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"Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists."

— Kevin Kelly

Friday vibe-shifting charts

2024 will perhaps come to be remembered for its dramatic shift in vibes — and investing has been at the center of it.

After years of fretting over the downside risk of pandemics, inflation and climate change, the focus shifted to the upside risk of AI, economic growth and technological breakthroughs.

This isn’t about politics because the vibes were shifting long before the election on Nov. 5.

The first to articulate the change may have been the venture capitalist, blogger and podcaster Santiago Pliego: "The Vibe Shift is an electric time," he wrote way back in February. "Things hidden before the foundation of the world are being rediscovered, and things thought to last until the end of time are crumbling at hypersonic speeds."

If that’s too abstract, think instead of the renewed enthusiasm for high-risk investing that’s been so evident in stocks, crypto, Big Tech, AI and new tech startups. 

This is a time "fraught with opportunities for new, disruptive technology," Pliego wrote. "As we enter what could very well be the most volatile political and cultural period in recent American history, we’re also seeing some of the boldest bets of the last few decades."

That proved to be prescient, because how better to sum up 2024 than "volatile politics" and "bold investment bets"?

How optimistic you feel about those bold bets is probably a function of how you feel about the outcome of the year’s volatile politics.

But it shouldn’t be, because mixing politics and investing is a recipe for disaster.

Politics is driven by pessimism (telling everyone how terrible things are) while investing is driven by optimism (imagining how good things might be).

In investing, at least, the optimists usually win.

So let’s end this vibe-shift year on an optimistic note by reviewing some of the good things happening now and some of the bets that even better things will be happening in the near future.

We live in an age of abundance: 

Humanprogress.org reports that — adjusted for wages, US consumer goods and services have been getting cheaper for decades: The same hour of work that bought a US blue-collar worker one basket of 75 finished goods in 1971 bought 5.19 of the same in 2024. Even housing is 9.1% cheaper now than it was in 1971, if measured in hours of labor. Most happily for this time of year, an hour of today’s wages also buys 707% more toys than an hour of 1971 wages did.

Henry Adams is as wrong as Thomas Malthus:

Henry Adams predicted that per capita US energy consumption would rise in an exponential curve of 2.5% per year, forever. He was right for about 50 years, but actual energy use has decisively broken the trend line known as the "Henry Adam’s Curve," proving that economies can grow while consuming less energy.

It will get even better:

Just this morning we learned that Commonwealth Fusion Systems (a startup spun out of MIT in 2018) plans to build the world’s first "grid-scale" nuclear fusion power plant. If all goes to plan, the plant will be delivering 400 megawatts of electricity to the Virginia power grid by the early 2030s — enough to power 150,000 homes with zero carbon emissions.

The robots are coming…to clean up our mess:

You’ll be unsurprised to hear that we put an estimated 33 billion pounds of plastic trash into the oceans every year — but you may not have heard that robots are starting to clean it up: The marine-tech startup Clearbot has developed autonomous, solar-powered boats that clean up after us by hoovering plastic waste out of our waterways. 

Robots to drive us around:

Amazon’s zoox takes autonomous vehicles to the next with bi-directional driving (there’s no front to the car), no steering wheel or driver’s seat, passenger seats that face each other, new LiDar tech for safer and more precise driving, and, best of all, an appropriately futuristic design. You may have seen them on the road in San Francisco or Las Vegas this year and should be seeing them all over next year.

Re-wilding the ocean:

Another marine-tech start-up, Ulysses Ecosystem Engineering, has a mission to "rewild the ocean and remove gigatons of carbon" by using autonomous robots to restore seagrass on the ocean floor. Seagrass is 35x better at carbon capture than rainforests. (Note: There's a patch of seagrass in the Mediterranean that's thought to be 200,000 years old and is probably the oldest living organism on Earth.)

Making it rain:

In May, the "weather modification" startup Rainmaker raised $6.2 million from investors to develop cloud-seeding drones that will make it rain over farms, watersheds and other ecosystems suffering from drought. With luck, they’ll make it rain for their investors, too. 

Manifest destiny:

Several other startups are similarly working on technologies that would bring water to arid regions like the American West. "Terraforming" the west could create 30 new US cities capable of supporting 100 million people. (And give everyone in Miami somewhere to move to.)

Thinking small:

Several startups aim to commercialize the rapidly advancing field of molecular nanotechnology — "atomically precise machinery" that can re-arrange atoms to create virtually any object, including spacecrafts that are cheap enough to enable widespread private space travel (in a few decades). Some believe atomic-level manufacturing will have an even bigger impact on the world than AI — so just wait until that investment bubble gets going.

We live in a golden age of scientific discovery:

A white paper from Google DeepMind explains that AI represents a "discontinuous leap" in scientific capabilities that radically compresses the time and cost required to make significant discoveries. Deepmind’s AlphaFold, for example, is an AI tool that’s reduced the cost of predicting protein patterns (pictured) from $100,000 per protein to $0 per protein. The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database offers free, instant access to 200 million predicted protein structures.

Things happen fast:

This chart shows how little time it takes for new technologies to become ubiquitous — proof that today’s astounding luxuries often turn into tomorrow’s ho-hum commodities. 

If history is any guide, then the future will be much better than the present. 

Happy holidays, optimistic readers.

(And thank you for reading this year!)

— Byron Gilliam

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