Sustainability and Games
I don’t usually care much for politics, except for when the issue of the environment comes up. Then, I really care. Even skeptics of global warming have to admit that whatever’s coming out of a car’s tailpipe is not something healthy for humans or the planet we live on, at the very least.
I came across this article: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html
It’s split into three parts — a section on the history of energy, a section on automobiles, and a section on Tesla and the electric car industry. The author goes into detail about the pre-fossil fuel era, where people really didn’t understand energy but used highly sustainable forms of it, the combustion era where people used a lot more non-renewable energy, and plans for a sustainable energy era in the near future. While I was reading through all three sections, I realized that all this entire story of coal, fossil fuels, electricity, and cars is essentially one continuous game.
Take Henry Ford, for instance. There were both electric cars and gas-powered cars during his time, and neither were that appealing to the public. Gas cars were dangerous to start up, dirty, and loud. Electric cars couldn’t go very far without running out of battery and took forever to refuel. Despite these shortcomings, people had viewed electric cars as the more futuristic model as they were quieter and relatively more elegant to operate, and saw gas cars as a sort of “dead end” technology that wouldn’t get anywhere. And Ford could have agreed with them — he could have played it safe and chosen to work on the electric car instead of the gas car. He would have profited a reasonable amount that way. However, there would be little competition if he did manage to make the gas car viable. He chose to play the second option and soon developed the assembly line and the wildly-successful Model T. He also drove the electric car makers out of business.
I found it interesting that in this game, the outcomes weren’t decided simply based on the actions of the other player. The nascent automobile industry had evaluated both kinds of cars based on their respective viability, and chose electric. But Ford took his chances after seeing the choice of the other players and chose gas. Granted, he might not have won if it weren’t for his innovation, and I think this speaks volumes about his faith in his own ability to not only choose the right strategy, but to execute it.
But what Ford could not have foreseen was the forward momentum of technology and the limits of our natural resources — today, Elon Musk is playing the same game that Ford once played, being the minority electric-car voice against the industry fossil-fuel majority. And from the looks of it, Musk seems to be winning as well.