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2020 has been a year that we have much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving holiday when it comes to technology.
Remember those technology doldrums 5 years ago, when the most exciting technology news of 2016 was an iPad the size of airline tray table? Those were grim tech times indeed.
The good tech news of 2020 owes itself to 3 big developments - technologies that to borrow Hemingway’s phrasing that seemed to develop gradually, then suddenly.
1. The Big Battery Breakthrough:
How many people traveling to Thanksgiving in 2015 foresaw the big conceptual breakthrough in battery power storage and charging speed that was to come in 2018? How many would have believed that these battery breakthroughs in the lab would be commercialized as early as 2020?
Our 2015 selves were immobilized by the belief that improvements in batteries would be gradual. Processing power and costs may improve exponentially, but battery technology was destined for only incremental improvements.
How wrong we all were. In 2020 we finally have laptops and phones and watches that, thanks to both new batteries and wireless charging, never run out of juice. We remember, but don’t miss, the frantic hunt for outlets at conferences and airports.
The biggest changes that the batteries of 2020 have enabled have nothing to do with handheld tech. Rather, the real change has been in the rapid decline of non-renewable energy.
How many of us driving to Thanksgiving dinner in 2015 did so in cars powered by electricity? Today, every new car is either full electric or a combustion/battery hybrid. We can now charge our cars in the time it used to take to fill a gas tank. Battery range is expanding rapidly, with all signs pointing to an electric vehicle fleet by 2030.
The other big change brought on by the battery breakthroughs has been in building and home solar. Every building on my campus now has solar panels on the roof, and batteries in the basement. Most of our homes have this set up as well. We are still attached to the grid, but now most grid power comes from the building and house solar arrays. Fast charging and long last industrial and home batteries, charged by solar panels, have eliminated most of the need for natural gas and coal fired power plants.
2. Abundant Mobile Bandwidth:
I have a distinct memory of a dispiriting discussion about the inadequacy of the available cellular data plans during our family’s 2015 Thanksgiving gathering. The expense and paucity of cellular data in 2015 was particularly worrisome for the parents of adolescents, as mobile was their preferred way of watching video.
It would be a mistake to minimize the privacy data breach that was one outcome of the 2018 Amazon-Verizon merger, but you have to admit that there has been a big upside. Mobile data, once scarce, is now abundant. Amazon after the merger (the Verizon brand was quickly dropped, as precisely no one missed the Verizon brand), was easily able to subsidize cheap and ubiquitous mobile data with the rapid upswing in mobile-commerce that almost free data enabled.
We now need to be reminded of a time when we made a distinction between WiFi and cellular on our devices. Today, internet-enabled device (which is every device) switches seamlessly and invisibly between whatever signal is most robust. Global bandwidth has become so ubiquitous that it is now invisible. Mobile broadband, once an expensive luxury, has become too cheap to meter.
3. The Mobile Micropayment Revolution:
There were probably signs at Thanksgiving 2015 that the most important financial story of the next 5 years would be born in Africa. Sadly, few of us eating our Thanksgiving turkey in 2015 were able to read those signs. If we had, we might have gotten rich.
The mobile micropayment revolution of course started in Kenya and Tanzania with M-Pesa, the mobile-phone payment system started in 2007 by Vodafone for Safaricom and Vodacom. What none of us predicted was that in 2016 Alphabet would buy Vodaphone, and in 2017 that M-Pesa would be built into the core of the Android mobile OS. By 2018 M-Pesa was the new mobile micropayment standard, migrating to every mobile OS and accepted by every retailer and financial institution.
The last piece of the M-Pesa rise to payment dominance was the decoupling of M-Pesa from local currencies. The new M-Pesa mobile OS’s made the use of legacy currencies unnecessary for all but the largest of transactions, as M-Pesa’s became universally accepted as instruments of exchange, pricing, and accounting.
Our 2015 Thanksgiving selves were probably paying for some things with our phones. (Starbucks comes to mind). Today, the plastic credit card and the paper bill is anachronistic as a gas station. We buy goods and services seamlessly and quickly with our phones, watches, and implants.
My favorite outcome of the mobile micropayment revolution is that open online education is finally sustainable. Did any of us predict in 2015 that the future of money would not only come from Africa, but that by 2020 most postsecondary education payments would come in the future of M-Pesa’s from the people of India and Africa?
What technologies are you most grateful for this 2020 Thanksgiving?
