We are approaching the end of 2024, a very troubled year for many reasons, in particular geopolitics and consequent serious geoeconomics situations across the world. As our readers know, we never talk about politics unless this has direct effects on future visions, technology, innovative services, etc. so I am not going to do it this time.
If I had to summarise 2024 with two topics that have been very popular during the entire year, I would mention the automotive sector – with specific focus on electrification – and ChatGPT alongside Artificial Intelligence (AI).
We have read a lot about these two topics that I would like to briefly discuss.
Automotive/electrification – as never happened before in the recent decades, the automotive industry went through a very complicated moment. Initially (around 2022-23), the biggest challenge was the design and introduction of autonomous vehicles.
Despite many attempts from many car makers, we still have the level 2 automation installed, where vehicles can do some automatic manoeuvres for a short time (e.g. parking in and out of a slot, maintaining a cruise speed on motorway while monitoring what the vehicle ahead is doing), but the miracles we have been waiting for – such as reading the newspaper on board the vehicle while it drives us to the office – they are still to come into our daily life.
Competition is in place, but it is not that disruptive as it was imagined in the past.
The real disruption was caused by the mandatory electrification of vehicles by 2030 induced by the European Commission some years ago. During 2024 the major European car manufacturers realised that, despite huge efforts to comply with these rules, they will not be ready for a total transition from Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) to fully electric vehicles (Battery-equipped Electric Vehicles-BEV) by that date. This has generated an avalanche effect on the industry with Volkswagen that announced the closure of two plants (then suspended for 1 year), Stellantis that lost a lot of money and their share costs collapsed in Dec 2024, Renault that launched two new EVs recalling star models from the past such as the R4 and R5 to make it more exciting. Nevertheless, all companies are suffering from the Chinese competition that is way more advanced than the European one from many points of view.
As many already discussed, without governmental incentives – as Norway did very efficiently – it is difficult to promote EVs sales taking into account the high prices they have. I discussed this topic in a few editorials in the past and, unfortunately, little has changed in the meantime.
The only feasible approach would be modifying ICE to enable them to use additional kinds of fuels (e.g. bio-fuels) and leave more time to plan the transition to electrification properly and in a cheaper way.
By the way, the Chinese CATL has recently launched a battery swapping station that intends to solve the issue of long waiting times for charging batteries: EVs can have their batteries swapped with fully charged ones within 110 seconds…
ChatGPT and AI – the other 2024 topic was the generative language software and Artificial Intelligence that could replace human interactions in a number of activities and services.
While ChatGPT could write articles, homeworks, even books, specific AI applications could generate pictures whose subjects are real, but their actions are not. Their levels of accuracy are continuously increasing and pretty soon it will be difficult to understand whether a pictures or a text are genuine or artificially generated.
Personally, I am not too much worried that these technologies will reduce the opportunities of employments as some analysists predict. As a matter of fact, every single invention in the last three centuries killed some jobs, but generated new jobs requiring different/more advanced skills.
What worries me, instead, is the risk of living in a fake world, if these technologies are not properly supervised and, sometimes, regulated. The additional risk I see is the creativity and abilities of the human beings: AI should help enhance them by giving people more tools and not reduce them by performing any activity with omnipresent AI-based tool suitably designed to the specific scope.
In the end, the values of human beings are invaluable.
Stefano Mainero
EPN Consulting and EPN Consulting Research and Innovation Founder & CEO
Article written by human beings without any use of AI. EPN Consulting Ltd. copyright 2024
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