The electric-vehicle utopia, running on fumes

From: POLITICO's Digital Future Daily - Wednesday Oct 18,2023 08:23 pm
Presented by CTIA – The Wireless Association: How the next wave of technology is upending the global economy and its power structures
Oct 18, 2023 View in browser
 
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By Derek Robertson

Presented by CTIA – The Wireless Association

Traffic on the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles in 2018.

Traffic on the Hollywood Freeway. | Damian Dovarganes/AP

The aphorism that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed,” comes up a lot in this newsletter — and right now it might be most apt in the world of cars.

Some American towns are filled with ever-larger, pedestrian-endangering gas-powered pickup trucks, while San Franciscans watch eerie, nearly silent robot-piloted vehicles navigate their streets like a scene from “Total Recall” or “Blade Runner.”

America’s electric vehicle infrastructure is a big part of this story.

For swaths of the nation, electric vehicles are already part of the present, with a charger at every gas station and grocery co-op parking spot. But for many cities and towns, they’re still very much a part of the future — a future they don’t feel particularly well-prepared to step boldly into.

The Biden administration is making a hard push for EV adoption. But as POLITICO’s Liz Crampton reports today, a lot of America’s mayors don’t feel like they’re ready to go along with the program.

“Our residents are used to a gas station on literally every major intersection,” Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, a Republican modestly supportive of the EV push, told Liz. “If everybody in the city tomorrow has an EV, we would have some serious infrastructure challenges.”

Liz reports that America’s mayors are saying, in effect: Please distribute the future more evenly to us.

The rise in EVs is usually seen as a story about car buyers and technology: As electric cars improve as a product and charging becomes more accessible, people are switching away from gas-engine vehicles. But missing from that story are the resources that cities and towns still need to build that sprawling charging infrastructure.

Of the 50 mayors polled by POLITICO, 45 of them “strongly or somewhat support” the EV push, while only three oppose it. (One expressed neutrality and one declined to participate.) But less than half said their city is prepared to handle it, with 14 saying they’re “a little prepared” and 12 saying they’re “not at all prepared.”

“EV adoption poses a puzzle,” Liz writes. “Consumers won’t feel comfortable buying an EV until they have adequate access to public chargers to avoid getting stranded on the road. But cities don’t currently have enough money to incentivize wide scale adoption by constructing ubiquitous charging stations throughout downtowns, in neighborhoods and along highways.”

If this is starting to sound a little bit like the explanations for why people don’t want to use the metaverse yet because there’s nothing to do there, or how ChatGPT hasn’t taken over the world yet because we aren’t quite sure how to use it (see the next item in this newsletter), that’s not a coincidence.

New technologies almost uniformly go through what’s called the “Gartner hype cycle,” where an early wave of astonishment and enthusiasm crests on the rocky shores of reality.

That cycle is even more potent with something like America’s automobile infrastructure, built over a century spanning Fordism and mass production, Robert Moses’ innovations in auto-induced sprawl, and now the dawning realization that America’s car addiction could prove environmentally fatal. The EV push is meant to reverse that last trend, but it’s up against a century of infrastructure meant to accommodate the opposite.

This is largely a technological and economic limitation, rather than one of a lack of will — just look at the major concessions General Motors recently made to striking auto workers in the interest of continuing to develop their own electric vehicle program. Liz notes that costs for installing quick-charging stations that provide roughly 100 to 200 miles of range per 30 minutes of charging can come in at $40,000 to $175,000 per port. So most cities have been using federal funding to install less expensive ports that cost in the low thousands, but only give drivers about 25 miles of range per hour. Fast and cheap-to-build charging just doesn’t exist yet.

The Biden administration is giving $700 million to cities for alternative fueling solutions, but applying for and winning those grants is no walk in the park. That means that even a post-EV-revolution American auto landscape might look pretty uneven. The mayors surveyed are largely still struggling to deal with the most basic of transportation problems, with three in five saying their most needed transportation investments are in pothole and road repairs.

On one hand, Liz reports, mayors are optimistic that the EV industry can be an economic driver: “Building up the infrastructure and being prepared for it gets people more excited,” the Republican mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, told her.

But on the other, even the most enthusiastic, technocratic local administrators still face the grind of partisan politics and industry pushback. Roughly 30 states charge extra fees for drivers to register their EVs, meant to replace gasoline taxes but according to EV advocates, are overly punitive compared to what those taxes would otherwise be. The future, in some instances, might arrive first simply where there’s the least political incentive to obstruct it.

 

A message from CTIA – The Wireless Association:

China is pushing countries to adopt their 5G spectrum vision and build a global market that favors their tech companies. To counter China’s ambitions, we need our own compelling vision for U.S. spectrum leadership over the next decade, and a clear commitment to make more 5G spectrum available. For our economic competitiveness, our national security, and our 5G leadership, America needs a bold new National Spectrum Strategy. Learn more.

 
the case, or lack thereof, for llms

Reports that large language models will take our jobs and end humanity are greatly exaggerated, at least according to one venture capitalist.

In a recent essay, Benedict Evans explores the possibility that as world-changing as the hype makes AI seem, we are still several iterations away from LLMs becoming meaningful everyday tools. He focuses on the tech’s “product problem,” pointing out that the highly variant and unpredictable nature of its output means there isn’t yet one key reliable use case for it.

“This can feel like Battleship as a user interface — you plug stuff into the prompt and wait to find out what you hit,” Evans writes. “Once you start talking about ‘prompt engineering’, you’re describing command lines — you’re describing what came before [graphical user interfaces], not what comes after them.”

He concludes that ChatGPT currently resembles nothing more (or less) than the early personal computer, with a few elements of it extremely powerful for savvy users but ultimately mystifying to the average person. That might change as ambitious developers use it as a platform, but right now it leaves their world-changing potential decidedly in the future.

 

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senate crypto moves

WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 22: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) questions executives of the nation's largest banks during a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill September 22, 2022 in Washington, DC. The committee held the hearing for annual oversight of the nation's largest banks. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). | Getty Images

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) just sent a new letter to the Biden administration urging it to put the clamps on money laundering in crypto amid the war between Israel and Hamas.

Warren is joined by 28 other Senators and 76 representatives, adding a sense of urgency to her push, as Politico’s Morning Money newsletter reported today.

“Congress and this administration must take strong action to thoroughly address crypto illicit finance risks before it can be used to finance another tragedy,” Warren and the other lawmakers wrote in the letter addressed to White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Treasury undersecretary Brian Nelson.

A Treasury Department spokesperson told Morning Money, “While we do not preview potential sanctions actions, the Treasury Department is committed to continuing to impose costs on Hamas and their funders.” POLITICO’s Eleanor Muller reported yesterday for Pro s that Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)’s Senate Banking Committee could consider rolling up Warren’s proposed legislation on the subject with a similar bill from Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.).

 

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Tweet of the Day

you look back on your life, you think, at least i answered all my slack messages within a few minutes, then you die contentendly

THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS
  • Anthropic is training a chatbot with rules suggested by… actual users.
  • Amazon is overhauling its factories with AI and robotics to make deliveries even faster.
  • Driverless cars are finally getting on the road in meaningful numbers.
  • DeepMind’s climate lead touts the company’s anti-climate-change capabilities.
  • Marc Andreessen talks about reclaiming tech’s moral high ground.

Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger (bschreckinger@politico.com); Derek Robertson (drobertson@politico.com); Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@politico.com); Steve Heuser (sheuser@politico.com); Nate Robson (nrobson@politico.com) and Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@politico.com).

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A message from CTIA – The Wireless Association:

America’s spectrum policy is stuck in neutral. The FCC’s spectrum auction authority has not been renewed, there is no pipeline of new spectrum for 5G, and China is poised to dominate global spectrum discussions, pushing for 15X more 5G spectrum than the U.S. America cannot afford to fall behind and become a spectrum island. The Biden Administration’s forthcoming National Spectrum Strategy is a unique and important opportunity to recommit ourselves to a bold vision for global spectrum leadership, secure our 5G leadership today and long-term leadership of the industries and innovations of the future. For our economic competitiveness and our national security, we need a National Spectrum Strategy that is committed to allocating 1500 MHz of new mid-band spectrum for 5G, and that reaffirms the critical role that NTIA and the FCC play in leading the nation’s spectrum policy. Learn more.

 
 

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