk chimed in, saying, “It’s going to be a massive social challenge.”

Americans appear not to have yet absorbed the potential for substantial trouble ahead. Or, to be precise, they know robots are bringing trouble, but they think they will hurt other people, while leaving them unscathed, according to a set of recent polls. Two-thirds of Americans think robots will have taken over much of the work currently done by humans within a half-century—but their own jobs will continue to exist in present form, according to a Pew poll published in March 2016.

That survey was taken prior to Brexit and the solidification of the Trump campaign. A second Pew poll taken in May and June last year—just ahead of the Brexit vote and Trump’s acceptance of the Republican nomination campaigns—resulted in similar findings: 77 percent said trade “hurts American workers,” and only half said the same about automation; 42 percent said automation helps American workers.

Sooner or later these numbers will correct, probably right about the time when a critical mass of workers observes robots are taking their jobs. And that is when the seething anger and resentment on display in Trump crowds during the campaign could pivot toward a different target from NAFTA and illegal immigrants.

At an artificial-intelligence conference in Asilomar, California, in January, MIT’s McAfee put up a slide. It said, “If the current trends continue, the people will rise up before the machines do.”

Serious people, including Musk and Stephen Hawking, are among those alarmed about a future peril involving artificial intelligence that, like Hal, Skynet, or both, obtains superhuman sentience and turns against the human race. In an interview with Maureen Dowd, entrepreneur (and Trump supporter) Peter Thiel belittled such thinking as “on the order of magnitude of extraterrestrials landing.”

But here is why things could get dicey if and when robots start eliminating whole classes of employment: Most people actually like to work, and to be paid for it. Most of us derive satisfaction—dignity—through our paid labors, even if the actual job may be routine. There is a long history of this. Brian Balogh, a professor at the University of Virginia and co-host of the Backstory podcast, sums it up neatly: “We feel proud of our work,” he says.

And that is why it’s best to be careful if you are messing with jobs, and the dignity and pride wrapped into them.

Policymakers Haven’t Begun to Grapple with the Robots

Andrew Feenberg, who teaches the philosophy of technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, says however you apportion the fault, there is a problem, and governments have put themselves in a fix.

“Doing trade deals and robotics without consideration of the people displaced is insane,” he says. “The backlash is understandable.”

So how does the world prevent a gigantic, destabilizing uprising should—if the pessimists are right—entire classes of work vanish? When, as Wallach pictures it,”governments lose their legitimacy and you have people saying they aren’t going to take this anymore”?

The EU attempted to take an aggressive stand but ultimately capitulated to the philosophy we must not get in the way of the march of technology. Meanwhile, the U.S., as of now, is doing nothing, and as far as I can tell is not even seriously discussing the coming onslaught.

But outside government, the matter of robots and jobs is among the most-discussed problems of our era. The answer raised by a lot of people, especially in Silicon Valley, is the “universal basic income”—the payment of a fixed sum to every adult, regardless of income or wealth. At once, people would not have to worry about funding their basic needs.

So frequent is this solution suggested it has acquired its own acronym—UBI—which if you haven’t seen already, you will soon. It’s not a new idea, but something suggested in different forms going back way before robots, at least to the 16th century, according to Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, the authors of "Basic Income," a new book on the subject. The philosophy behind the idea is every person on the planet deserves some fruits of the society in which he or she lives by mere dint of living there.

The idea has its flaws. Among them is how to pay for it. Second is whether, given the profound anti-tax strain running through the U.S. and other countries, it is politically realistic. Charles Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, suggested last year it is both fundable and realistic: As he proposes, the government would pay a $13,000-a-year basic income to all adults and actually save money (in the U.S., anyway) by doing away with existing government welfare and retirement programs including Social Security and Medicare. Many others in many countries have proposed a similar approach, differing mostly in the amount of the annual payment.

But would the basic income actually solve the problem?

MIT’s McAfee doesn’t think so. He is fond of quoting a scene from "Candide," the Voltaire classic, in which an old farmer remarks his family’s work “preserves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.” In McAfee’s view, the basic income takes care of need, but leaves much room for misery and mischief in the persistence of the other two dynamics. Vonnegut, if he were alive today, would no doubt agree.

Working with what we can call the "Candide" conundrum, Wallach attempts a tweak he calls “guaranteed income plus.” Adults would receive a basic income and be expected to “do something for that,” he says. “People would create their own jobs. Or government would create new forms of work. Something to make life meaningful and constructive to society.”

Bill Gates is one of the only major figures proposing how to slow the march of the robots. Echoing Vonnegut, Gates has attracted much attention by suggesting a tax on robots. The way his thinking goes is that, just as governments tax workers, they would levy a substantial tax on the robots that replace them. The proceeds would fund needed services, such as care for the growing numbers of elderly people.

Larry Summers has taken a swipe against this idea, too, which he says will stifle innovation. But Gates’ idea has resonance, not because of its economic soundness or humanitarian features, but because it attempts to take control back from technology. Gates is saying in effect, technology is not a law of physics; we are in control. As Feenberg notes, “Societies do have choices with respect to technology.”

One Answer: Affirmative Action for Humans

After a conversation with Mathew Burrows, who formerly produced the foundational global trends reports at the National Intelligence Council, I understood we may be looking too hard for a novel solution. Over lunch, Burrows, who now sits at the Atlantic Council in Washington, proposed an idea closely resembling how fledgling petro-states attempt to avoid the resource curse.

In what’s known as the “local content requirement,” foreign oil companies working in, say, Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan are required to employ a certain number of local workers, and to patronize local businesses and factories for their parts and services. This way, a petro-state isn’t receiving just cash payments, but mandated investment in its people and their businesses.

With robots, Burrows agrees with Gates’ tax idea, but also advocates a “human content requirement.” “You could have a rule that factories have to have 50 percent humans,” he says. “In other words, affirmative action for humans.”

On its face, the idea rings pathetic. Is this our lot after the millennia that led us to all this? As mere flotsam, kept around because we have to be?

Albert Borgmann, a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana, suggests we stop worrying so much about the robots. Let them proceed with their plot to conquer manufacturing, while we humans turn back to our own roots—to communities, and to local, labor-intensive businesses such as breweries and crafts, and services like yoga and counseling. That sounds quaint and also quite limiting. How many potters, for instance, can a city realistically support? But Borgmann makes the case that such businesses can support a large labor force, and begin to attend to the health issues connected with the loss of jobs.

“Tech had a terrible impact on people’s health, attention and focus, and now threatens employment,” Borgmann says. “The reply should not be to stop it but to support a much saner kind of work. This would renew the fabric of society. It re-establishes the relationship between producers and consumers. And it runs counter to the disillusion of reality through screens.”

We are not going to stop the robots. The main reason is the tragedy of the commons: Unless every major industrial country agrees to forego the vast productivity gains to come from automation, then none of us can. Which leaves us culling the best of the solutions at hand, among them Gates’ tax on robots, Burrows’ affirmative action for humans and Borgmann’s back to the basics.

All would tilt the balance of power away from technology, and respond to the same to the question: Do we want robotization to happen unfettered, or do we want to be in charge of shaping our own future? The answer is simple. All that is left is to do it.

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Trump’s Treasury Secretary Says One of the Top Threats to US Jobs Is “Not Even on Our Radar Screen”

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 12:38:49 -0400

Automation is one of the biggest concerns of labor economists these days. But US president Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary thinks the threat that robots will replace whole classes of white- and blue-collar jobs is too remote to even think about.

“I’m not worried at all” about job-stealing robots in the nearer term, Steven Mnuchin said today in an interview with Axios; that time is “not even on our radar screen…[it’s] 50-100 more years away.” Rather, he said, tasks to be carried out by robots in our lifetime will be of a non-threatening, mundane character—such as folding towels—that will free up humans for more important work. “In fact I’m optimistic.”

Mnuchin’s remarks seem important in signaling the administration’s agenda and priorities. Trump has blamed globalization for the loss of American industrial jobs and promised to bring them back by creating incentives for companies to manufacture in the US. In reality, labor economists think automation is already responsible for a lot of the job decline. A study by Ball University in 2015 estimated that if US industry were producing in 2010 at the same level of productivity as it did in 2000, the US would have needed 20.9 million manufacturing workers; instead it had only 12.1 million (pdf, p. 4).

Predictions of the future impact of automation vary widely. The forecasts range from an Oxford University study in 2013 saying that 47% of American jobs are susceptible to automation to a European report that the number is just 9%. Today, a report from PwC predicted that 30% of UK jobs, 35% of German jobs, and 38% of US jobs were at high risk of automation by the 2030s. The Trump administration however suggests this is not worth worrying about.

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US Plans to Retaliate Against Russia’s Cyber-Hacking Campaign With a Hack that Putin Is Sure to Understand

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 12:13:12 -0400

After three months of accusations that Russia is seeking to influence the U.S. presidential election with a cyber-hacking campaign, the U.S. is planning to strike back and send “a message” to Moscow with “the greatest impact.”

In an Oct. 16 interview on the NBC show Meet the Press, Vice President Joe Biden said the U.S. retaliation against Russian cyberattacks would be covert. The United States’ two main weapons against such cyber intrusions are sanctions and a reciprocal cyberattack, but sanctions are never covert and of dubious impact. So it seems likely from Biden’s remarks the U.S. is planning a demonstration of cyberspace might.

One likely tactic in a U.S. cyberattack on Russia would be to threaten or actually release detailed accounts of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s wealth, intelligence that would have been gathered by the National Security Agency. Such a strategy could rattle Putin by potentially affecting his domestic popularity without damaging any infrastructure, and thus avert a dangerous escalation of hostilities.

“We’re sending a message. We have the capacity to do it. And the message—he’ll know it,” Biden said, referring to Putin. “And it will be at the time of our choosing. And under the circumstances that have the greatest impact.”

Biden’s remarks come a week after James Clapper, the director of U.S. intelligence, formally accused Russia of attempting to influence the election.

The U.S. began to notice massive Russian cyber intrusions into government computers in early 2016 or before. They began telling reporters in July, after the release of 20,000 hacked emails from Democratic Party officials and consultants by WikiLeaks. Russian intelligence agencies—working through cyber hackers known as APT28 and Fancy Bear—gained access to the emails, in addition to others in the State Department, the White House and other agencies.

The break-ins have continued through the presidential campaign. There also appears to be a channel from the hackers to WikiLeaks, whose founder Julian Assange has openly sought to help defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook Can Probably Defy the US Government All He Wants and Not Go to Jail

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 14:12:16 -0500

Does Apple CEO Tim Cook risk going to jail by opposing the U.S. government request for help hacking into the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone?

Cook has said he’ll pursue the legal challenge as far as the U.S. Supreme Court. That sounds courageous, and his stand patriotic. But what he hasn’t said is whether he’s prepared to carry his defiance as far as other Americans who also have taken on the law—journalists, for example, who have gone to jail in cases involving the disclosure of sources and other proprietary material to judges.

It’s in fact not clear yet whether Cook could eventually be subject to jail for refusing a court order: Some experts say he is. If they are right, a judge could jail Cook for contempt as the case wends its way through the federal courts, that is if his lawyers couldn’t successfully argue against any penalties until the case reached its natural conclusion in the courts.

But Stephen Vladeck, an expert on national security law at American University, told Quartz that it’s Apple as a corporation, and not Cook himself, that is potentially liable to a contempt charge. Lee Tien, a privacy lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees that Cook himself doesn’t appear to be at risk, but that, in the event that Apple were charged with contempt, it could be subject to stiff fines. Tien notes that Yahoo has said that, in 2014, the U.S. government threatened the company with $250,000-a-day fines in a surveillance case.

Whether Cook is at risk of jail or not, some observers argue that it would be a colossal PR coup for him and Apple if he does end up behind bars for a few days on behalf of privacy. Something short of that—unless the government improbably folds its hand—might seem anti-climactic at best.

Apple did not respond to an email requesting comment.

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Two Big Labs Step Back From the Most Promising Next-Generation Battery

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Fri, 30 May 2014 13:10:08 -0400

In a sign of more gloom in the struggle for a better battery, two major US labs have quietly downgraded research on a technology until now widely believed to be the most promising path to a competitive electric car.

IBM and the US-funded Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) have ratcheted down or outright abandoned their work on the lithium-air battery, a concept in which oxygen would react with lithium to create electricity.

Over the last few years, lithium-air has generated much enthusiasm because of the prospect that a competitively priced electric car using such a battery could travel 500 miles on a single charge, and thus finally put battery-driven vehicles on equivalent ground with conventional models.

Most current electrics, using lithium-ion batteries, travel no more than 100 miles on a charge; those that go further, like the Tesla S, are expensive. Lithium-ion technology uses a cathode generally built of metal oxides including cobalt, which is costly, and also results in limited range.

Lithium-air, conversely, uses cheap carbon as a cathode–the pivotal flow of oxygen through the cathode gives the battery its name–and takes you further. But it has remained theoretical because of its challenges. Among them: the other electrode in such batteries—the anode—is pure lithium metal, which provides a lot of energy but also ignites when exposed to water, carbon dioxide, or other contaminants. What is more, the lithium-oxygen itself can turn into unwanted lithium carbonate. Hence, the battery would need screening technology to keep both electrodes pristine, adding weight and cost and obviating the advantages of going to all that trouble.

Yet in 2009, IBM announced plans to tackle lithium-air, which it called the Battery 500 Project. Using its Blue Gene supercomputer and collaborations with partners including federally funded national labs and commercial players, IBM set out to make lithium-air a reality. The move put the company instantly on a bold, leading course in what—if successful—promised to be a highly lucrative, gigantic industry. While IBM proceeded, the US Energy Department three years later awarded $120 million to establish JCESR at Argonne National Laboratory, outside Chicago. The objective was to put the US in the leading position for next-generation batteries after lithium-ion. Among JCESR’s initial projects: lithium-air.

But recently, the labs had a new think

In a little-remarked-upon article in March, Nature magazine reported that IBM’s Winfried Wilcke, director of the Battery 500 Project, had a “change of heart” about lithium-air and had turned his favor to a technology featuring sodium. In an electric car, a sodium-air battery, he said, stood a better chance of meeting the economics needed to compete with conventional cars. It was a dramatic move, with the most bullish player in lithium-air—Wilcke himself—calling it a day.

Wilcke did not respond to emails. An IBM spokesman told Quartz that the Nature report is accurate but said that the company is now working on both lithium-air and sodium.

About the same time, JCESR dropped its lithium-air project entirely. Like IBM, JCESR did not announce the decision publicly. Kevin Gallagher, a JCESR manager, said it concluded that the challenges were too overwhelming to resolve any time soon. “The penalty of using gaseous reactions overwhelmed any advantage,” he told Quartz.

Some are still in the game

Lithium-air is not being abandoned everywhere. At Argonne, Michael Thackeray is directing work on a novel hybrid battery combining lithium-ion and lithium-air. The result is the potential for a battery with specific density of 500 watt hours per kilogram, two-and-a-half times greater than today’s best commercial lithium-ion cell.

Peter Bruce, a leading lithium-air researcher at the University of St. Andrews, said battery scientists should work both on technologies with a high certainty of success—such as better lithium-ion—and riskier ideas like lithium-air. “So far we haven’t seen any show stoppers for lithium-air, but equally I don’t know whether it will work and be viable,” he said. “I don’t believe anyone does at this stage.”

Bruce is right. But battery scientists seem much less prepared to spend time finding out.

Reprinted with permission from Quartz. The original story can be found here.

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Battery Maker's Fall Fuels Criticism of Federal Energy Investments

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 08:29:12 -0500

At the end of November 2012, Atul Kapadia and Sujeet Kumar hosted the staff of their startup company for a holiday lunch of Mexican food at a Palo Alto, California restaurant. For days, the pair—the CEO and CTO, respectively, of a lithium-ion battery company called Envia Systems—had awaited an email from General Motors.

It was to contain a deal rare to an industry newcomer—a contract worth tens and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars to provide the electric central nervous system for two showcase GM models including the next-generation Chevy Volt. Untested small suppliers almost never get in the door of the world’s major automakers, which regard them as too risky to rely on. But GM was won over by what seemed to be the world’s best lithium-ion battery—a cell that, if all went well, would catapult the company to a commanding position in the industry with a middle-class electric car that traveled 200 miles on a single charge and rid motorists of the “range anxiety” that disquieted them about such vehicles. GM would have the jump on the high-end Tesla S, the only other major model with that range but one that would cost much more. For Envia, the contract could lead to an IPO that would make both men rich.

But the talking had gone on so long and with such uncertainty that neither man had even told Envia’s staff scientists of the impending deal. Even if they felt more confident, they could not have said anything, since such news could affect GM’s share price. Word had leaked around the Envia lab anyway. An edginess hung over the lunch.

Kapadia’s cell phone rang as he drove back from the holiday party. It was General Motors: Senior management had finally signed the documents. They were on their way by email. Kapadia turned off the phone but tried not to let on.

Back at Envia, situated across the bay in the industrial city of Newark, company employees gathered in the conference room for a regularly scheduled office meeting. Kapadia stood before some papers. He said it was the company’s first licensing deal, one involving the biggest and most prestigious possible customer of all—General Motors.

“Just to let you know this is not my achievement. This is your achievement,” the CEO said. “And I am signing on behalf of you.” The room erupted as Kapadia bent over and initialed the papers. Envia’s three-dozen scientists and business staff sounded like 200. They cat-called and screamed. The administrative staff jumped up and down.

A year later, the deal is in tatters, GM has accused Envia of misrepresenting its technology, and a document suggests why the carmaker may be right. The startup’s unraveling is a blow for GM as it transitions to a new regime next month under CEO-designate Mary Barra, setting back its ambitions in the potentially gigantic future electric-car industry. It also risks making Envia, the recipient of several small federal grants, another punching bag for critics of US government funding of advanced battery companies.

Envia meanwhile is mired in two angry civil suits and the two executives are at daggers drawn, with Kapadia accusing Kumar of fraud and intellectual property theft, and Kumar dismissing the allegations as the rants of an ousted executive who performed badly. Envia “was an illusion,” alleges Michael Pak, the plaintiff in an IP theft suit against Kumar. “While the illusion is there, you can sell the company and run away. But illusion doesn’t last forever.”

The Great Battery Race

Four years ago, the US and China set in motion a race for dominance of electric vehicles. At the cusp of two crises—the collapse of Detroit and of the global financial industry—lithium-ion batteries and electric cars seemed among the likeliest chances for driving the kind of fast economic growth that the high-tech and semiconductor industries had led in the past. President Barack Obama declared that the US would have one million electric vehicles on the road in 2015, and China vowed to accomplish the same. Both envisioned besting Japan, which had established an early lead with Toyota’s Prius, along with consumer-product juggernaut South Korea.

Central to Obama’s calculus was the creation of a lithium-ion battery manufacturing industry, an aim that Congress primed with $2 billion of direct stimulus grants and an additional $400 million for Arpa-E, a funding unit for frontier innovation within the Department of Energy. First invented in 1800, batteries are an old technology, but the financial stakes should anyone crack their confounding physics have resulted in waves of unusually motivated scientists, industrial leaders and politicians. A breakthrough in batteries could not only allow cars to go farther, but smartphones and emerging wearable devices such as smart watches to last longer, and solar and wind generators to better store the power they produce.

Read the full story on Quartz.

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Another Dreamliner Is Forced to Land

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 14:38:07 -0400

A Japan Airlines 787 Dreamliner on the way to Tokyo has landed in Boston, returning to its originating airport after a reported fault. An early report suggests a problem with the plane’s fuel pump could be to blame. But whatever the case, Boeing’s flagship airliner is starting to look star-crossed. And its investors are anxious: Boeing’s share price fell in after-hours trading on the report that the JAL plane was returning to Boston.

Peter Wilson of Boston’s WBZ tweeted that a JAL 787 landed safely at Boston’s Logan Airport just after 6 pm EST. Few other details are known. Wilson included this photograph.

But it is potentially the latest problem in an unusual spate of incidents involving the Dreamliner. On July 12, an Ethiopian Airlines 787 caught fire at London’s Heathrow Airport, forcing the closing of all its runways. In an announcement today, British authorities said a small lithium ion battery had possibly been the reason for the fire.

How To Keep Up With Events in Egypt in Real Time Without Getting Swamped

Gideon Lichfield and Steve LeVine, Quartz — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 16:42:34 -0400

If you want to keep up with events in Egypt as they unfold but not be overwhelmed, here’s our carefully selected list of the best sources.

Live-blog: The Guardian’s, which updates automatically without your needing to refresh the browser.

Live TV feed from Tahrir Square: Reuters‘, which you can shrink down to a small window on your desktop.

TV feed with commentary: Al-Jazeera English, which isn’t exclusively focused on Egypt but is good when it is.

Read the full story at Quartz.

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Dreamliners May Fly Again, but Not From Tokyo to Silicon Valley

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:46:47 -0400

Someone has leaked the intention of US authorities to lift a no-flight ban on Boeing 787 Dreamliners, the jet grounded in January after fire and smoke erupted from its lithium-ion battery packs. Bloomberg, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times (last three paywall) are all quoting unnamed sources as saying the announcement could come as early as today.

But Boeing may lose one of the key original selling points of its twin-engine plane—its ability to fly between nearly any two points on the globe using less fuel than four-engine planes. The Seattle Times, the hometown newspaper to Boeing headquarters, reports that the planes may not be able to fly from Tokyo to Silicon Valley, a major route, for instance, or Tokyo to Boston. And there may be no direct flights from Auckland to Los Angeles. Boeing did not respond immediately to an email seeking comment.

For China, a new set of energy pipelines will reduce its hated reliance on the US Navy

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:55:59 -0500

Infrastructure is a basic part of China’s economic-led foreign policy—around the world, it builds roads and buildings as part of deals to mine, drill and build energy pipelines. But in neighboring Myanmar, it is taking on the unaccustomed role of attempting to end a war—the country’s 17-year conflict with Kachin rebels on the Chinese border.

The reason is economic—China wants peace along the route of strategic new(paywall) oil and natural gas pipelines that will connect the Bay of Bengal with southwest China. A new 495-mile-long natural gas pipeline is to be finished on May 30. Next year, it hopes to finish a twin, 440,000-barrel-a-day oil pipeline. The lines will shorten China’s oil and gas supply routes by some 750 miles, and erode the centrality of the Strait of Malacca, allowing Beijing to reduce its hated reliance on US military help in keeping its oil supply flowing. The US Navy–the world’s largest ocean-going force–protects global sea lanes, including the Malacca Strait, through which some 80% of China’s oil supply flows.