VUCA Waymo
Strong Towns member Johnny Sanphillippo blogs at Granola Shotgun. This post is republished from his blog with permission.
I’m prone to going down YouTube rabbit holes that take me to unexpected places. I recently eavesdropped on a Zoom conference where a woman in rural Idaho was strategizing on the global dairy trade. Turns out Mormon farmers are locked in a dog-eat-dog international competition over bulk milk commodities and specialty cheeses. New Zealand is their prime nemesis. Who knew?
She used a term I hadn’t heard before to describe the situation. VUCA. It’s a military acronym that’s been in circulation since the 1980s. Vulnerable, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. The bright clear lines are gone. The black and white is all gray. Standing still isn’t an option. But running is tricky if you bob and weave in the wrong directions. The viability of a dairy farm in small town America is oddly tied to events and policies on the other side of the planet—and they keep changing rapidly in unexpected ways.
You wouldn’t think a highly perishable product like milk would be exposed to global pressures. Isn’t milk produced and consumed more or less locally? Then I got a flashback to my time living in Hawaii. The highly productive and climactically varied agricultural land of the island chain could easily supply the small population with all its own food including milk. But Hawaii imports 90% of its food, including 100% of its milk from 3,000 miles away.
Land and labor are expensive in Hawaii and the small family owned dairies that had existed all across the state in past decades were gradually consolidated in an attempt to achieve economies of scale. When farms are scattered and separated by water, amalgamating operations has inherent limits. There’s only so much sharing of equipment and processing facilities that can be reached. And since there are only 1,400,000 people in the entire state the market is considered “too small” to support a home industry. Eventually corporate owners converted the territory to higher value uses and local milk production ended completely.
The milk that’s sold in shops in Hawaii is double pasteurized and imported by refrigerated ships from the mainland, typically from the port in Seattle. It’s at least two weeks old before it ever hits the shelf. If the milk is purchased on any of the outer islands it’s even older because it needs to make a second refrigerated barge voyage from the central port in Honolulu to the smaller ports on the periphery. A gallon of milk in Hawaii will generally cost north of $9. That same jug of milk in Idaho is closer to $2.29. I could go down another rabbit hole about the monopolies involved in the Hawaiian shipping industry and the Jones Act, but I’ll save that for another day.
Would anyone like to guess what the single largest Hawaiian crop is today? Back in the 1990s both sugar and pineapple production were shut down and moved to lower cost parts of the world—mostly in Latin America. Today seed corn is the big cash crop—twice as large as the next two crops (coffee and Macadamia nuts) combined. All that corn planted in Iowa and Nebraska each spring is grown in Hawaii by a German multinational chemical company and transported across an ocean and a continent to ensure a successful harvest in the fall. It makes total sense from a corporate accounting perspective. But like milk production the whole system seems…fragile.
Cut to the streets of San Francisco where there’s a continuous flow of prototype self driving cars going through their paces. They are everywhere in my neighborhood. These test vehicles are slowly teaching the Artificial Intelligence how to drive in real world conditions. Waymo, a division of Google’s parent company, is one of many enterprises creating autonomous vehicle fleets which are expected to completely change the nature of transportation.
Waymo’s website is almost entirely devoted to the issue of safety and how much accidental death and loss can be eliminated by replacing human drivers with AI. And they’re probably right. I’m 100% certain a machine is a better driver than I am. (That’s a really low bar—ask anyone who’s ever been in the passenger seat with me.) But it’s hard to make money cultivating road safety. The multi-billion dollar investments in this technology are in anticipation of a new economic model. Instead of paying people to drive trucks, taxis, school buses, and delivery vans society will pay fees to The Cloud.
But here’s where VUCA comes in to play. A few months ago Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, one of Iran’s most important nuclear scientists, was assassinated by a computer guided machine gun mounted on the back of an autonomous Nissan pickup truck. His wife was beside him and was unscathed by the bullets. Facial recognition software was most likely in play. Once Fakhrizadeh was down the Nissan promptly blew itself up destroying much of the evidence. The usual suspects have been blamed. Israel, the US, the Saudis… No surprise there.
So what are the long term consequences of these new techniques once they mutate and “democratize?” What if all the otherwise servile pieces of machinery in our lives can be animated remotely by just about anyone on the planet with the right combination of technology, budget, and desire to “move fast and break things?”
We think it’s cool when the SmartFridge communicates directly with the Amazon Prime account so Whole Foods deliveries become seamless. We can tap and swipe our cell phones from anywhere and turn on our lights or air conditioner back home. But then so can all sorts of other people—many of which aren’t even people.
We’ve already entered the VUCA Waymo World. It sounds like a trendy new dance from Brazil. I’m sure there are coordinated hand gestures involved. And we’re all going to learn them sooner than we think. For better. And worse.
Cover image via Electric Motor Engineering
