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Google is well aware that traditional search is going to die (or at least go away for the vast majority of use cases). I don't want to search for things if I can just be told the answer.
Here's an example. I was installing new light fixtures in our bedrooms this week and I wanted a refresher on wire colors.
Historically, I would have done a Google Search, which would have then led me to some website or to some lengthy YouTube video that I didn't actually want to watch and that I would have had to scan through to find the salient parts.
But today that feels old school. Instead what I did was take a picture of the ceiling box and ask ChatGPT to just tell me the answers.
Voilà:
It seems almost trite at this point to talk about the virtues of AI. But over the last few months, I have found that — just like that — it has become an integral part of my everyday workflow.
This is true whether I'm playing electrician, planning travel, writing a blog post (and I want an assistant to find me data), or I'm looking to brainstorm around something business related.
I'm sure the same is true for many of you as well.
I never used to listen to very many podcasts. But lately I've started doing it while heading to/from meetings, either in the car or on the train. This past week I listened to a Bankless podcast talking about crypto and AI, and one of the arguments that was made was that it's probably a safe bet to assume that we're going to need dramatically more compute and electricity in the future.
This seems obvious enough. If you recall, there's no such thing as a wealthy, low-energy nation. If you're a wealthy country, you consume a lot of energy. And that's why Build Canada recently argued that we need a kind of energy revolution. By 2050, it's likely Canada will have 2-3x the electricity demand that we have today. So today I thought I would share a few related charts.
Here's electricity production by source across the world. Coal dominates.
Among other things, insurance companies now use aerial photography, combined with AI, to better assess property-level risk. Here's an excerpt from Bloomberg Green:
“Weather and catastrophe losses are running ahead of the ability to manage them, and many insurers are having trouble sustaining their business because they’re not getting the right rates,” said Jay Guin, chief research officer of the extreme event solutions team at Verisk, a catastrophe modeling firm. “AI changes the equation.”
Zurich Insurance Group AG, one of the largest insurers in Europe, uses AI powered risk-modeling software to assess catastrophe risk and often tweaks it for its own purpose.
“If there’s fire hazard like vegetation, overhang or debris in your backyard that shouldn’t be there, we can tell you to lower the risk otherwise we may not be able to underwrite you,” said Ericson Chan, chief information and digital officer of the Swiss company.
What AI allows is a level of granularity that just wasn't possible when humans were the ones who had to do it. Insurers now talk about "continuous remote risk monitoring," meaning they can use AI-powered aerial imagery to constantly check on that risky debris in your backyard.
This feels like quite an improvement for the insurance industry. But when you more accurately price risk, I would imagine that it will lead to more insurers deciding to stay clear of certain risks and certain properties, as has already been the case in places like California.
Looking at renewables more closely, we again see that wind and solar are making a run for it. And if you consider that solar is one of the fastest growing energy sources, it's not inconceivable that it will start to become a more dominant source in the near term. In the US, solar PV projects make up the largest share of new planned generation capacity.
But the US is not winning this race today. Right now it's China. (Chart below sourced from here.) They have the largest cumulative solar capacity, followed by the EU, and then the US. That said, coal still forms a dominant part of China's energy mix, and the country continues to construct coal-fired power plants to meet its short-term energy needs.
It's unfortunate that Canada is not on this list. That needs to change.
Cover photo by Benjamin Jopen on Unsplash
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