Harari on Covid, Shipping in Pandemic and Tech-battles
Three recent essays that I found interesting:
If you are searching for a good primer on what’s happening with the global shipping trade during the pandemic, then this short commentary in NYT makes for a good read. In brief, the links in the shipping supply chain are all stretched given the demand, often skewed, generated during the pandemic. As a result, while Maersk had record earnings, other companies that are dependent on shipping are finding it hard to score containers to ship their products. For instance, Peloton which has seen an increased demand in its exercise bikes are now scouting for air routes to ship them from China (where it’s manufactured) to the US (where the demand is generated). The demand for containers in Asia has resulted in empty containers being shipped back from the US coasts, which in turn has left the US agri-manufacturers stranded.
Yuval Noah Harari wrote this piece in FT on lessons learned from a year of Covid. He highlights, unsurprisingly, the power of automation and the internet that has made lockdowns viable across most of the developed world, including agriculture, where most of the ‘farm work is done by machines, which are immune to disease’. The same has happened with shipping, where ‘largely automated present-day container ships can carry more tons than the merchant fleet of an entire early modern kingdom’. While these are some of the positives, Harari highlights that not all (political) decisions can be backed solely with scientific, fact-based analysis. He argues that although imposing lockdowns helps contain the spread, the impact such lockdowns have on the mental health of the populace is ignored. For example, he asks to consider, “How many people will experience depression if we do impose a lockdown?” Harari makes a point on digital surveillance, which has become more legitimate in the pandemic year. However, he argues that we shouldn’t allow data to be concentrated in the hands of a few organisations. The takeaway for me from this essay was that while we should be proud of the technological advances that have protected us during the pandemic, we will need a strong political backbone and structure to ensure the safeguarding of our digital infrastructure.
An excellent deep-dive appeared in The Economist last week on the battle of tech giants, primarily, Alphabet, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. While they all have their cores (search, handsets, social media, and e-commerce), the incumbents are losing the market share to the second and third players. Moreover, increasingly these tech giants are stepping onto each other’s shoes while expanding into new areas (for instance, AI and cloud computing). As a result, while they continue to profit from their core, all these players will increasingly start selling the same products and services, albeit on the back of different business models (for instance, giving away the service for free in lieu of data). Some of the fiercest battles, The Economist speculates, will be fought in the space of AI (including voice assistants and self-driving cars) and club computing. Again, the essay makes for an excellent primer on what’s brewing in the tech industry.
A quote that I came across last week:
In an unpredictable world, a good routine is a safe haven of certainty.
