Kai Gondlach

Death to private transport! Long live private transport!

The recently ignited mobility debate about "free public transport" or "free public transport" makes trend researchers take turns smiling and shaking their heads. Starting from different political camps, the topic pops up in a regular ity and then disappears very quickly into the abysses of the supposed specialist blogs and in the association meetings of interest groups, which reduce the traffic mix to 100 % rail, 100% wheel, but definitely 0% cars want to discuss. In this article, I would like to outline how the idea will probably become a reality, look completely different and leave all established players perplexed.

As is often the case, politically motivated trench warfare rarely goes around people's real needs. Each stakeholder pursues his own, profit-maximizing agenda without subjecting his own positions and the discussion process to a reality check after the first half kick-off. Of course, the always identical discourse spolicies first of all attract the doubters from the reserve, who then nip a constructive solution in the bud. At this point, I do not want to point the finger at certain players, everyone is in turn. And this is not only my humble opinion, but has justified Not least Niklas Luhmann in his system theory by the fact that the systemic constraints of individual subsystems undermine individual motives (greatly shortened – dear sociologists, please do not take it badly).

Mobility in Germany

In the German transport sector in particular, we are also faced with an excessively complex web of effective laws at all levels, interdependence between administrative bodies and private companies, which is excessively complex for international comparisons. And, thanks to pluralistic society, the interest groups are of course also talking a word. In the end, however, the party wins anyway with the thicker seat meat, the largest proximity of the lobby office to the Reichstag building and, of course, the one that can mobilize most of the no-sayers.

What a pity! In fact, all the parties involved know that the current system is not particularly modern, but far from agile or agile. adaptable for what awaits us in the coming years. The incremental logic of gradually correcting shortcomings without the courage to even loudly express far-reaching progress denies an entire nation access to contemporary mobility. Since I do not want to write a book at this point, the controversy on politics and society ends right now and I focus on the topic of the introduction: free public transport.

In 2013, I was in the process of writing my master's thesis in futures research with a focus on transport. My supervisors were a specialist in research and teaching as well as a maker in the bus division of one of the largest German mobility companies. The theme in the text: "Disruptive development of 'free public transport': utopia or plausible future?". As a result, I was concerned with comparing the real existing concepts, the analysis of expert discussions on feasibility and the essence of the conditions of success. Spoiler: With a well-thought-out financing model based on a citizen's fee and user monetization, the system would work profitably in the shortest possible time. Not all the experts have said that, but here I am writing down my assessment. Unfortunately, I do not have a current modelling, which would be a nice task for our colleagues from KPMG. Of course, the idea is quickly dismissed as a utopia, because of course the transport associations, all (federal) traffic laws and all operators could have something against it. Zack, Welcome to the Land of the Visionless!

Mobility is not the same as transport

As is so often the case, the crucial people remain in the sluggish option tunnel and cling to what they know rather than look for opportunities. A first contribution to the solution would therefore be to acknowledge that the current transport system no longer meets the current needs of mobility customers. Fewer and fewer young people are driving a driving licence, buying cars is increasingly de-emotionalised, the transport of people is no longer what it once was. People want to go from A to B, so far, really. The fact that the individual transport mix is becoming more and more intermodal – commuters travel by car to the train station, by train to the city and by bicycle to the office – is also not new. Mobility is therefore the need to live and work in different places or to reach friends and family as efficiently as possible. Aha: efficient! Is it efficient to have both a vehicle worth tens of thousands of euros, to finance insurance and taxes and wear and tear, and to spend extra money on public transport up to the two-wheeler? And, in addition, taking the risk of getting into an accident on individual traffic every time you drive? That must be better. And it does.

Future researchers expect the first fully autonomous vehicles on German roads in the early 2020s. This may sound utopian to some readers or evoke the reflex "perhaps in Silicon Valley, but not here." Caught? I like to explain why. For starters, all automakers are now working with the world's largest and most innovative technology companies to replace the driver at the wheel. The driver is now translated as "safety risk". The autonomous prototypes of Waymo (spin-off of Alphabet, Google's parent company), Uber, Baidu, Tesla and Co. are already running today. safer than human drivers and cause far fewer accidents than careless people. Technologically, therefore, the task will be solved very soon. It will not be long before the statistics of the pioneering regions on security and resource efficiency have convinced every doubter. Numerous providers of (today) car sharing offers and car rental companies are waiting for this moment. They are currently preparing everything necessary to disrupt public transport with completely new business models. I have already written about the use cases in another article. I would now like to explain here that this is the anniversary of the death of public transport.

Individual mobility is geared to the basic needs of users

As soon as the relevant companies offer autonomous vehicles – self-driving taxis, hotel rooms, restaurants, offices... – the price of mobility in itself drops to close to zero euros. why? It will no longer be a question of ordering a ride, but of how the vehicle, the moving pod, is designed from the inside. Nobody is interested in PS, consumption or rear spoilers any more. It's all about entertainment systems, on-board comfort or the menu. The monetization of performance no longer follows the old logic of buying a car or ticket, but is based on subscription models analogous to Spotify and Netflix with any time bookable extras, upselling on board and, of course, advertising. Ad blockers cost extra, of course.

As soon as a critical mass of vehicles is available in a metropolitan area, the last stall of rigid station-based offers of today's public transport providers has struck. After all, who likes to run or drive the last mile when an autonomous vehicle does this service? Yes, there will be more individual vehicles on the roads first. No, this will not lead to a traffic attack. Even today's models of limited autonomous vehicles show the effect that although the maximum speed in traffic systems will decrease, the average speed will increase massively. This is partly because the autonomous pods are able to keep a smaller distance and interact intelligently with the infrastructure.

The application of D-Wave's first commercially usable quantum computer in cooperation with Volkswagen has already shown in Beijing and Barcelona that congestion can be avoided by connecting vehicles and traffic lights. The computer was able to predict traffic for twenty minutes and with this ability will not only soon replace my job, but will organize transport systems worldwide. And this was the very first of its type with just a few qubits ... and we know from the past the amazing effect of exponential advances in computer technology. Moore's Law on Steroids!

What public transport actors need to do now

Back to public transport. The real task of the hour for providers of transport services in the system around operation, management and financing of mobility is: radical rethinking. One automaker once called this requirement "re-parking in my head," although I'm not sure we mean the same thing. When a passenger in Potsdam gets on the S-Bahn, takes a regional train to Eberswalde in Berlin, in order to cover the rest with a (soon autonomous) rental car, he does not want to have to take different fare zones and providers into account. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos commented on business models of the digital era in such a way that no good product is sold, but a customer problem has to be solved ... with which he is in line with Henry Ford, who did not "produce" any faster horses.

Even today, the wish of many people is: book once, a package price, no matter which provider is involved in the billing in which way. The new, data-driven companies such as Uber, Waymo and Tesla think that what is an almost insoluble challenge for established players due to the growing internal processes, corporate hierarchies and cultures, as well as legislative hurdles, is what the new, data-driven companies such as Uber, Waymo or Tesla think of Start with. Open interfaces, digitally seamless regional changes across city, land and state borders, usage-based billing and, of course, the monetization of all data packages. Users may see an app, contact "Siri" or "Okay Google" or automatically find the autonomous taxi when they leave the workplace; pattern recognition has long known that every Thursday evening the sports course always takes place and is covered directly after work.

Is the situation basically hopeless for today's players?

Yes, if you continue to wait and manage stubbornly. No, when the most important decision-makers finally come up with a concrete vision and an ambitious roadmap.

The future is not yet written, but is shaped by us; so let's enter into the exchange and make the most of it!

Photo by Alasdair Elmes on Unsplash

by Kai Gondlach

The 5-6 phases for autonomous mobility

In this short post I would like to fill the phases / levels of autonomous mobility with a little more life. If you read this, you have certainly already encountered diagrams such as the following, which shows the five phases (sometimes six, incl. of the "zeros") for autonomous driving:

THE 5 LEVELS OF AUTONOMOUS DRIVING, (c) www.y-mobility.co-uk

Let's bring more grip into these cool phase descriptions. If you want to jump to a later stage, just go to:
Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 | Phase 5 | (Intermediate) Conclusion

Phase 0: No automation

Phase 0 is what you probably learned in driving school. Probably in a VW Golf, whose highest electrotechnical achievement was the cassette deck. The entire control was the responsibility of the driver. The gearbox had a maximum of four gears (plus reverse). They also cranked up heavily when parking, braking was an act of violence, approaching the mountain of horror. Driving was still a real job!. You may even have to put a seatbelt around because it simply didn't exist – the installation of such belts has only been in place since 1974. The entire design of the car was based on firstly giving the owner a sense of freedom, independence and, secondly, not breaking apart while driving.

Phase 1: Driving assistance systems

In phase 1 towards automation, the first supporting functions came into the standard equipment. These included servo steering, brake boosters, ABS systems, which made it possible to control the car even when braking in hazardous situations, driving dynamics controls for stabilising driving dynamics such as ESP and ASR, which have been mandatory for new cars since 2014. Are. The bottom line is all minor optimizations, which mainly reduced the required energy expenditure of the driver. The exterior design hadn't changed, the interior suddenly had a little more buttons in the cockpit – and maybe a CD player.

Phase 2: Partial Automation

You may be familiar with this phase if you usually travel with mid-range vehicles, because vehicles of this stage of development are most common in 2018. According to ABS, ESP, power steering, etc. when buying a car, they are standard equipment. Probably your vehicle has a cruise control that you can use to transfer control of the speed to the system. Presumably you are still self-switches without automatic transmissions (statistics from 2011). But you probably already benefit from the automatically dispersing rear-view mirror and high beam, you may have a start-stop automatic and maybe also a permanently integrated navigation and entertainment system. A few dozen sensors are already installed in your vehicle that analyze the environment and activate the windshield wiper that darkens the passive lighting in the interior when it gets dark outside, and adjusts the outside lights to the route. Just like the steering, which resists or at least vibrates when leaving the track without any flashing before. If you look tired, your vehicle will persuade you to take a break and initiate emergency braking when something appears in your journey – I hope you don't know this feature from your own experience. But at least your car protests loudly if you have missed another vehicle in the blind spot. In addition, a growing proportion of passenger cars are connected to the Internet in order to integrate, among other things, current traffic messages into navigation or, conversely, to send operating data to manufacturers or emergency centres. Combined, all these functions lead to passages in which the feeling of automated driving can be simulated during a motorway journey for at least a few seconds. Cruise control and lane assistant and the automatic spacer work well until the system reminds you to put your hands back on the wheel.

Even in this evolutionary phase of the car, there are still no fundamental changes in exterior and interior design. Depending on the manufacturer, the design changes, because the outer shapes go from edgy to rounded, SUVs are indispensable from the cityscape and traffic accident statistics. The interior as a whole is more comfortable than ever, the fabrics are more noble, seats are more comfortable and even in small cars the legroom is greater. Some mid-range vehicles even allow the front seats to be reset to the balance (of course only possible if no one is seated at the back), some offer a massage function at an additional cost.

Phase 3: Conditional Automation

Under good weather and road conditions, autonomy is a decisive step forward in Phase 3. Especially in slow traffic, the first Level 3-capable vehicles are already faster than any human driver, as they leave the human attention second far behind. The on-board computer far exceeds the computing power of our common company PCs. He constantly calculates all possible entry scenarios in order to be able to react in fractions of a second in the actual event. Unfortunately, most of the media only report fatal or at least devastating accidents involving "autonomous" vehicles from Uber or Tesla, which statistically do not happen in practice (with all due respect for the victims!). There are also a long line of good examples, googling "autonomous car prevents crash" and convince yourself in case of doubt of the incredible performance of today's systems. Be that as it may, the manuals of phase 3 vehicles and the permanent attention of the human driver are required purely in terms of regulation. In the USA, however, the legislation is now being adapted in anticipation (notification of 4.10.2018) to clear the way for self-driving cars. Ford, for example, has announced that it will skip Phase 3 altogether and enter the next phase.

Phase 4: High Automation

In this phase, for the first time, scenarios such as the following reality: the car asks where to go, you say the destination, put on the seatbelt – and off you go. The vehicle starts on its own, goes on the route and steers autonomously to the destination. It recognizes all traffic signs and observes the rules attached to them, accelerates appropriately and brakes independently when a vehicle driving is slower or stops. In uncertain situations, however, it will still notify you and require your intervention. However, it is now perfectly okay to sit back and read a book, work on the customer presentation for the appointment at the destination, or enjoy a meal in peace. However, the interior is still largely unchanged; two seats at the front, a seat at the back, possibly more interactive elements in the entertainment screen and perhaps here and there an on-board system with the most popular Netflix movies.

And at this point the inclined entrepreneur will think: Suddenly we can make completely new worlds of use possible! Yes, exactly! If the occupant, who is sitting near the still existing steering wheel, no longer has to use 100% of his attention to the road traffic and the control of the surrounding driving vehicle, it quickly becomes boring. The first concept vehicles in this segment already have swivel front seats and, for example, have a table in the middle where the occupants can play cards, eat or work together. Another obvious use case is to use autonomous delivery vehicles. Equipped in the warehouse or production site, they drive independently to the destination address and can be opened via customer interfaces. Sounds theoretical? The pizza delivery service Domino's already does it today:

And in doing so, we are saying goodbye to our classic understanding of mobility. Goodbye, human drivers and thanks for the fish!

Phase 5: Complete Automation

This will be the completed phase of automation. Please say goodbye to the following parts of driving:

• Steering wheel
• Gas and brake pedals
• Rear and side mirrors
• Classic cockpit components (blinkers, windscreen wiper levers, tank display...) And more than that. Get used to the fact that the self-propelled capsules are suddenly possible in very different manifestations. Of course, there will continue to be smaller vehicles that carry one or more passengers as robo-taxis. In addition, there are larger vessels (traffic science for transport units) that transform applications into mobile business models:
• The moving office has comfortable, productivity-enhancing seats and enough power outlets for your mobile office. Of course, a sufficiently large desk should not be missing, maybe even a flipchart / whiteboard / smartboard, if you are planning a productive session with colleagues. The minibar can be unlocked with an appropriate code. All windows contain LEDs that are transparent as needed, completely darken, show a presentation or any video. The worktop contains hologram technology to project 3D models into the room. This environment does not fit into an average mid-size car, but rather resembles a small multivan. In the trunk, of course, there is enough space for the luggage for the business passengers.
• If you get into a moving hotel room and close the door behind you, you won't be able to make any difference to today's 4- or 5-star hotel room. You will find a small work place with chair, immediately see the comfortable bed with bedside table and a small bathroom. The use case suits the more than 180 million business trips in 2017 (source), especially those overnight and early in the morning: get in, fall asleep, arrive in the hotel dock and enjoy the continental breakfast before you go to the appointment in a relaxed way Can.

(Intermediate) Conclusion

By the way, business model ideas do not come up with futurologists, but entrepreneurs. We then ask the following questions:

What does the entry of self-driving vehicles mean for the aviation industry or for the hotel industry? What does it mean for the sale of vehicles, what for the insurance industry, which suddenly no longer serves end customers, but almost exclusively fleet operators, and suddenly also insure damage to or service defects due to hotel interiors?
What infrastructure and networking of devices does autonomous mobility require? Which antenna technologies are needed, which software and deep learning algorithms are used, why do distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain, tangle and hashgraph lead directly into an autonomous economy, in which machines soon carry the bulk of the financial transactions?
What other use cases for business models are available for other industries?
I hope this article offers you for the time being "food for thought", lots of approaches for a transfer to your environment.

PS: If you want to travel to the pioneers of autonomous systems, you can of course travel to the west of the USA – so would most people. I find China more exciting. This medium article "Breakdown of self-driving car industry in China" deals with which companies are worth seeing.

Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash

by Kai Gondlach

The political debacle of the established

Andrea Nahles, (now) former head of the SPD parliamentary group and party and former Federal Labour Minister and SPD general secretary, has resigned. CDU chairman Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (#akk) is likely to be voted out soon. The Grand Coalition (#groko) is shaking over the tectonic plate shifts in political operation. Is politics still to be saved?

What a heap of shards! Who these days received the news from the press, radio and television (or Twitter, Youtube and TIME Online and Co.) can only slap your hands over his head. This applies at least to all those who remain who do not already fully express their political disaffection through their complete devotion to other topics and activities. If we take the participation of those entitled to vote in the european elections as an indicator of the first group, that is just under 51% (more than 200 million people!) across the EU, and 61.4% in Germany. The European elections, on the other hand, are often used as a measure for future elections of the national parliaments, and it is clear that the former People's Party has failed disastrously in this country. Beneficiaries of the whole tragedy in three acts: the Greens.

One channel undoubtedly underestimated by "the established" is the Internet. So #neuland. In my seemingly naive worldview, until recently I had assumed that leaders had now understood what the Internet is doing with their system. I was wrong. In epic terms, we have been able to observe the consequences for a few days and in the following weeks. First voices call for the dissolution of the Grand Coalition (#groko) and new elections at the federal level (and this is in sluggish, "alternative" Germany!), revolutions of party programs (keyword Kevin Kühnert) up to the complete revision of the political system. What's going on!?

Review: Dismantling the Established

In times of networked, pluralistic society, I too would like to make my contribution to the discourse. In addition, a subjective A-chronology of the last milestones.

• 2. June 2019: Andrea Nahles, leader of the former Spd Party , resigns from her positions as party leader (with effect from 4 June 2019). or 5. June). It thus draws the conclusion from the disastrous results of the European elections on 26 May. May 2019. Someone has to hold their head.
• 26. May 2019: European elections. Even the first projections do not bode well for the established. It is early on that the Green Party will celebrate a historic success; splinter parties such as DIE PARTEI or Volt also win seats in the European Parliament in Brussels – at the expense of the established, of course. The fact that the latter (in part) were even admitted to the election is due to the already mentioned inertia of political inertia – it was simply sleepy to implement the EU-wide percentage hurdle. And so voters in Germany had 41 options on the meter-long (no exaggeration) ballot papers and therefore difficulties in folding in order to prepare the paper for the ballot box appropriately.
• 18th. May 2019: Youtube influencer Rezo publishes a video entitled "The Destruction of the CDU" a week before the European elections. sources). The content of the nearly hour-long video is a mostly well-researched polemic against actually all established parties, in which Rezo critically discusses some program points of the CDU. The video has since been viewed more than 14 million times and has over 1.1 million likes.com.m. May 2019).
• 20th. August 2018: Greta Thunberg lays the foundation for the "new climate strike movement" just before the elections to the Swedish Reichstag. In the meantime, several million students around the world have joined in protesting for more truthfulness and consistency in political action as part of the #fridaysforfuture. In addition to the content component, there is also a threat: the students of solidarity will gradually become eligible to vote in the coming years.
• 19th. June 2013: German Chancellor Angela Merkel meets then US President Barack Obama in Berlin. The spectacle will historically go down in the annals as the day when the head of government of one of the world's most economically powerful states coined the following sentence: "The Internet is new territory for all of us." Ouch.
  April 2011: In several mostly North African, Islamic-influenced states, there is a lot of rumbling. Egypt, Libya, Tunisia... apart from the cultural-historical-political-intricate situation, the networked world society experiences first-hand what is happening in Tahrir Square: On Twitter and Youtbe, demonstrators and opponents of the regime broadcast live images of the site of the Action. The Internet presence of the terrible conditions is historically new, the smartphone revolution proclaimed.
• otherwise:
• In 2018, 57 million people in Germany used a smartphone, five years earlier it was just over 40 million, in 2009 just 6 million (Statista). Worldwide, more people had access to the Internet in 2018 than to clean drinking water (please use your smartphone to google the respective statistics).
• "In mid-2012, 21.4 million households had a DSL connection, while 3.6 million cable Internet connections existed, bringing the DSL m[3]arket share in the broadband market to approximately 86%." (Wikipedia) We are all connected – whether through Skype, Whatsapp, Facebook or the good old e-mail: distances are no longer measured in meters, but in relative proximity and attention.
• 9. November 2007: The iPhone is the first fully functional smartphone to be launched in Germany. A historically significant date – data retention, anti-terror law, fall of the Berlin Wall, Rolling Stone Magazine, 68 movement, St. Petersburg Agreement, Pogrom Night, Birth of Jean Monnet, November Revolution... The mobile connection to the Internet, access to online commerce and the permanent availability of Wikipedia and Chefkoch.de has also changed people.
• In 1990, the commercialization of the Internet (Wikipedia on the history of the Internet) began and thus the foundation for the spread of omninet was laid (my contribution to the topic).

Attention: Subjective interim conclusion

Despite the apparent lack of networking or digitization, the top politics of the Federal Republic of Germany still has not understood what it means when a person has a "viral video" on Youtube (or another digital video). channel). Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, for example, has clearly underestimated the influence of internet star Rezo and relied on the support in her system. The CDU has failed in its own structure to respond adequately to Rezo (Philipp Amthor wanted, but was not allowed). After all, the SPD has Secretary General Lars Klingbeil, Juso CHIEF Kevin Kühnert and MdE Tiemo Wölken granted. However, both actions can only pick up a few shards to cushion the election drama to some extent (although it is unlikely to be possible to calculate the exact effects of the respective tactics).

So, enough opinion, an episode science, please!

Meta-perspective change: Systems

According to Niklas Luhmann, the sociology god, every social system works according to its own self-sustaining (autopoietic) logic. Whether a family, a circle of friends, a county, a nation, a federation of states, a religion, etc.: People organize themselves in groups and are per se loyal to their group members. This results in formal (in most not a. laws) and informal (in other words) behaviours) codes. Language plays a central role here: spoken word as well as logics of action, in a sense the currency of any transaction. In business this is money, in social relations affection, in information technology bits and bytes, in politics power.

In times of digitalization, however, these boundaries are increasingly blurred. Where in pre-digitized times communities, much later societies, duchies, states and states were organized, in globally networked times potentially every person can contact any other human being, as long as they have access to an internet-enabled device. The potential size of this network not only exceeds the imagination of an average Homo sapiens – after all, we are talking about currently potentially 4-4-1 billion connections - but it also exceeds the possibilities of the usual system boundaries. No wonder many are burying their heads in the sand in the face of such complexity, opening the doors to Brexit, protectionism, and authoritarianism. After all, "everything used to be better".

Today's systems are overwhelmed with recent technological developments. Some politicians may have discovered Twitter for themselves and their self-expression, but that's not digitalization. There are good reasons why the separation of powers (legislative, executive, judicial) was introduced in democratic systems – and, above all, historically, there was a need to establish various processes and (action) logics within these systems. individual and social skills. However, it would be too short-thought to say that the above-case The caesuras of new media in political discourse were merely fads or zeitgeist. For the new age of the digitized era of Homo sapiens, we need not only educated politics and administration, but a fundamentally new mindset.

I apologise for the fact that this perspective is being discussed extremely briefly. What is more important for this contribution is how to proceed.

Floor plans for a future policy

Juso CEO Kevin Kühnert said in an interview after the European elections that personnel discussions do not come first or second for him. This is not only rhetorically absolutely brilliant, because he naturally catapults himself up by such statements, but even soberly considered correctly (and then of course not discussed in depth in the interview). The fate of a party, i.e. a highly professionally organized community of interests, should not depend on a few (selected) minds. However, the historically developed system of the party landscape currently provides no other way and updates are still difficult for the old system – today, many people are still blasphemed about the decision of the Green Party to have a double-header for the group chairmanship. As Max Weber did in the early 20th In the 19th century, politics is the drilling of thick boards... to stay in the mechanical image: the drill needs a renovation. So, a few food for thought for renovation needs in politics and administration:

• Speed vs. Eye-catching: The world has been ticking faster than the political system could show since Whatsapp, real-time brokerage and just-in-time production. Of course, human brains are not made to think about all the possible consequences of individual decisions and to include them ex ante in the negotiations. Equally of course, there are legitimate interests of companies, civil rights movements, climate activists, etc., who want to have a say in decisions. In addition to committees, institutes for technology assessment and consulting firms, the view for the big picture (and a lot of taxpayers' money) is lost. Solution approach: Artificial intelligence in the status quo has long since been used to make visible connections that no human being can recognize with the naked eye. The result is not deterministic yes/no decision templates, but almost holistic evaluations of the present and the past. Why do top corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Softbank, or Alphabet use such software – but states don't?
• Politics vs. Science: Especially in the context of the climate debate, I often wonder why there are serious debates about the extent of human guilt for undeniable climate change – and especially about which state or state. which people have caused more harmful emissions. I would like to banish these discussions to Members' coffee clubs and instead push for binding measures. It is not only in the field of climate research that we are running out of time; also in education, integration, the social contract between old and young (keyword secure pension), infrastructure, the development of artificial intelligence and many more, personal or party opinions are exchanged, where scientific evidence has long been Exists. Project managers from agile, market-leading companies would only shake their heads if they had to analyse the management of parliamentary debates. Less rhetoric, more (potentially unwelcome) binding decisions!
• Employers vs. Workers: Any structural change has an impact on the economy. But it does not help to shy from the consequences. Employers' associations are begging for tax relief and a reduction in social security contributions, while workers' associations are openly opposed to "disruptive" innovations to safeguard jobs. A seemingly intractable conflict, as both operate in different systems. Some want to maximize profits, preserve other working conditions. Both fail due to globally networked systems, which unfortunately take little account of geographical systems. If you want to secure jobs, you have to make long-term, realistic forecasts and start the transformation in time instead of preserving the old status quo until the turnaround is suddenly radical. If you want to maximize profits, you need to try up-to-date organizational and process tools instead of pacifying shareholders in the short term through incremental improvements in the balance sheet.
• Faction coercion vs. Conscience of the Deputies: From the day of the election to the Bundestag, a member of parliament finds himself in a fundamental conflict of conscience. On the one hand, the election promises to the citizens, on the other hand the commitment to their own group, which has not primarily anchored the national politics of the elected in its foundations. How should these differences be compatible? Well, through networking (from social media to blockchain / DLT votes) all interested parties, those involved, those affected can participate technically simply in decisions. For the construction of a swimming pool, these are the taxpayers of a municipality or a county; for the decision of speed limits on motorways all road users, and so on. Direct digital democracy is the buzzword.

In short: the end of the story...

... does not occur again. The renowned political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicted the "end of history" in 1992 after the fall of the Iron Curtain, not least because the ideological question between capitalism and communism seemed to be resolved. But that is nonsense, of course. Nor will the utopia of a perfect society and politics be made by mine or other people's proposals next year. January.

However, my personal motivation on a path to a "world with a future" is and remains to point out grievances and to present constructive, often fundamental solutions. If you have read so far, I would like to begin by thanking you for your attention. If you have thought of a new thought, I am happy about comments and reproduction of my thoughts – and even more so about the implementation on a small and a large scale. In addition, as always, this contribution should serve as an invitation to change perspectives; because if we continue as before, we will not make any progress.

Selected sources

Institute for German Economy IWD (2019): What helps the turnout on the jumps.

Luhmann, Niklas (2002): Introduction to System Theory.

Photo by Andrew Buchanan on Unsplash

Rezo ja lol ey (2019): The destruction of the CDU:

Thunberg, Greta (2019): TED An urgent appeal to tackle climate change as quickly as possible:

by Kai Gondlach

Forget the word "car"

Every child now knows that the technical equipment that we still call a car will soon be driving across the streets without a driver. And yet there is one more thing missing from the broad discussion: scope. Apart from the organization and technology of self-driving cars, the impending change of language is quickly forgotten ... we are not talking about mechanical horses today, if we mean cars. So we won't be saying self-driving cars in 2030 and mean something else. A brief outline of the coming years as well as two crisp scenarios, from which approx. five business models.

Autonomous driving: Machines are already making better decisions

First of all, I would like to state in writing and in public that, in my opinion, the first Level 5 journey in complex traffic situations will take place before 2020. The first commercially available self-driving cars (with level 4) will follow shortly afterwards – but with the legal limitation that a steering wheel must still be available in case of an emergency. That I don't laugh. I always like to imagine such assumptions figuratively. What does a human occupant do if the superintelligence of the automotive board computer, after evaluating 1GB of data (over one million data points) per second, comes to the conclusion that it can no longer save even this situation? That's right: nothing at all. Then it is too late. Described differently: what do people do if someone unexpectedly takes their driveway or an animal runs in front of the car? Answer: In the majority of cases, they react irrationally, affectively and wrongly. Unfortunately, our genetic material does not contain a prefabricated instinct for such situations.

As early as 2018, evaluations have shown that autonomous vehicles cause fewer accidents than human drivers (source1, source2); in our media haze circle only the message about the errors of the autopilots always appears. Humans tend to be skeptical of new approaches to solutions at first, perhaps this property has also taken the species far. Public debate back and forth: promoting the registration of autonomous vehicles only on motorways is only right for reasons of acceptance. There is more demand in the city centres, where, although fewer and fewer, but still far too many living beings are being injured or killed by careless drivers over the last few years.

Zoom out: Business models in self-driving cars

Back to the big picture. Cars will soon be self-driving. How does this soon-to-be reality change the appearance of cars? Do the engineers at Daimler, Volkswagen, Tesla and Toyota simply remove the steering wheel, pedals, handbrake, direction indicator and windscreen wiper and that's it? After that, just carry on as before? I can already explain to you that this is not all. When vehicles control themselves, the interior designers suddenly ask themselves completely new questions. Instead of designing a safe and comfortable cockpit around a driver who is ideally not too distracted and defocused by additional functions, autonomous driving turns this skewer around. Finally, the designers of the automotive industry are allowed to design vehicles that revolve around the passenger and increase the experience within a moving tin box, because then all occupants are passenger and distraction is good!

What's more, please consider what you can finally do while driving if you commute home after a long day at work or hunt for a customer appointment early in the morning. Finally, you can prepare or sleep, you can eat light-heartedly with both hands, daddling computer games or dealing with your family Aug in Aug. Incidentally, these scenarios do not come from science fiction fans, but from the production halls of the industry. Hardly any car manufacturer has already presented prototypes, but I personally find the collaboration between Toyota and Softbank in the monet joint venture most exciting. Unlike the competition from the established automotive industry, Monet has understood that Toyota will stop making money selling vehicles in a few years. In the logic of the "Mobility as a service" (MaaS) the booked trip applies, but rather the generated data about the ride and occupants as well as the premium services sold if necessary.

How will this work in the future? Two scenarios:

Friday, 11. February 2022. My presentation to the Frankfurt business partner went well and I leave his office at around 4:30 p.m. I'm looking forward to my best friend's birthday party tonight – but I know full well that there are about 400 kilometers between the revolving door in front of me and my front door. Luckily, I no longer have to drive a rental car myself, because then I would need a good four hours for the journey with breaks and then I would have to sit at the desk at home and prepare the meeting and everything for my colleagues. I used to come to parties too late and inwardly agitated because of something like this. Instead, my Uber office is already waiting for me, because it knew, thanks to my calendar release and the activated extra interface, that I don't need a Best Western Sleep or Starbucks Diner today. A vehicle that is about the size of an SUV of the 2010s opens its doors, I throw my backpack into the spacious interior, sit down to it – first stretch legs laaang – and say: "hello Uber, once home, please" – "everything clear, let's go! We will reach your home at 20:19 if you don't need a break on the way. I certainly don't, my battery is fully charged!" I fold up the office chair with massage function, put my notebook on the table and start the preparation and preparation of the meeting. At 8:17 p.m. we roll out of my front door at my home, which gave me enough time to slip out of the meeting outfit and cycle to the party. At 9 p.m. I start at the party and am the first guest – and look into stunned faces: "You already here?!"
On the same day, Uncle Wilhelm has a lot in his place. In the morning the monthly check-up at the family doctor, in the afternoon shopping a few small things – a "real" supermarket and his idiosyncratic shopping list are still preferable to online orders – and in the evening chess games in the neighboring town. He was looking forward to driving himself for many years, so his Bosch taxi is on his doorstep at 7:50 in the morning to drive him to the city centre. Wilhelm's favourite radio station BOB Radio is running on board. Less than ten minutes later, they reach the finish line. Instead of occupying a parking space in front of the medical center, the "taxi" steams off again after successful transport in order to receive further orders and navigate autonomously to the charging station. After the doctor's appointment comes another taxi, this time from Lyft – the efficiency- and comfort-driven passenger couldn't care which manufacturer or operator is behind the transport. Thanks to NFC recognition, payment is contactless and, for some providers, also automatically by direct debit with the old bank accounts. Since Uncle Wilhelm, like many others, looks at commercials on his smartphone or on the windshield during the driving time, which is now a mixed reality display, the fare for the three trips to the doctor, supermarket and chess friend is in total less than 10 euros. This scenario involves one of the biggest drivers of autonomous mobility: people who are not yet allowed to drive (children and adolescents) or are no longer (seniors or physically and mentally impaired) and thus, in 2018, still on the goodwill of motorized motorized relatives and acquaintances or on inflexible public transport solutions.

Zoom in: Who are the drivers of autonomous vehicles?

Sounds like utopia? From several reliable sources, I can say that this image is not utopian, but comes from the business model departments of various actors. The first prototypes even exist and are produced at the major trade fairs in the world (e.g. IAA) for some time. Suppliers such as Bosch are also getting ready for this new round of games and forging exciting alliances such as with Deutsche Telekom or the highly innovative IOTA Foundation. Much to the chagrin of established OEMs such as Daimler, Volkswagen or BMW. And on the other side of the big pond sits arch-rival of the German engineers, Tesla Motors by Elon Musk, Waymo from Alphabet, Uber, GM, Ford ... and in Asia Baidu, Yutong, Nissan, Toyota and so many more. CBInsights has compiled the 44 largest players of autonomous development here.

The derivation is child's play. In the industrialised countries, sales of passenger cars are stagnating or even declining. Markets are saturated. Manufacturers need to think about something new in order not to let the revenue streams dry up. We combine this with the computing power and computer size of computers, the advances in the development of machine learning et voilé: the foundation for a u-turn of the fundamental business model of classic car manufacturers is Placed. The race for an autonomous vehicle began with Elon Musk's announcement that Tesla would produce the first autonomous vehicles in series with Tesla; Currently (May 2019), U.S. companies dominate, with Chinese manufacturers preparing to wobble at the Tesla throne.

They all do not necessarily belong to an altruist-motivated Salvation Army. No, they are tapping into the most valuable asset of consumers with the means of digitalization: time. Several million hours a day, people are behind the wheel in Germany alone. Assuming they were sitting in a vehicle (captive audience), they would have that time free for other things. For advertising. For entertainment. For relaxation. For purchase recommendations. This will be sold to consumers as "customer centricity"; in reality, of course, it is profit maximisation through additional offers.

Conclusion: Autonomous car is not the same as car

Our understanding of a car involves the idea that a person is actively operating the steering wheel, acceleration, brake, etc. influences the course of the journey. The moment we stop doing just that, but rather sit back in our app-ordered mobile office, hotel room or robotaxi, it's no longer a car. My prognosis is that in Germany by 2030 at the latest, we will even see the first large-scale bans on man-made vehicles. Elsewhere, of course, much earlier, not only Silicon Valley is known to be far ahead of us, Dubai, of course, France wants to become a European pioneer.

anyway. We will no longer call these self-driving vehicles cars, but we will have to find a new concept for them. to have to? to become. This is a normal process of human evolution. As I said, today we are not talking about mechanical horses, if we actually mean cars... they will be mobile purpose fulfillers. And in a few decades, your grandchildren will ask you, "How do you mean that, Grandma, you had a driver's license? That was allowed?!"

by Kai Gondlach

The Age of Exnovation

Innovation was yesterday. Few today know the difference between incremental and disruptive innovation. But it doesn't matter either, because much more important is in the 21st In the 19th century, the ability to exnovate.

Homo sapiens and Innovation

Our species, the homo sapiens, stands out from other mammals by an essential property: with the help of increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques (=technology), seemingly insurmountable hurdles are taken*. In the broadest sense, this also includes language and writing, as well as the use of fire, the invention of the wheel, the loom and the steam engine. The history of innovation is exciting, turbulent and sometimes tragic, but we will come to this later.

An essential feature of innovation is that the development of new methods, tools or even technologies make old, until then valid practices obsolete. So far, so trivial. This can happen step by step (incremental) or abruptly (disruptive). A few examples to fill these terms with life:

Examples of incremental innvations include:

Umbrellas were built from the early Middle Ages to the Enlightenment period in the 18th world. Only sparsely used in the 19th century. Also just didn't fit the time... in any case, the rain-repellent helpers have developed over the centuries into true specialists – not least fueled by competition in the rise of capitalism. The Wikipedia list of types of umbrellas is longer than my 15" notebook monitor can display. The bottom line: The product has been optimized over the centuries in many small steps to adapt it to the circumstances and customer benefit.
Writing instruments. How many different ballpoint pens, fountain pens, pencils, permanent markers are available today? History goes back to the year ... No one knows for sure. The people of the Stone Age already used chalk, bones and charcoal to immortalize messages in the walls of their dwellings. So innovation is older than homo sapiens, aha! Be that as it may, today we are still writing down our thoughts for ourselves and our posterity; with ordinary pens, luxury versions from Montblanc to digitizing contact pins from Apple or HP. Incremental innovation!
Mattresses, chairs, bridges... Most of humanity's ubiquitous achievements have been developed incrementally and optimized to date over many centuries. This does not diminish their indispensable value for our everyday lives, is clearly incremental from the present point of view. Straw mats have been improved, stool more comfortable, previous river crossings have been "bridged". Step by step.

Examples of disruptive innovations:

At the turn of the century, the automobile drove coachmen, stables and riding companies out of the market. The same will soon be true for classic car manufacturers, whose suppliers are going for manual transmissions or rear-view mirrors and driver's license providers. Market leaders are being pushed out of their own market? Disruptive innovation!
Digital cameras pushed analog models out of the market because they were available at comparable prices and were able to reproduce these impressions as often as they like through the classic function of capturing snapshots. Again and again ironic: The first digital camel was developed by an employee of the then market leader Kodak, but rejected by the board – did not correspond to the product range... a few years later, the Group filed for bankruptcy. Disruption!
CDs released vinyl records from the mass market, DVDs replaced VHS cassettes, MP3s and streaming platforms quickly replaced all media and moved the business to the Internet. Few people know which industry dominates the video recording format in particular... please write a comment ????
Smartphones quickly heralded the decline of the classic (mobile) phone industry, in which even in 2007 – after the announcement of the Apple iPhone – there was still (retrospectively) amusing ease of the impending innovation. Nokia, as the market leader, quickly lost ground – disruptive market shift.
Principles clarified? Okay, then continue into the 21st. Century!

Innovation in the 21st Century

At this point, I will save myself the list of the groundbreaking innovations of the 21st. Century. However, I would like to give an example and point to examples from other areas, which should prove my thesis: for the majority of the actors in business, science and politics, the age of innovation is over; the age of radical exnovation has begun.

Never before has humanity developed innovations at a comparable rate as it does today. I often say in my lectures, "Today is the last day in your life when the rate of change was so slow." Because, thanks to the Moore and Metcalfese laws, the speed of potential technology innovation is accelerating for a few more years. Whether we like it or not, technology and the logics in our economic system are driving our world. Inevitably, this leads to the invention in some places of solutions or products that replace others.

A tragic example has been observed for a few years in one of the most important industries for the German economic system: the automotive industry has benefited for many decades from being a supposed pioneer in the development of vehicles with internal combustion engines (petrol engines with gasoline or diesel engines). Despite the global mix, the big corporations have wonderfully egocentrically continued to honing their models, opening up markets, increasing margins, making shareholders happy – at the expense of taxpayers and the environment. The criminal system, which knowingly manipulated emissions levels of the engines, flew up far too late and the image damage of the "systemic" brands is relatively small. In addition: the main thing is that the cart achieves 250 km/h on the motorway.

So the big ones carried on as usual, even though I know from confidential conversations with various insiders from Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW that the corporations operate in panic mode and are more like a wasp's nest than a well-stocked company. Be that as it may, the traditional business model no longer works. To recognize this, you don't have to be an expensively paid McKinsey consultant in the VW Group. For a long time now, all signs have been on "mobility as a service" (MaaS) about the sale of vehicles, alternative drives have long since become market-ready, and international competitors in Silicon Valley, China or Israel have long since been much further in development. autonomous vehicles. And yet, in 2019, one in three jobs in Germany will still depend indirectly on the automotive industry, including the automotive industry. suppliers and peripherals.

It is now an unspoken certainty that the golden age of Germany as a car location is over. But what now? This caesura in the history of innovation will go down in the history books. The question arises as to how to deal with this pink elephant. An inherent feature of innovation is that fundamental innovations (such as e-drives, platform economy, and autonomous vehicles) are eliminating jobs. This affected the farmers at the time, then the weavers, then the telephone connectors and so on. At this point, I would like to say that every single and family destiny that is marked by job loss is potentially tragic. We are talking about responsibility another time. At the same time, through the peculiarities of the human striving for ever new innovations, we can also learn something, after all, not least Martin Luther, Johannes Calvin and finally Max Weber, who came up with the idea of Protestant ethics much later. written, already many centuries ago knew what technological innovations entail.

Exnovation in the 21st Century

As a result of more or less radical innovations, companies develop (usually) business models that meet customer benefits in new ways (using scientific knowledge). Part of the bitter truth is that, as a result, the former providers of (now) outdated practices are losing market share, depriving the employment base for the people in the sector. Let's change perspective. The "old" providers have slept through the zeitgeist, which is why it is not the innovation itself, but the conservative employers and sometimes the employee representatives who are "guilty" of structural change. If they had taken care of upcoming developments in good time and their business model, their strategic investments, their personnel policy, etc. then adjusted, they would have escaped the drama. But they are not. So Bayer will cut 4,500 jobs, ThyssenKrupp 6000, Deutsche Bank over 7000, and 50,000 jobs could be lost in total as a result of the large bank merger between Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank. What sounds a lot is a small number compared to the automotive industry with the thousands of suppliers. In my view, this is negligent.

After the 1950s, Germany experienced an incomparable economic upswing. Volkswagen, cheap nuclear power, recurrent diplomatic acceptance, and strong economic alliances are just some of the hallmarks of the country's so far prosperous wealth. Over the decades, the country's largest corporations have apparently forgotten a virtue of the middle class. This means that even in satisfactory times (= with a good order situation, with a sufficient number of product innovations), the overall market should not be lost sight of. As early as the late 1900s, it sent clear signals that the age of classical industries was threatened by global and digital actors and platforms. The painful keyword for the automotive industry is "Tesla", for insurers it is "check24", for notaries "blockchain" and for physicians "Watson".**

Innovation today also means exnovation

The commonality of all these supposedly innovative companies: they have become too focused on innovation. This certainly did not happen without the help of their consulting firms, which have always focused on cash cows and strictly optimised processes to justify savings in the really important places. Innovation is important and right, but it is in the 21st world. It was all the more important in the 19th century to put old truths to the test again and again.

Innovations have always driven the status quo to rethink and act. Translated into corporate language, the catchphrase is exnovation: the ability to learn, to dismiss, to rethink learned and proven methods. We need to make friends with replacing tools, methods, technologies, production sites, work routines and processes in order to be able to do so in order to be able to To survive as an organization in the 19th century. Even when it hurts.

Comments

* Right, other species also use tools to deal with problems, and also use language. However, this is not the subject of this article.

** This pain would not be so great if the actors mentioned had taken weak signals seriously in good time. Sure, there are countless weak signals about technology or business model innovations "out there." Not everyone is serious. But that is precisely the purpose of futurology: to draw expected, probable and consistent images of the future in order to improve the decisions of the present.

by Kai Gondlach

Omninet: The Future of the Internet of Things (IoT)

You know the Internet of Things or The Internet of Things. (Industrial) Internet of Things and wonder where the journey is headed? Let us ask future research!

Short history of the Internet

In times of digitalization, no one can get past computer topics. But moment! Hand on heart: since when has this digitalization actually been around? It depends on the scale you set.

• Digitization did not appear in the broad perception of the Western world until after the turn of the millennium, when "this Internet, as it was often called at the time, slowly spread. At that time you probably already had a PC at home and maybe already an Internet line with more than 56k or ISDN modem. Amazon was founded in 1994, and from 1995 onwards, goods were traded between private individuals in the online auction house ebay.
• The commercialization of the Internet began in 1989, and not only an iron curtain fell. Suddenly, thanks to the Domain Name System (DNS), it was possible to access a website created somewhere in the world by pioneers of the world wide web by entering www addresses and a browser – probably Netscape or Opera at that time. Previously, global connections had already emerged in the 1960s; driven mainly by the military, fueled by the "Sputnik shock". The first emails were sent in the late 1970s.
• As early as 1938, Konrad Zuse completed the first modern and above all digitally working computer based on transistors. All ancient precursors worked purely mechanically (e.g. abacus) and have little to do with the subject of this article. Can we agree for this article that, firstly, digitalization and the Internet – digital computers and the Internet – are older than commonly recognized and, secondly, have not yet reached their full potential. It's just started.

From the Internet to the Internet of Things to the Internet of Everything

With the first networked computers, it quickly became clear that in addition to the "Moore's Law", which describes the exponential doubling of the computing speed and storage capacity of computer systems at the same price, another powerful mechanism would have an impact. The "Metcalfe law" states that in communication networks the total benefit increases proportionally to the number of possible connections, while the costs increase only proportionally to the number of participants. Transferred to the Internet, the combination of the two laws has rapidly led to immense values being generated almost out of nowhere simply through networking itself. This value is difficult to measure quantitatively or qualitatively, as is tragically demonstrated not least by a "dotcom" speculative bubble in March 2000.

Today, we all use the Internet for granted. We googling everything we don't know ourselves, look at Wikipedia instead of the lexicon, offer goods on online exchanges, order books, furniture and groceries on the Internet. Without the Internet, many shelves in your supermarket would look different, communicating with friends and relatives across national borders would be difficult or very expensive, and you would be significantly less high-quality produced series or cat videos from Hobby vets.

As a result of the miniaturization of computer chips, a person living in Germany uses 1.6 mobile phones, 95% of 14- to 49-year-olds use a smartphone, more and more wearables like smartwatches connect the existing devices with the digital twin of the owners, while the data streams into the cloud (i.e. in data centers somewhere on earth) and generate added value. In industry, plants and devices are interconnected, every new car sold today has an internet connection, the Internet of Things is present. The Metcalfe law has long been in force here: the companies that sell the devices do not necessarily have to make the largest turnover. A software layer is very successful in the revenue streams and developers from San Francisco to Berlin and Tel Aviv to Bangladesh earn a lot.

On average, every German household had 500 connected devices in 2018, and worldwide it is expected to be around 50 billion by 2020. The trend is unbroken: everything that can be digitized will be digitized. I don't know who made that statement first, presumably someone from Silicon Valley. Translated, this means – for this topic – that in the coming years all everyday objects will be equipped with IP addresses and transmitting function, including clothing, household appliances, packaging material, furniture, bodies, internal organs...

Short Future of the Internet: The Omninet

• • Every hearing aid, every pacemaker, every smart mirror now contains more high-tech than the computers that calculated the lunar mission. Even the health sector is, of course, now subject to free market logic – where there is an offer that satisfies a (possibly unknown) need, markets around the world can conquer.
  • Already today, more than 50,000 people worldwide wear an NFC or RFID chip under the skin (t3n 2017), I am one of them. Today, data can be stored on the approximately rice-grain-sized implants, such as the health file, links to your favorite music or social profiles. Anything you do with a hotel room card can be done by the chip; provided that the card typewriter at the hotel reception is compatible with it. Anything a credit card can do, if you pay contactless at the supermarket checkout, the chip can. From insider conversations, I know that the big credit card companies are still hesitant, but a notable German bank is working on allowing a banking process to allow the cyborgs to pay contactless even without a wallet.
  • IBM announced in 2017 that it will launch the "lab on a chip" in five years. The idea: a nanochip the size of a few nanometers is injected into the blood path to permanently observe human vital or inflammatory values. Unfortunately, many deadly diseases – including breast and prostate cancer – are detected too late, as they do not cause discomfort in the early stages, when the chances of cure are still close to 100%.
  • A handful of companies are developing contact lenses that can not only increase vision up to 150% using a computer chip, but can also display virtual information such as navigation data, a football game or Wikipedia article. I also expect these lenses, which will not focus exclusively on people with visual impairment, to be ready for the market in 2022.
    In the 2030s, companies like Neuralink could launch minichips for use in the brain. The purpose: storage of thoughts in a cloud, downloading knowledge from the Internet, optimizing thinking performance based on AI.... and all these devices are connected to the Internet. Welcome to Omninet, where you and your digital twin will have their own IP address. Incidentally, your digital twin will make its own decisions and be independently liable for them as an electronic person on the basis of the legislation.

Please explain to me why, in view of these revolutionary advances of the past few decades, there is still no school subject, why employees are not regularly digitally trained, why there is no serious Digitisation Ministry and why is the old economic logic still being adhered to?

Unsorted sources

Wikipedia (2019): Digitization, online: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitalisierung, retrieved on 19.05.2019.

Wikipedia (2019): History of the computer, online: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_des_Computers, retrieved on 19.05.2019.

Wikipedia (2019): Internet, online: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet, accessed 19.05.2019.

by Kai Gondlach

Responsibility: Compensating for CO2

Welcome to the moral zone! Let's philosophize a little bit about responsibility. Today: Compensate for CO2.

When Homo Sapiens was in the 21st world. In the 19th century, we have a tremendous responsibility for the survival of the planet on which we live, whether we like it or not. To put it precisely, of course, this is not entirely true. Planet Earth doesn't care what happens on it, it already existed for a good 4.6 billion years before humanity in its present form prevailed. However, our species or future generations may well have an interest in this, including your and my descendants.

You probably ended up here because you are well educated anyway and wonder what the Gondlach now has to say about responsibility. They know that climate change is anthropogenic. You know that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are accelerating the process and that a number of behaviours we love are increasing the release of greenhouse gases, including: motorised private transport, plane travel, cruises, conventional animal agriculture (and thus, indirectly, the consumption of meat, milk, eggs and other animal products), ... And so on. In all this, you also secretly know that you could do more yourself to serve the climate. Yes me too.

(Not only) My job is characterized by numerous business trips a year. It is not always possible to avoid travelling by plane, every time I personally face a dilemma. There is only one way to convert CO2 in the atmosphere and possibly slow down the greenhouse effect: plant trees. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to do this myself, which is why I set out a few years ago to find an alternative. And I have found what I am looking for and I would like to encourage everyone to find this last resort out of the climate dilemma. In the meantime, there are some organizations that make up for their climate sins through afforestation programs around the world at least a little bit. Googling to compensate for CO2. My choice was Atmosfair.

But please do not forget that, of course, only the prevention of greenhouse gases that are harmful to the climate can save the climate. Compensating for CO2 alone cannot stop climate change.

I don't want to use the charisma of the wonderful Greta Thunberg, but her TED talk just fits in incredibly well with this post. The page also provides the transcript (in 29 languages). Sharing desired, trading recommended.

Thank you for your attention! If you have personal experiences or tips on the topic, don't shy away from the comment feature.

by Kai Gondlach

Why I like Dorothee Bär ... on flying taxis and the digitisation of mobility

There are these topics that, as a futurologist, you would rather be spared. Too exhausted are forecasts that never arrived, a too high risk of potential implausibility is associated with it. That's why we scientific futurologists analyze concrete, real existing drivers instead of nice ideas and possible utopias. Since I have been active in futurology, I have been repeatedly met with failures of the presumed prophets, visionaries, dreamers as a benchmark of my theses, because even in our relatively small industry there is already something like clan-like. One of the long-running burners: "When are there finally flying cars?" or in the political talk: Is the CSU Minister of State for Digital Dorothee Bear a baseless seer? Maybe, but the discussion has several levels. Away from power-political and legal aspects, however, I would like to focus on the two really important ones: how realistic is the vision of flying cars and what does digitalisation have to do with it?

1. Flying cars become reality, very soon!

As described at the beginning, I have personally been extremely sceptical about the issue of flying cars. For various reasons (price, regulation, technology, reach, financing) it was not enough to make a breakthrough.

However, the list of current projects and the financial resources that will be used to develop them is getting longer and longer. A few examples:

• PAL-V (Personal Air- and Land-Vehicle) from the Netherlands. The occupant currently needs a ticket to control it, which means that the flight vehicle remains rather something for the luxury segment.
• Starup Lilium, which was founded in Germany, wants to launch an electronically operated flying car very soon and make it available at the taxi fare with a smart app on demand. Range: 300 km, Speed: 300 km/h. In fact, there are other projects in this country that are only waiting for the airspace to be released, but unfortunately they are not yet ready for approval.
• Ehang from China has developed a series-ready flight taxi, which already operated the first flights in Dubai in 2017. The flying car, which has a person and a briefcase of approx. 50 km, remotely controlled from the ground. In the near future, however, the flying taxis will be able to fly passengers over city traffic stress-free as autonomous drones.
• For the time being, the aviation giant Airbus is the last, powerful player in this incomplete list. The Vahana project has been working on a flying car for several years, which made its maiden flight in the first quarter of 2018. With such financial backing, it is not difficult to imagine that road traffic will soon be moved into the air a few floors.

In view of these developments and the ongoing efforts to open up medium airspace to private aviation and drone traffic, I have for some time at last dared to seriously consider the implications and effects of flying cars. At last!

2. Digitisation is not the same as broadband internet

Back to Dorothee Bear. Unfortunately, she was heavily criticized in the public debate by saying that she wants to push ahead with digitization in Germany in the current legislature and that flying taxis are also on her agenda, to put it mildly. This moment was the first moment in a long time in which not only futurologists like me breathed a safest and longed for an end to the chronic lack of vision of German politics. For visions have an uncanny power to shape the future: they mobilize comrades-in-arms and financiers, translate ideas into plans, and break taboos that otherwise cement dangerous gridlock and convenience. Dorothee Bär has been the first German leader to publicly demonstrate that she has understood the basic mechanism of digitization. Digitalization does not only mean broadband and smart smartphones, digitalization also takes place a few floors up. In this case: in the air.

Digitisation is above all the usefulness that arises when invisible data transmission makes life easier for people. In addition to cat videos on Youtube, endless, freely accessible knowledge bases such as Wikipedia or the diagnosis of rare diseases, this also includes traffic and total mobility. Without the current state of digitalization, flying taxis would still be utopias today. But they are not. Without the technologically driven dynamics of digitalization, it would not be possible today to bring vehicles from common materials with electric motors into the air in a stable manner. Once again, the increasingly powerful computer chips play an important role – both in the vehicle itself and in the organisation of the individual vehicles as well as in materials research. Perhaps we will soon be relying #neuland and embarking on the digitized era.

3. Innovation logic of the digital era

Jules Verne was not the first to say: "Everything a human being can imagine will one day be a reality." However, this does not happen on its own. Criticism of capitalism, the existing global economic system has laid the historical foundation for providing capital to imaginative people with promising business models and to changing the world. Investments determine the realisation of visionary ideas – what sounds trivial has not yet fully arrived in Germany. This is despite the fact that many capable innovators such as Peter Thiel or Dirk Ahlborn from Germany in other parts of the world are making their ideas a reality. Our system is deliberately designed to be counter-innovative - or counter-disruptive, because we master incremental innovation very well here.

But too few risk investors dare to subsidize risky ideas, and in the event of funding, the sums rarely secure more than the first year. In this first, so important year, the corporate culture is emerging in the young start-ups ... and zack – the traditional German mentality of saving and waiting has already been implanted. Yet German companies and corporations are sitting on accumulated trillions of dollars in reserves that are just waiting to change the world! But "one" prefers to wait leisurely, optimize processes that have existed over decades and complain that the train and flight are too late. Instead of looking for fundamentally different solutions! Somehow this causal chain seems schizophrenic ... and it leads to a vicious circle at the end.

Whoever says A must also say B

Dear Dorothee Bear, if you are really serious about your digital vision, break a lance for all the motivated founders. Get the private funding landscape to take more risk and invest more money in potential startups. Otherwise, in ten years' time, everyone will complain that the German mobility companies have been disempowered by China, Silicon Valley and Qatar. In retrospect, we will be able to make the painful diagnosis that we ourselves were to blame. Then we finally have another reason to complain. I wish you and your colleagues every success in this.

So I ask you, dear public, doubters and opponents of progress, for a favor: think occasionally in opportunities rather than impossibility, think "yes, and!" instead of "yes, but", but please at least do not stand in the way of those who have their put visions into practice.

by Kai Gondlach

Why the citizen ticket is coming soon...

Since the Greens Berlin are now very intensively dealing with the topic of "citizen ticket" and are also publicly announcing this, there was a forsa survey, which was commissioned by the stern. According to this, "48 percent of German citizens support this proposal if the levy were significantly cheaper than a season ticket. About the same number, 47 percent, reject it." (Press release on the free public transport Gruner+Jahr, Stern). That is a lot more supporters than I would have expected. The often not particularly well thought-out reservations about a flat fee have always prevailed in the media coverage. This may be due to the fact that voices are often very selective.

Free public transport / citizen ticket in Berlin

The concept of the citizens' ticket of the Green Berlin provides that all Berliners can pay a monthly mobility fee of 15 euros and then use public transport "free of charge". Excluded, of course, are children, the elderly and the socially weak. In order to regulate traffic at peak times in the morning and evening hours, Berliners also have to redeem (highly discounted) tickets during this time.

That sounds quite good. The weakness is yet to come: tourists or Commuters from outside still have to draw a ticket. However, this ignores the enormous savings effect of the abolition of the distribution system (ticket machines and their maintenance, tickets, ticket controllers...), which accounts for up to 10% of sales for transport companies.

Step back: Benefits from more public transport

The whole positive effects of a significant strengthening of public transport and/or There would probably still be a shift of private transport to public transport. I have already described these (and many others) in detail elsewhere, but here is a short list:

• fewer cars on the roads
• less congestion
• less pollutant emissions
• less noise
• fewer accidents (car vs. Car, Car vs. cyclists and pedestrians)
• less land use due to transport
• overall a more positive balance of the transport sector

... many other follow-up effects, such as improved punctuality of all road users = higher overall productivity; quality of life in cities; less noise and pollutant-induced diseases = lower costs for the solidarity health system; lower total cost of the transport system, as it is distributed in solidarity – not to mention the externalised costs...
To put it in a nutshell, everyone would have something to do with this development, including cyclists and motorists. Comments like "Everyone pays my rent, whether they live there or not." (Source: Facebook page of the Berliner Morgenpost) are simply not effective.

by Kai Gondlach