13. The Future History of Government Services
Chunka Mui
Futurist and Innovation Advisor @ Future Histories Group | Keynote Speaker and Award-winning Author
Let’s make government services as efficient and citizen friendly as any private sector company. Here are three examples of how that might look:
-- We should be able to interact with federal, state and local government to receive critical services and benefits in a completely digital, self-serve manner.?
-- We should be able vote securely and anonymously, anywhere, at any time of day (within legal parameters, of course).
-- We should have robust public infrastructure, such as roads, electricity, communications, water and waste systems, that is resilient in the face of man-made and natural threats.??????????
It’s borderline unacceptable that we don’t have these services today; it would be really crazy, given the Laws of Zero, if we didn’t have these exemplars of excellent government service (and many more) by 2050.?
In this chapter excerpt of “A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the Future We Can Proudly Leave Our Kids by 2050 ,” which I co-authored with Paul Carroll and Tim Andrews , we offer a Future History of Government Services that illustrates how such near “perfect” government service might look like by 2050.
For example, what would it look like if government were “invisible” — still there, enormous and powerful, but working in the background for us citizens efficiently and effectively, without requiring so much time and effort from us.
What would it look like if Texas suffered a far worse freeze than the one that essentially shut it down in 2021 – yet nothing troubled us (or required any of our senators to flee to Cancun)?
And, importantly, how might we get there from here? How might we invent and build that more “perfect” future of government service by 2050.
What follows is a NotebookLM-generated "deep dive" into the chapter. Then, we provide the audiobook and book excerpt of the chapter. We hope you’ll take listen and read, offer your thoughts, and upvote our aspirations for better government services.
CHAPTER 13 —The Future History of Government Services
Future History Scenario: ‘Invisible’ Government
October 1, 2050
CRYSTAL LAKE, IL – Connie Civis has just moved across the country and is getting her family settled into their new home in Illinois. As she unpacks boxes, she takes a moment to survey her new surroundings.
“A definite improvement already,” she thinks. “And wait until we get settled.”
As a veteran, Civis received a loan from the Veterans Administration to purchase her new residence. All she had to do to apply was indicate, via the Citizens.gov app on her phone, how much she wanted to borrow from the VA and provide the address of the property she hoped to buy. The app had already assembled, securely, her digital persona based on all the records the government had for her — including her service record from the Army and her income and number of dependents from her tax returns. To complete the application, she merely clicked a button on her phone that authenticated her identity. Citizens.gov queried the website of the broker who had the listing and instantly gathered all relevant information on the property. Within moments, Civis knew the size of the loan that had been approved.
She also recently applied, through Citizens.gov, for a VA grant to make some accessibility changes to her home, because she has a disability as a result of her service in the Army. Now that she has taken possession of the house, Civis gets an alert that her request for the grant has been approved and that the bank has received the funding.?
Remembering she has some other transactions pending, she authenticates herself to her phone again and logs back in to Citizens.gov to be sure her driver’s license has been transferred from California to Illinois, that her car is now registered in her new home state, and that she’s registered to vote in Illinois. Sure enough, all the needed data handoffs have happened since she told the app the house she was buying would be her permanent residence.
She sees both the IRS and California’s Franchise Tax Board have posted the drafts of her federal and state tax returns for her review. Her taxes are straightforward, and everything looks right, so she accepts both the IRS and California drafts and officially files her returns. Moments later, her bank notifies her the refunds have shown up in her account. She thinks she’ll use the money to pay for new household items — maybe a new kitchen countertop. Civis makes a mental note to check back in a week or so to make sure that her tax withholdings are correct, given her new job in Illinois comes with an increase in salary.
Before she signs out of the app, she’s prompted to see if she wants to file for federal student aid for her son, who turned 18 two months ago and is reviewing college admission offers. She clicks “yes” and receives confirmation that her son’s application has been filed. She’ll get details on the size of any loan once her son hears back from all the colleges he’s applied to and tentatively commits to a school.
Later in the day, Civis receives a notification on her mobile device asking if she’d like her new address and her household size to be included in the next American Community Survey (ACS) that will be conducted by the Census Bureau. She opts in and is asked to complete some additional questions to verify other critical demographic data for her inclusion in the survey.
Realizing that, even before finishing opening her boxes, she’s completed what not too many years ago would have been days’ worth of frustrating interactions with government agencies, she decides to take a well-earned break and heads to the refrigerator for a beer.
How we invent that future
With or without the future histories built on the Laws of Zero, governments will keep making progress, but this will likely happen slowly as they struggle to keep pace with improvements in the commercial world and with the sorts of new expectations by citizens who have been raised to expect instant access and response based on phone apps, texting, and whatever new forms of communication develop by 2050. Government agencies would also likely maintain the sort of siloed approach they take today, focusing on their own affairs and not much on working with other departments, agencies, and levels of government.
But great progress is possible if governments raise their sight lines and imagine how a Future Perfect could look — and then work backward to the sorts of measures they should be taking today to prepare. We’ll illustrate by looking at three key areas: what we call invisible government, as well as elections and infrastructure resilience.
Invisible Government
We think it’d be crazy in 2050 not to be able to interact with government to receive critical services and benefits in a completely digital, self-serve manner.?
The first three Laws of Zero — on computing, communication, and information — will make this goal possible. The basic capabilities are already there, and they’ll become far easier to tap into with the exponential improvements we’ll see by 2050. The key will be amalgamating and deploying the sort of digital identity that Connie Civis used so effectively.
At the moment, all the pieces of government data related to that identity exist… somewhere. Perhaps they’re on paper in a file cabinet in an office. Perhaps they’ve even been updated all the way to a PDF (though that’s basically just a picture of a piece of paper) on a hard drive. Perhaps the data even exists in some more advanced digital form — though good luck sharing that data across government agencies, which use a multitude of different formats for the data and may lack a secure way to share it. Those pieces can be accessed by the individual… if you stand in line at a government office or wait on hold long enough. Oh, and, of course, if you know in advance to fill out Form XYZ and have every bit of necessary documentation with you. Otherwise, you’ll have to come back tomorrow and start the whole process again.
Even without a future history sort of approach, government will make considerable progress toward pulling all that data together seamlessly and reducing inefficiency. Laws — notably the Paperwork Reduction Act of1980 — have encouraged government to take a whack at bureaucratic complexity, and there’s been steady progress. Various other laws and regulations have been aimed at smoothing interactions with citizen-customers. President Obama appointed a federal chief information officer in 2009 to take a more strategic view of how government can exploit digital technology, including on behalf of those who use its services and receive benefits. Initiatives such as Benefits.gov are masking government’s complexity and are helping citizens get simple answers to questions.
But even with the progress already underway, there’s still a benefit to stepping back and imagining a Future Perfect, because it can provide a unifying vision to aim at. We've shown the data compatibility and sharing issues can be resolved by 2050 and moved to the background, where the Laws of Zero will do the work. As you’ve also seen, we’ll have a digital identity we can trust won’t be hacked by criminals or be misused by government. This all means we can imagine a set of government services that should look pretty great — and we can start inventing them now.
Future interactions will be simpler and will be possible through voice queries via phone or computer. The bureaucracy of days past — the standing in lines, the filling out of forms, the long waits on the phone — will go away because, once you authenticate yourself, all your information is available in verified form to whatever arm of government needs it.[1] Government will save untold billions it’s currently spending on gathering data that already exists elsewhere and shuffling that data around. Those savings could then be plowed back into providing better services – provided by the same people, who get to shed their clerk-like tasks and spend much more time interacting with and assisting citizen-customers.
The appreciation for a new, seamless approach to government services will be enormous. We can all imagine how much better government services would be with an Amazon-like interface. Just imagine. Go to the main federal government site and search for something specific, if you like. Perhaps type in a general query on a keyword or two and see what turns up. Want help? Here are recommendations based on your profile and on those of others like you. Need more help? Click on the icon in the lower right corner to initiate a chat, initially with a bot but with a human expert always within easy reach.
Yes, government will still be there and be enormous and powerful, but it can do an awful lot more without requiring so much time and effort from us citizens — as Connie Civis showed us with her tax returns and loan requests. Government won’t be invisible, but it can get a lot closer than it is today.
Elections
We think it’d be crazy if you couldn’t vote securely and anonymously, anywhere, at any time of day in 2050.
While elections today are tied to paper – and, thus, to all sorts of limitations of the physical world – think about this: Every day, we send trillions of dollars around the world, conduct hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions (on Amazon alone), and make innumerable withdrawals, deposits, and credit card purchases on- and offline without paper. Those transactions are secure, and we trust that they are secure.
We conduct business at ATMs without paper forms. In fact, we can almost all simply take a picture of a check on our phones and send that picture to the bank for deposit – no deposit slip or other paper required. Restaurants and stores routinely email receipts. Venmo, PayPal, and other direct transfer apps now send around tens of billions of dollars per year without any paper involved.
If the financial system can get all these complicated and super-important transactions right, what’s so hard about conducting fraud-free elections? They’re basically just a one-time survey of the population. And why do we need paper as a backup?
Now, there is significant, and reasonable, concern over the security of electronic voting. After all, there were attempts at electronic interference by Russia and other bad actors in the 2016 and 2020 elections.[2] The hanging chads and other issues in 2000 undermined trust in voting systems, in general. More recently, cybersecurity has become a big issue across all networked systems and added to the worry about using internet voting or electronic voting at the precinct. All this has led to concern that, without human-readable paper ballots, creating a verifiable audit trail for recounts would be challenging. So we’ve run backward to a system where around 95 percent of the vote is cast with paper ballots.[3]
But there’s no evidence that the attempts at interference changed any votes in 2016 or that fraud of any sort had an effect on the 2020 results.[4] And, while internet voting is contentious, it has been in use since the 2000 election, when Booz Allen worked with the Foreign Voter Assistance Program in four U.S. counties on the U.S.’s first internet voting project.[5] Online voting is reliable, and we already know how to do it.?
Getting to the Future Perfect goal of voting anywhere, anytime requires a baseline of trust, but we’ve already shown how trust can be much more robust, without paper. We’ll be able to easily identify ourselves to the voting system, and the system will be fully up-to-date regarding who is eligible. At the moment, issues occur in updating voter rolls because it takes time for one government system to notify systems involved in the electoral process that someone has died or moved. Confusion occurs because of people with the same or similar names or because of typos and other mistakes that are introduced as information gets transferred into government systems from the paper forms people fill out. But those errors and timing issues are gone in the Future Perfect, thanks to the profusion of computing and communication power and the unlimited access to accurate information.
Now, even a minor problem with online voting could be used to cast doubt on the whole enterprise. But the capabilities for secure online voting will be so strong as we move toward 2050 that heading in that direction is inevitable. Look at professional tennis, where super-fast, high-resolution cameras combined with super-fast computers have replaced humans and call the lines almost perfectly – there is currently a one-millimeter margin for error, but the computers are so much better that players accept the electronic calls.[6] When is the last time you saw a player pull a John McEnroe “You cannot be serious” with an umpire? Players needed a brief stretch to get comfortable with the technology, then the tantrums just disappeared.
In elections, three key phases need to be addressed to get us to the Future Perfect: registration, the voting itself, and the post-election auditing. Let’s delve into them.
Voter registration
Political issues aside, registration needs to be accurate – and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be. Problems of identity can, as noted in the chapter on trust, be solved by triangulation, and we’re already starting to see this happening with voter registration. For example, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is already in use by 30 states and Washington, DC.[7] ERIC, a nonprofit formed by the states and the PEW Charitable Trusts, consolidates several sources of data, including state vehicle registration, USPS address information, and the Social Security records of deaths. ERIC then triangulates information to identify individuals who have moved or died. Thus, ERIC identifies eligible voters who aren’t registered to vote, as well as the names of those who are no longer ineligible. As data formats standardize across government and as the Laws of Zero provide additional computing power, even more detailed and accurate triangulation will become possible.
We can already see glimmers of the prospects for this kind of public-private partnership, via automatic voter registration, which began in the late 2010s, often triggered when a vehicle is registered with the state.[8] Data from the registration can be checked and then used to register the owner to vote – if the owner isn’t registered already and wants to be. Voter registration increases dramatically where an automatic system is implemented. (This approach is part of the growing movement to use behavioral economics to “help us help ourselves.”[9])
The Future Perfect will thus resolve today’s conflict, where some argue voting needs to be more secure, while others focus on making sure all those eligible to vote have their rights protected. In the Future Perfect, all those, and only those, entitled to vote will be authenticated as able to cast a ballot. In the language of the debate going on today: Everyone voting will be required to show voter-ID – and every eligible voter will be able to do so. ??
Casting the Vote
It’s hard to imagine that our use of paper ballots won’t become a source of late-night comedy. Having to get to a voting precinct within limited hours, wait in line, and correctly fill in a paper ballot will seem quaint.[10] And today’s in-person voting tends to exacerbate disparities of access based on race and economics.[11] [12] For those with disabilities, the use of paper ballots is especially vexing, given disabled persons’ difficulties getting to a voting place and, for some, challenges with marking paper ballots.[13] Remote voting is already supported in every state, because it’s required for those in the armed services who are deployed out of state, and most states support early voting by mail for the entire population, so many of the mechanisms for online voting are already in place.?
How would it work? Well, there are two parts to casting a vote: 1) authentication of the voter’s ID and right to vote and 2) the actual casting of the vote. Authentication is already done in many in-person settings via electronic poll books combined with some sort of ID.[14] These poll books rely on multi-factor electronic authentication, which is far more reliable than a signature match, the standard used for most mail-in ballots today, and these systems are scalable over the internet. They’re already much less costly than other current systems.
The big concern over the last few elections has been that electronic votes are more easily hacked than paper ballots – but an electronic audit trail can be created and secured via multiple backups. Those backups can be used to check the validity of internet voting systems, just as a paper trail was used to validate the counting of the unfairly maligned Dominion voting machines following the 2020 elections. Some complain that electronic voting makes it difficult for the voter to review the ballot and be assured it was counted – but that’s just an interface issue of the sort that web-based designs solve all the time.
Online ballots can also be live, meaning you could click on, say, the titles of local offices and see what issues they have decision rights over. Voting on local offices and issues would surely increase, boosting civic involvement.?
An ever-improving form of online voting can accommodate those with disabilities much more easily, both directly in the interface and by making voting available where they are. The same goes for the elderly, minorities, those who have limited access to transportation, or those who have difficulty getting to the precinct within voting hours.
Counting and Recounting
Think about it: We use paper ballots now largely because they’re hard to hack over the internet – but most are read by optical scanners, which can themselves be hacked or just not work. After the scanners register the votes electronically, we tabulate the totals… electronically. Why start with paper?
Yes, paper ballots can be recounted by humans, but paper copies of online votes are easy to print securely, if desired for backup. Banks, hospitals, governments, and all sorts of other institutions have stringent security, record retention and regular audit requirements, which they manage by creating geographically separated electronic backups and even offsite backups of computer records, all of which can be audited. Voting can follow these well-trodden paths to verify results. In fact, with the Laws of Zero in our favor, every vote can be audited using several methods in real time to provide the most robust verification of results possible in the shortest time.?
Easy voting anywhere, anytime, with airtight results. We’ll vote for that!
Infrastructure resilience
We think it would be crazy if we didn’t have robust infrastructure that is resilient in the face of man-made and natural threats in 2050.???????????
Infrastructure resilience? Why should I worry that roads, electricity, water, or other key aspects of public infrastructure might suddenly be compromised or even unavailable? Two words: toilet paper.?
In March 2020, the world changed overnight with the onset of the pandemic. Suddenly, almost everyone was asked to stay at home. Within a few weeks, shelves in stores were barren of the precious tissues. The supply chain for toilet paper simply couldn’t respond to the surge in demand from all those trips to the bathroom at home that normally would have occurred at work, a restaurant, a concert, and so on.[15]
There were many reasons behind this lack of resilience for the supply of toilet paper. The profit margins are, to make a pun, paper thin, so there is little tolerance for any excess inventory in the supply chain. Demand is generally extremely stable, so there is no incentive to create the ability to respond quickly to changes – and the pandemic required a major change, given that the toilet paper purchased for home use is not the same product businesses and public authorities buy for use outside the home. Consumers went into panic buying mode, further exacerbating the demand increase.
Virtually everything in our lives is produced through coordinated activity in supply chains, and many can’t withstand even a mild shock, let alone a pandemic. In addition to toilet paper, bicycles, appliances and many other things were in short supply at various points during the pandemic. More ominously, automobile plants had to slow or shut down production, and Apple had to delay the release of a new phone due to a shortage of computer chips4 as demand for them surged when the pandemic began to recede. Shipping containers were in short supply; ports were clogged trying to get ships in and containers unloaded; restaurants couldn't find cooks; and trucking companies couldn't find drivers.5 These issues then cascaded into other effects – e.g., the lack of trucker drivers reduced work in manufacturing and other industries because there weren’t enough drivers available to deliver the resources they needed.
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At the most serious level, lack of resilience for some infrastructure, such as the electric grid and national defense, can threaten life and security, as became so clear during the 2021 winter storm that pretty well shut down the electric grid in Texas. Climate change will continue to exacerbate infrastructure risk, including by producing more frequent and higher-intensity storms. Major flooding in the Midwest has already caused massive destruction of infrastructure, while causing crop shortages, and severely damaging military facilities in the Midwest that are vital to our national security.[16] Cyber security hacks happen daily and threaten our economic security through fraud and disruption of our financial infrastructure. A ransomware attack shut down the Colonial Pipeline for days in the spring of 2021 and cut off gasoline supplies to much of the East Coast. Then attacks shut down a major meat processor, JBS, in June. Even our essential water supply utility infrastructure has been the subject of cyber/industrial control system attacks.?
The SolarWinds cyber breach demonstrated, too, the need for more attention to our communications infrastructure.[17] Communications infrastructure has already become embedded in virtually everything and will continue to become even more critical as we create connected vehicles and add sensors in the power generation and transmission infrastructure, water infrastructure, and national defense apparatus. Satellites in low Earth orbit will help create broadband access everywhere – but will require considerable monitoring for resilience. The sheer number – tens of thousands are planned – create the potential for collisions with each other or with cosmic debris that would damage the satellites and create even more debris.
And, of course, 2020 showed the need for infrastructure resilience to cope with pandemics. Everything from hospital and health care supply chain problems to the shortages of toilet paper and other items on stores shelves could be traced to the effects of the pandemic worldwide.
Resilience is a funny thing: We assume reliability for basic services like electricity, water and broadband and may only think about the issue when disruption hits those services. We hope we’ve learned enough painful lessons, though, that we’ll start to think about resilience ahead of time rather than just rue its absence when the sort of freeze that wouldn’t even make anyone in the Dakotas blink shuts Texas down for a week.
Fortunately, the Laws of Zero are already helping and will continue to do so as computing, communications, and AI advance.?
Heading off threats begins with planning and monitoring – and help is already on the way. The incredible proliferation of sensors and exponential growth in computing and communications power will mean that buildings, grid structures, and all sorts of digital assets can be monitored like never before. Augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) will be commonplace and inexpensive, making it possible for humans to have holodeck-like visualizations with incredible detail. With advanced AI, we will be able to control even incredibly complex, critical infrastructure.
At the federal level today, the National Risk Management Center provides simulation tools, planning, and assessment for all stakeholders with critical infrastructure.[18] For instance, the center offers the Infrastructure Visualization Platform, an advanced, early AR/VR tool that uses information and imagery from across agencies to create an immersive planning environment – for instance, for special events such as the Super Bowl or a presidential inauguration. The tool is also used for infrastructure resilience planning at a regional level based on information and imagery that regional utilities and stakeholders provide.
As examples of what the Laws of Zero can do in the Future Perfect, let’s look at two key aspects of infrastructure: the energy grid and our water supply.
Energy Grid
We take electricity for granted. You plug an appliance into a socket, and you get power. But there have, in fact, been major outages in the past decade, and there are many reasons to fear more. Here are just some of the major incidents:
·????? A derecho caused massive flooding in the Midwest in 2012 and left some 5 million homes without power, in some cases for weeks.?
·????? That same year, Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast and left around twice as many people without power, again for long periods even though utility workers were brought in from around the country to help with repairs. Lower Manhattan was completely flooded, threatening major financial institutions on Wall Street. More than 150 people perished.
·????? In 2013, a group fired high-powered rifles at 17 transformers in California, in an attempt to disrupt power to Silicon Valley.[19] Had the domestic terrorists succeeded, they would have disrupted Google, Cisco, and more that support a variety of critical communications and technology functions. Those problems would have cascaded into the broader economy, hitting firms that rely on those infrastructures.
All these examples make it clear that critical infrastructure faces significant threats on a regular basis, more so in this era of more extreme flooding and more powerful storms.
Now we have to add the threat of cyber-attacks. Many critical parts of our energy grid are controlled by devices that were designed well before there was extensive digital communications and connectivity to the internet. As a result, these devices are ripe targets for cyber-attack. Often, they were installed without any thought about security, as they were physically isolated and not wired to any communications infrastructure. While there’s yet to be an acknowledged cyber-attack on the U.S. electric grid, Russian hackers took down a portion of Ukraine’s electric grid in 2015, leaving over 200,000 people without power,[20] and U.S. utilities privately estimate they are directly threatened hundreds of times every day.[21]
In response, government agencies such as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation are working with utilities on many aspects of grid resilience. A host of startups, such as Grid Assurance,[22] have arisen to attack the problem. Grid Assurance aims to help by offering a subscription service that gives utilities quick access to equipment such as transformers, which are too expensive for utilities to keep on hand in any quantity and which have long lead times for purchase. This would help electric utilities replace equipment much faster following a disruption.
More broadly, utilities are investing in areas such as “smart grids.” This involves installing new forms of the IoT that will help more accurately monitor critical infrastructure, which enables more rapid response to avoid problems. The smart grid capabilities will improve as the Laws of Zero accelerate and will result in a totally different design by 2050.[23] Over the past century, the grid has developed largely based on economies of scale, beginning at the top and cascading down. A company would produce an ever-increasing amount of coal, gas, or oil and ship it to a utility, which also would aim at the most efficient scale.[24] The result was a sort of broadcast system a la television from the 1960s, which had three national networks covering the country. Smart grids will turn that ‘60s-era broadcast model into one more like the internet, with essentially unlimited sources coordinating with each other in an everybody-to-everybody mode rather than three-to-everybody.
There will be sensors everywhere, monitoring who is producing how much and who is consuming how much, in real time. Appliances will, with the permission of their owners, cede some control to the network so that air conditioners, dishwashers, water heaters, and other major appliances can be taken offline briefly to maximize the efficiency of the whole system.[25] Individuals and businesses will receive feedback – in real time, if they want – on their energy consumption, using behavioral economics to encourage efficiency. AI will monitor the whole system for problems and reroute electricity as needed, creating a self-healing, self-balancing, self-optimizing grid.
Water and Wastewater Systems
There's little more important to human life than water. And the infrastructure that carries away our wastewater and processes it is crucial to public health, as well as to the efficient reuse of water, especially where it is in short supply.
The problems of the current system are obvious. For instance, London’s pipes leak half a billion liters of water a day, and leaks cost the U.S. more than 1 trillion gallons of water a year.[26]
Invisible government is already helping through the Creating Resilient Water Utilities (CRWU) program at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which provides planning assistance, tools, and more to water sector utilities to help them create infrastructure that is resistant to climate change.[27] CRWU also enables information sharing to accelerate learning across the community from the many different efforts at local and regional levels. The city of San Diego’s Public Utilities Department, for instance, used a CRWU tool to assess impacts from climate change, which are important to the city given its reliance on distant water supplies and the prevalence of wildfires and storm surges.[28]
As with the electric grid, the Laws of Zero will take today’s efforts and improve them exponentially by 2050. Sensors that feed into far more sophisticated management systems will, again, play a key role. Water utilities will be able to visualize the entire water system, measuring flow, usage, leakage, and more. Utilities will be able to see which leaks to fix – sometimes by sending tiny robots down pipes – and to identify bigger infrastructure issues to address.[29] A whole host of companies that are startups today but will be established companies in 2050, in the case of those that succeed, are tackling related issues, such as watching for arsenic and other contaminants and removing them from water sources before they ever reach our lips.[30],[31]
The Future Perfect for water, like for the electric grid, will be far more efficient, and resilient, than the haphazard system we have today.
***
Future History Scenario: ?Texas Freezes – and Nobody Notices
March 12, 2050
LUBBOCK, Texas – Connie Civis, having recently settled into her new home in Illinois, decided to take a well-earned vacation to visit family in Lubbock, Texas, and landed right in the teeth of a record winter storm.
It caused a far worse freeze than the one that essentially shut Texas down way back in 2021 – yet nothing troubled her vacation.
Having long ago learned about the need to prepare for surprise weather events, Texas utilities winterized their electricity generation. In 2021, natural gas pipes and even piles of coal froze and were unusable. But, today, sensor-driven AI reallocated power to keep the grid working, drawing both on local sources of power (individuals’ and businesses’ batteries, charged by solar and wind) and on connections with surrounding states.
With so much power available, heating never became a problem in the state. Nor did access to water, as it had in 2021. Yes, this time around the roads were still icy for a few days, but the automated vehicles that used them had seen that problem before, not just in Texas but around the world, and had no trouble navigating. Civis took an AV from the airport to her parents’ home and gave them both a big hug.
Footnotes:
[1] Data architecture will enhance the security of the information. The IRS won’t have to send all of Connie Civis’ tax information to authenticate her loan application, for example. It’ll keep all her information within its walls, subject to all the security it can provide, and just answer questions that authorized institutions pose about income level, dependents, etc.?
[6] One of your authors has called a side line in a match involving two soon-to-be Grand Slam champions and is more than confident that the machines are superior. Even assuming he got all the calls right when his view wasn’t obstructed, you try looking through a player’s legs while he’s lunging for a 120mph serve that maybe clipped the outside of the line 50 feet away from you. The machines are more than welcome to that job.
[12] The need for remote schooling during the pandemic showed how greatly race and economic status also affect access to computers and WiFi, but that problem will disappear by 2050 because of the Laws of Zero that will deliver free(ish) computing and communication, so electronic access won’t be an issue for voting.
[15] https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the-toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0
[20] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/inside- cunning-unprecedented-hack-ukraines-power-grid
[25] This control of major appliances may be more complicated than utilities hoped. When the Texas grid struggled during a heat wave in the summer of 2021 – the Texas grid had a rough year – many customers expressed surprise that they had given the grid managers permission to turn down their air conditioning.?
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