Brick by Brick by (Smart) Brick

I’m an innovation junkie, the further out there the better, but every so often it’s good to be reminded that just because a company has been around for a while, innovation is still possible.

Two examples: LEGO® and Kodak.

Let’s start with LEGO. If you are around any small children – and perhaps not even all that small – you probably have seen them playing with Legos. Legos have been around, in various incarnations, for longer than I’ve been alive, and that’s saying something. Most adults watching kids assemble their Legos probably have two reactions: “gosh, I wish they’d make them even more complicated” (note to the oblivious reader – that was sarcastic), and “well, at least they’re not on their screens.”

So I bet a lot of us have a slightly surprised reaction to Lego’s announcement today to CES 2026: LEGO SMART Play™.

The key innovation is the SMART Brick, which “is packed with technologies that bring play to life including sensors, accelerometers, light sensing and a sound sensor as well as a miniature speaker driven by an onboard synthesiser, and much more, in addition to easy wireless charging.” All that is powered by a custom chip, which is smaller than one of the studs on a LEGO brick.

The LEGO Group states: “Without any setup, SMART Bricks are magically ‘aware’ of each other’s positions and orientations in 3D space, thanks to a novel, high-accuracy, magnetic positioning system. They can also communicate via a self-organising network that adapts to play. Advanced onboard systems let SMART Bricks comprehend and interact with each other, as well as the fans building with them.” “Magic” in this context meaning Bluetooth.

Nerdist calls it “the most exciting innovation in screenless play ever.”  

“For over 90 years, the LEGO Group has sparked imagination and creativity in children around the globe. As the world evolves, so do we— innovating to meet the play needs of each new generation. LEGO SMART Play™ is the next exciting chapter in our LEGO System in Play and something we are super excited about being able to bring to the world at this scale,” said Julia Goldin, Chief Product & Marketing Officer of the LEGO Group.

Tom Donaldson, Senior Vice President & Head of Creative Play Lab at the LEGO Group said “The launch of LEGO SMART Play™ brings creativity, technology, and storytelling together to make building worlds and stories even more engaging, and all without a screen. We truly believe we are setting a new standard for interactive, imaginative experiences and can’t wait to see this innovation in the hands of kids when we launch this year.”

LEGO is partnering with Disney and Lucasfilm for three ‘All-In-One' LEGO Star Wars™ building sets, featuring SMART Bricks, SMART Tags, and Smart Minifigures that “power the system and allow builders’ creations to become interactive, responding to actions with appropriate sounds and behaviours, allowing for a truly responsive play experience.” LEGO being LEGO, of course it’s all compatible with existing LEGO Systems-in-Play.   

The three initial sets are building sets for the Red Wing X-Wing, the Darth Vader TIE Fighter™, and the Throne Room Duel & A-Wing™, and will be available March 1. 

Nerdist’s Rotem Rusak raves:  

But just because a form of play doesn’t involve screens doesn’t mean it can’t evolve or incorporate the cool technologies at our disposal today. LEGO SMART Play isn’t trying to transform LEGO into something it isn’t. Although its technology is awesome, the purpose of it isn’t just to create new tech, but to enhance the traditional play that has always been at the heart of the LEGO brand.

She adds: “This is truly a beautiful way to use technology. The LEGO Group is putting technological advancements to work to bolster something that is already so good, rather than trying to rewrite or erase it, as we’ve seen happen in so many other arenas.”

That’s a beautiful way to do innovation.

Then there’s Kodak. When I saw a headline in Digital Camera World naming Kodak the “comeback king of 2025,” and another review calling the Kodak PIXPRO C1 as the hottest camera of the year, my first reaction wasn’t “how nice for them,” but rather: “wait -- Kodak is still around?”

To those of us of earlier generations, Kodak was the Apple of its day.  Bold, innovative, well-designed, omnipresent. With the advent of digital cameras and then mobile phone cameras, though, it was generally thought to have lost its mojo and, indeed, I can be forgiven for assuming it had curled up into bankruptcy or worse. Don Stapley in DCW explains:  

The comeback king has been revitalizing its fortunes largely by betting big on its ultra-cheap PixPro line of compact cameras – you know, the kind of camera we were all assured was dying out. The company that first made its name with point-and-shoot cameras a century ago is doing so once again.

Chris Gampat’s review in The Phoblographer gushes: “Make no mistake, the Kodak PIXPRO C1 is a camera that feels so much like the early iPhone if it was stuffed into a camera body.” Mr. Gampat further tells us: “Photography doesn’t need to be that serious all the time…The Kodak PIXPRO C1 is a wonderful reminder of that in a time when the world around us is burning.” 

Japanese photo retailer Map Camera listed the Kodak PixPro FZ55 as the best selling camera of the year. Kodak even has a global licensing program,  which, as The Washington Post reports, is particularly popular in South Korea.

Kodak PixPro FZ55. Credit: Kodak

That is not to say that all is sunshine and roses in Rochester. Its second quarter 2025 financial results warned that its various debt obligations “raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern as of the issuance date of the Company’s second quarter financials,” although its 3^rd quarter results belied those concerns.

The point is, with all its history and with all the headlines against it, Kodak is still finding ways to innovate in its space, not by being the flashiest or having the most modern tech, but building on its brand and delivering the experiences customers are looking for.

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Not everything has to be AI. Not everything even has to involve screens. Not everything has to include the latest tech. Here’s to innovations that, as Ms. Rusak says, “work to bolster something that is already so good, rather than trying to rewrite or erase it,”  

We Might Have Renewed Energy Next Year

It’s the time of year when many people like to either look back at the previous year, or outline their hopes and goals for the new year. Well, 2025 was way too depressing to recap all the reasons why, and I’m afraid many of them will still be true in 2026. But there is one area where, despite the Trump Administration’s headwinds, the future appears promising. That area is renewable energy.

It is the dawn of a new day for renewable energy. Credit: Microsoft Designer

On the face of it, one might think that renewable energy is losing the war against the Trump Administration. President Trump has long criticized, even ridiculed, wind energy, and recently threw the wind industry in turmoil by halting five wind farms under construction, citing unspecified “national security” concerns (developers are, of course, suing).  The “Big, Beautiful” tax bill ended EV tax credits. The EPA cancelled a $7b Solar for All program (it is being sued as well).  Grim days for renewables, right?

So why did Science list renewable energy as its “Breakthrough of the Year”? 

Let’s take a look at a few developments that you might have missed had you only been watching Fox News:

• Energy think tank Ember reported that, in the first half 2025, renewables overtook coal as a source of electricity, for the first time ever.
• According to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, for the first third of 2025 solar and wind accounted for 96% of new U.S. power generation. In fact, solar has been the largest source of new generating capacity each month since September 2023.
• An analysis of the U.S. Energy Information Administration data shows that renewable sources provided 26% of U.S. electricity for the first ten months of 2025 – and that all net new generating capacity in 2026 would come from renewables.  
• A quarter of all new car sales worldwide are EVs.
• Worldwide, investments in clean energy are twice those invested in fossil fuels.

To be fair, there is an increasing dichotomy between what is happening in the U.S. versus the rest of the world.  The U.S. has become even more dependent on fossil fuels for electricity, in part because demand is rising faster than renewable increases. U.S. EV sales have plateaued at 10%. Those wind farms aren’t going to build themselves.

There may be a renewable revolution going on, but it is not one the Trump Administration has much interest in.

Still, as Pavan Venkatakrishnan, policy advisor at The Foundation for American Innovation, told NPR, it "may not love renewable technologies, but they're going to need them to meet the data center demand [and] also maintain energy affordability for all consumers." He added: "It is not climate goals or imperatives primarily driving the need to build out renewables. It is literally, 'What are you able to get on the grid as quickly as possible?'"

Long reliant on fossil fuels for its economy, China has vowed to cut carbon emissions by doubling down on renewable energy. As Tim Appenzeller reports for Science, China has gone all in: “After years of patiently nurturing the sector through subsidies, China now dominates global production of renewable energy technologies. It makes 80% of the world’s solar cells, 70% of its wind turbines, and 70% of its lithium batteries, at prices no competitor can match.”

“China really mastered this … with the help of the scale of its economy, its manufacturing capacity, and the fierce competition right at home,” Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Mr. Appenzeller. However, lest you think that China is inventing the industry, Mr. Li notes that it “more or less relying on the same core [solar] technology that the United States invented half a century ago.

Sigh.

Here's a startling fact: Mr. Appenzeller reports that in 2024 China installed new solar and wind generation that were the equivalent of 100 nuclear plants. The U.S. has only built two in the last ten years, and, despite a Trump Administration effort to build more, faster, they can take decades to happen.

Author Bill McKibben told The Guardian:

…we’ve had 35 years of a full-on disinformation campaign from the fossil fuel industry about climate change, about alternative energy, all designed to drive home the idea that only the way that we’re doing things now could possibly work. And that’s sunk in with too many people, especially in this country, but the rest of the world is quickly shaking off that habit.

Economic self-interest drives this; Mr. McKibben says: “As long as you rely on a source of power that’s only available in a few places, the people who control those places will end up with inordinate wealth and power.” E.g., he lists John D. Rockefeller, Putin, the Koch brothers, and the king of Saudi Arabia as examples.

China’s dominance in renewable energy manufacturing means that The Global South and Southeast Asia are turning even more to China, which has all sorts of geopolitical implications. “For people who were asking, ‘How am I going to keep the lights on in my home,’ it was a very obvious choice,” Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Mr. Appenzeller.

Mr. McKibben is harsh in his criticism of how the U.S. has treated the renewable revolution:

You could tell watching the climate talks this year in Belém, Brazil, that people are sort of moving past the US, like we’re sort of receding into the rearview mirror. It’s becoming clearer and clearer where the future lies.

As patriotic Americans, that should upset us. These technologies were all invented in the US. The first solar cell in 1954 at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The first industrial wind turbine in 1941 at Grandpa’s Knob in Vermont. We could have owned these technologies, and instead we’ve just ceded them to our theoretical main rival on this planet. I don’t think there’s been an act of national self-sabotage quite like this that I can think of anywhere in human history.

Mr. Appenzeller believes that renewables have gone from a virtuous thing to do to being a rational thing to do: “Now, the real driver is self-interest: lower cost and greater energy security.” Accordingly, “To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.”

So, bravo to renewables and to the people who are making them happen. I just wish more of it was happening here.

Tiger Moms, Beware

We all love the idea of a child prodigy. Mozart was playing an instrument by three and composing by five. Bobby Fisher was playing chess by six. Gauss confounded his elementary school teachers with his math skills. Norbert Wiener published his first paper at eleven. Tiger Woods famously showed his golf skills on The Mike Douglas Show at age two.

Most of us weren’t child prodigies, of course, but who wouldn’t want their child to be one, and what parent doesn’t scrutinize their child’s abilities in hoping of identifying and then encouraging any special talents they might show signs of. We even have a name for parents who actively push their children towards early achievement: “tiger moms” (or, to be less sexist, “tiger parents”).

It turns out that, the above examples notwithstanding, being a child prodigy may not be such a great thing after all, and tiger parenting may be the opposite of the best way to develop world class talents.

New research by Güllich, et. al. -- “Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance” -- offers a sobering reassessment about how exceptional talent is developed. The researchers reanalyzed data on almost 35,000 top performers in a variety of fields, including Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, Olympic medalists, the world's best chess players, and the most renowned classical music composers. They wanted to find the answer to two key questions:

(i) Are exceptional performers at young ages and at later peak performance age largely the same individuals? And (ii) do predictors of young exceptional performance also predict later exceptional peak performance?

Long story short, the answer to both questions appears to be “no.”

"Traditional research into giftedness and expertise did not sufficiently consider the question of how world-class performers at peak performance age developed in their early years," said Professor Güllich, professor of sports science at RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau,. The new research found that, contrary to expectations and across the diverse fields, a common set of patterns emerged, with three key findings:

1. “Early exceptional performers and later exceptional performers within a domain are rarely the same individuals but are largely discrete populations over time.
2. Most top achievers (Nobel laureates and world-class musicians, athletes, and chess players) demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years.
3. The pattern of predictors that distinguishes among the highest levels of adult performance is different from the pattern of predictors of early performance.”

E.g., just because your child plays the violin well at five doesn’t ensure he/she will become a virtuoso as an adult. World class performers typically develop slowly but continue to progress as they get older. And focusing too early on a particular skill or field may be counterproductive.

Copyright: Gullich, Barth, Hambrick, Macnamara

Coauthor Brooke Macnamara, a psychology professor at Purdue University, explains:

A very popular theory for quite a while was the deliberate practice theory, or the 10,000-hour rule — so with 10,000 hours of practice, anyone can become an expert. It turns out that people who start early, focus in on a single discipline and engage in a lot of discipline-specific practice tend to outperform people with less practice early on. They have these fast improvements, but interestingly, if you look across a career, then a lot of these people who were early top performers do continue to do well, but usually people who were doing well but not as well often surpass them. If you look at world-class performers, they tend to have started later compared to national-class performers. These are clear distinctions across top areas — the No. 1 tennis player in the world versus the No. 200 player. The No. 200 player may be professional and playing for a living, but they haven’t made it to the Olympics.

We’ve started finding this in other disciplines as well, so if you look at Nobel laureates compared to national-class awardees in the sciences, they tended to have engaged in disciplines other than the field in which they got the award, more so than the national-class counterparts. They also didn’t look as impressive early on. So, if you look at Nobel laureates compared to nominees, the citation counts are higher among nominees early on, but then it flips. We see these trajectories that differ when we’re looking at the highest echelons. Deliberate practice doesn’t explain that. It does a great job explaining young performance and sub-elite performance but not world-class performance.

The researchers propose three hypotheses to explain their findings:

• “The search-and-match hypothesis suggests that experiences with different disciplines improve one's chances of finding an optimal discipline for oneself over the years.
• The enhanced-learning-capital hypothesis implies that varied learning experiences in different disciplines enhance one’s learning capital, which improves the performer’s subsequent ongoing learning at the highest level in a discipline.
• And the limited-risks hypothesis suggests that multidisciplinary engagement mitigates risks of career-hampering factors, such as misbalanced work-rest ratios, burnout, being stuck in a discipline one ceases to enjoy, or injuries in psychomotor disciplines (sports, music).”

Professor Güllich suggests: “Those who find an optimal discipline for themselves, develop enhanced potential for long-term learning, and have reduced risks of career-hampering factors, have improved chances of developing world-class performance.”

I can hear all those kids stuck in math camp rebelling.

That's not the right way. Credit: Microsoft Designer

So what are parents interested in maximizing their kids’ lifelong achievements to do?  Professor Güllich says: “Here’s what the evidence suggests: Don't specialize in just one discipline too early. Encourage young people and provide them opportunities to pursue different areas of interest. And promote them in two or three disciplines… This may enhance opportunities for the development of world-class performers—in science, sports, music, and other fields.”

It's exciting to identity talent early. It’s rewarding to try to fan that spark of talent. But it’s all too easy to burn it out too soon, and to ignore other signs of talent that weren’t as obvious as early.

Whether you or your children are going to be world class or not, there are some good lessons here: Be curious. Try many things. Don’t get discouraged prematurely. And perhaps try harder to be sympathetic with child prodigies, not envious.  

 

China, China, China

Perhaps you, like me, read with some concern the news that, after some negotiations with China and much pleading from Nvidia CEO Jenson Huang, President Trump is allowing Nvidia to sell its second best AI chip to China. Hmm, isn’t China going to use them to compete even more on AI and other crucial new technologies? Well, others might argue, we do need their rare earth minerals, the President says it will be good for trade, plus the U.S. is supposedly getting a 25% cut of the sales. And anyway, they might add, we’re the U.S.: it’s only the second best chip, and we’ll keep innovating our way to the top.

The U.S. is in a technology race with China - and ma not be winning. Credit: Microsoft Designer

That last statement is not quite as clear as it might once have been. The 2025 Critical Technology Tracker, done by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), looks at 74 current and emerging technologies – and found that China is ranked number one in 66 of them. That’s 90%. ASPI added ten new emerging technologies to its 2024 report, including advanced computing and communication, artificial intelligence, and emerging neurotechnologies relevant to human-machine integration.

ASPI’s special report on the findings, written by Jenny Wong-Leung, Stephan Robin and Linus Cohen, was blunt:

The updated picture is stark. China’s exceptional gains in high-impact research are continuing, and the gap between it and the rest of the world is still widening. In eight of the 10 newly added technologies, China has a clear lead in its global share of high-impact research output. Four—cloud and edge computing, computer vision, generative AI and grid integration technologies—carry a high technology monopoly risk (TMR) rating, reflecting substantial concentration of expertise within Chinese institutions.  

Just to be clear, the report focuses not on how well the countries are implementing the technologies but on the high impact research in them, as measured by the ten percent most cited research papers in them between 2020 and 2025. This is research pointing to the future.

The ASPI authors write: “The historical data for these new technologies tells a familiar story: an early and often overwhelming US lead in research output in the opening decade of this millennium, eroded and then outmatched by persistent long-term Chinese investment in fundamental research.”

“China has made incredible progress on science and technology that is reflected in research and development, as well as in publications,” Ilaria Mazzocco, an expert on China’s industrial policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Nature’s Xiaoying You. ASPI’s Dr. Wong-Leung also told her that democratic nations were at risk of losing “hard-won, long-term advantages in cutting-edge science and research.”

The report indicates that the U.S. still holds the lead in top tier tech research talent, but that probably does not reflect the recent “brain drain” caused by the Trump Administration’s war on science as The Washington Post recently reported on.

In a new Goldman Sachs report, The U.S. China Tech Race, Mark Kennedy, Founding Director, Wahba Initiative for Strategic Competition at New York University’s Development Research Institute, was asked if the role of technology in the U.S.- China strategic rivalry was overstated, and he responded:

The role of technology is not being overplayed. Technology isn’t just at the center of the US-China rivalry—it’s the central switchboard. Whoever controls how technology, data, and computing power are routed will impact every domain—from military might, to economic influence, to the flow of information

Mr. Kennedy believes the U.S. is still leading in the most advanced technologies – he and ASPI will have to discuss that – but agrees that China is making great strides to catching and sometimes overtaking the U.S. Moreover, he notes, “China is also dominating on the global installations front.”   

He urges:

…the US must more broadly move beyond its historically laissez-faire approach toward technology and lean into winning the tech competition across all arenas. This means significantly increasing investment in research and development, reversing the recent trend of stagnant or declining university funding, and easing restrictions that hinder the entry of global talent.

From his lips to Trump’s ears.

In the same report, GS Chief China Economist Hui Shan discusses how China’s most recent Five Year Plan (FYP) three key areas of development:

• “chokehold technologies,” including integrated circuits, industrial machine tools, high-end instruments, basic software, advanced materials, and biomanufacturing;
• “emerging industries,” including new energy technologies, advanced materials, aerospace, and the low-altitude economy (i.e., drones and urban air mobility;
• “future industries,” including quantum technology, biomanufacturing, hydrogen energy and nuclear fusion, brain-computer interfaces, embodied intelligence (integrated AI and robotics), and sixth-generation (6G) mobile communications

And, she notes, “China’s government support for science and technology—and their adoption in industrial sectors—is holistic and highly coordinated.”  It would be hard to say that about the U.S.

Let’s take a specific example of an exciting emerging technology: fusion. The New York Times reported on how China and the U.S are each approaching it:

The world’s two superpowers are in a tightening contest to dominate the energy future. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. is intent on producing oil, gas and coal and selling it abroad. Its chief economic rival, China, has become the world’s dominant supplier of clean energy in the form of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles.

 Now, NYT says, China is seeking to add fusion to its list of 21^st century energy dominance, while we continue to invest in energy technologies of the past. China has made fusion a national priority, while the U.S. is largely relying on the private sector. Whichever country succeeds would have access to cheap, plentiful power that could supercharge its economy (think of all those data centers).

Even if the U.S. does out-innovate China, China might out operationalize us. Jimmy Goodrich, a senior fellow at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, told NYT: “The risk for the United States is we create a viable technical pathway first, but then China engineers and scales it up before we can.”

That same risk applies to other key technologies.

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 Maybe ASPI’s methodology is not the best measure for evaluating who is leading in emerging technologies. Maybe China has so many priorities that it is overextended and most will fail. Maybe practical fusion will remain, as it has been for decades, ten years away. Maybe China will prove to be the “paper tiger,” and these concerns are just a hoax. Maybe worrying about all this is just being paranoid.

But as Joseph Heller told us in Catch-22, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

The Defense Doesn't Rest

Two articles caught my eye this week, and neither was about the “Trump Kennedy Center,” the Netflix attempt to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, or anything AI-related. Instead, both concern defense spending, something I’ve been paying more attention to during the Ukraine-Russia war and China’s revamping of its military.

You'd think all that spending would buy us more. Credit: Peter G. Peterson Foundation

Today’s New York Times Editorial Board published Overmatched: Why the U.S. Military Needs to Reinvent Itself.  It is by no means the first such call; critics of the Defense Department have long accused it of being too slow, too expensive, too bound by tradition. The Ukraine war in particular has been a startling demonstration both of how war is being waged differently and how quickly tactics and weapons are forced to evolve. The U.S. military claims to be paying close attention to that struggle. It even has a Defense Innovation Unit aimed at speeding adoption of commercial technologies, and is trying to radically increase its drone capabilities.  

That’s all well and good, but the Editorial Board says: “Nearly four decades after victory in the Cold War, the U.S. military is ill prepared for today’s global threats and revolutionary technologies.” E.g., in war game after war game against China, even Pete Hegseth admits: “we lose every time.”

Gulp.

Don’t get it wrong: we spend more money on the military than the next nine nations combined, close to $1 trillion annually, devoting over 3% of our GDP on defense. We just aren’t necessarily spending it wisely. We like to spend it on fantastically expensive weapons systems (which are usually overbudget and years beyond schedule) that employ lots of people in many political districts. As Editorial Board noted: “There is also a conceptual failure: the idea that more sophisticated is always better. For decades the American military has relied on systems that are bespoke, complex and wildly expensive.”

We also can’t build those systems fast enough – e.g., ships, artillery shells or drones. China’s industrial capacity would turn any extended conflict into a disaster for the U.S. and our allies, which is exactly how the U.S. led the Allies to victory in WWII.

Credit: USN via The war Zone

The Editorial Board concludes:

Ultimately, a stronger U.S. national security depends less on enormous new budgets than on wiser investments. Spending heavily on traditional symbols of might risks shortchanging the true sources of American strength: relentless innovation, rapid adaptability and a willingness to discard old assumptions.

Meanwhile, Congress is considering a defense spending bill that would not only top $900 billion but also include more money than even the Trump Administration requested. Faster, smarter, cheaper? Probably not.

President Trump has long been demanding that NATO countries, as well as Pacific allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, boost their defense spending. There are good reasons for that, but he also certainly expects that much of that increased spending will go to U.S. defense contractors. We do pride ourselves on having the most sophisticated weapons, be they F-35s, Patriot missiles, nuclear submarines, or tanks.  But, it turns out, Europe has a more robust defense than I’d realized, which leads me to the second article.

The Washington Post profiled German defense contractor Rheinmetall. WaPo reports that its shares have tripled in the last year, and its market value is almost $100b, from less than $5b before Russia invaded the Ukraine. “Before the war in Ukraine, I would have said Rheinmetall was one of those German arms companies becoming increasingly less important and likely to be displaced internationally,” Ulrich Kühn, head of arms control research at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, told WaPo.  

Instead: “We are becoming a global defense champion,” says CEO Armin Papperger. Mr. Kühn agrees, adding: “It will very likely grow into one of the world’s leading arms companies, if it isn’t already in certain areas.” 

Rheinmetall is building plants across Europe, from Spain and Hungary to Ukraine and Latvia, along with its German facilities.

But it is not just Rheinmetall and not just Germany. The European defense industry grew 14% in 2024. In fact, five of the top 20 defense contractors in the world are European; the U.S. has 11, and China 4. And, of course, Ukraine leads the world in drone innovation and production  (although Russia has dramatically closed the gap).  

For example, for those of us old enough to remember Saab automobiles, its slogan was “born from jets. You won’t find many Saab cars anymore, but Saab is still a leading defense contractor.  Its Gripen fighter jet is drawing lots of attention. Canada is considering buying them instead of F-35s (no doubt in part due to recent trade wars instigated by the U.S.), and Ukraine has already ordered up to 150 of them.  The Gripen is considered not as advanced as the F-35, but it is much cheaper to buy and maintain.

Poland is buying submarines from Saab, and the Saab led MANGROVE consortium has been selected by NATO to lead the Allied Underwater Battlespace Mission Network project (AUWB-MN).

There’s also Airbus (France), B.A.E Systems (U.K), and KNDS (Germany), among others.

The U.S may have (by far) the biggest defense industry, with some of the most advanced weapons, but it is not the only game in town, nor are those weapons necessarily the ones best suited for fighting future wars.

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All this, of course, reminds me of the U.S. healthcare system and the U.S. tech industry. The U.S. has, by far, the most expensive healthcare system in the world, with some of the most advanced care and technologies. Our tech industry has led the world for decades (although we lost most of our actual manufacturing capabilities). They are both major drivers of our economy.  

But look at the NYT Editorial Board’s charge about our military: “There is also a conceptual failure: the idea that more sophisticated is always better. For decades the American military has relied on systems that are bespoke, complex and wildly expensive.” Tell me that substituting “healthcare system” for “military” wouldn’t be equally accurate.

Similarly, we take great pride in NVIDIA, but what is it -- and all those data centers -- going to do if/when China takes over TSMC? We love OpenAI, but China’s DeepSeek indicates that our approach to AI may also be bespoke, complex and wildly expensive.

We keep deferring regulating digital privacy, social media, and AI, claiming that would deter innovation, but the countries that are trying to do so may be reading the future better.

Bigger isn’t always better. More expensive isn’t always more valuable. Traditions aren’t always to be followed. Faster, cheaper, more flexible may be the ticket to the 21^st century.  

Let's Check the Math on Health Subsidies

It’s December 1, and, to no one’s surprise, Congress still has not acted on extending the expanded health care premium tax credits for ACA. To Congress, the subsidies don’t expire until the end of the year, so they figure they have until at least then to act, or maybe sometime after that, given the way they handled the recent government shutdown.

Trust me: the math is not that complicated. Credit: Microsoft Designer

On the other hand, consumers who are renewing or shopping for ACA plans face a more immediate deadline; they have until December 15 to enroll for January 1^st. They’re already seeing huge increases that result from a normal renewal increase plus the loss of the generous subsidies; Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that their premiums will more than double without them. They can’t wait while Congress plays politics.

There seems to be agreement that something will be done about the subsidies, but less clarity about what that something is. Some centrists argue to extend the enhanced subsidies but with some tweaks, such as lowering the upper income levels and/or requiring everyone to pay at least some minimum premium. To me, that’d be a reasonable compromise. But some Republicans, including President Trump, are calling for a more radical change: instead of giving the expanded premium tax subsidies to those “fat cat” insurers, give them directly to consumers through health savings accounts (HSAs). Put individuals over insurers, they argue.  

I’m here to tell you: the math does not work.

I am not an actuary, but long ago I was a group underwriter, setting rates for employer groups’ health insurance, and, also long ago, I was involved in the early days of so-called consumer directed health plans (CDHPs), including HSAs and high deductible health plans. I don’t disagree that HSAs and high deductible plans can play a role, but one has to understand the math that drives health care spending.

The central fact of health care spending is that it isn’t evenly distributed. It is a perfect example of the Pareto principle: 80% of spending comes from 20% of people. The flip of that is that about 15% of people have no healthcare spending in any given year. What insurance does is take money from everyone and use it to fund the spending of the high cost people. That’s what all insurance does.

Pareto principle illustration

OK, I’ve avoided doing the math as long as I could, but here goes. One proposal has called for $2,000 to be deposited in each enrollee’s new HSA. Let’s keep it simple and say there are 1,000 such people, and that their average annual health care spending is $2,000 (which, of course, is way low). So we have 1,000 x $2,000 = $2 million in both subsidies and spending. It works out perfectly, right?

Not so fast. Of that $2,000,000 in spending, eighty percent of it -- $1.6 million -- is accounted for by just 200 people. They’ve only got $400,000 in HSA funds (200 x $2,000), so they are really out of luck. $1.2 million out of luck.

The remining 800 people have only $400,000 in spending ($2 million - $1.6 million) but have $1.6 million in HSA funds (800 x $2,000), so they just got a big windfall. They can spend it on non-covered services like dental or vision or roll it over to the next year, tax free. They’re $1.2 million to the good.

Of course, at some point insurance kicks in, but the unfortunate 200 people are going to hit those big deductibles and out-of-pocket limits, while the more fortunate people are sitting pretty with their mostly intact new HSA funds. It’s a great deal for them (and the financial institutions that get to manage those funds, an angle let’s not forget about).

Do we aim to protect the high cost people, or benefit the most people?

It gets worse than that. Let’s assume that ACA premiums are also $2,000 per person, ignoring any insurance admin or profit. So we have $2,000,000 in premiums and $2,000,000 in spending. But let’s now take those 15% of people without spending. They contribute $300,000 (150 x $2,000) in premiums but get nothing back. Now that they’re losing the expanded subsidies and seeing their premiums double, they might decide, the heck with insurance, I’ll drop out.

That’s devastating to the insurance risk pool. Its premiums now fall to only $1.7 million ($2  million - $300,000), but its claims stay at $2 million. It is then going to require an 18% rate increase ($2 million divided by $1.7 million) just to keep up, which is probably then going to cause more people to drop coverage, which will cause rates to go up again, and soon we’re in the ominous death spiral.

ACA required insurers to take everyone with no medical underwriting and no exclusions for preexisting coverage – neither of which was true pre-ACA – and it only worked because of the subsidies. Without enough healthy people, you cannot have a viable health insurance market.

Republicans seem to think that insurers are making too much money off of ACA plans, which in their mind justifies not paying the enhanced subsidies to them. I’m dubious this is true. I can see insurers profiting off Medicare Advantage, but I suspect ACA plans constantly teeter on the edge of profitability.  Insurers have to get, and keep, that enrollment mix just right: enough healthy people, not too many sick people.

I’m trying to figure out if Republicans truly just don’t understand the math, or if they understand it just fine but are using the HSA ploy to continue their efforts to undermine ACA. I.e., are they ignorant, or cynical? 

The expanded subsidies were a COVID response and no one should have ever expected them to be permanent. It’s fair to take a look at them and the original subsidies to see how they might be improved (e.g., the original subsidies never contemplated that states wouldn’t expand Medicaid, so don’t go to very low income people at all).  But let’s not kid ourselves that the HSA approach is an effort to improve anything.  

Revenge of (the Other) Nerds

Like it or not, ready for it or not, we appear to be living in the age of A.I. Anyone who isn’t worried about its impact on their job isn’t paying attention, and anyone who isn’t thinking about it for their portfolio is risking experiencing FOMO. If it wasn’t for all the A.I. spending – both on its development and on the data centers that support it – we probably wouldn’t be seeing big stock market gains and might even be in a recession. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Growth has become so dependent on AI-related investment and wealth that if the boom turns to bust, it could take the broader economy with it.”

AI is going to have to get past the accountants and actuaries. Credit: Microsoft Designer

So it is kind of ironic that a revolution caused by the computer nerds could be facing big headwinds caused by the green eyeshade kind of nerds, like accountants and actuaries.

Let’s start with the accounting. Many questions have been raised about how circular some of the AI investments seem. Microsoft invests in OpenAI, which then buys cloud computing from Microsoft. Same with Oracle. NVIDIA invests in OpenAI, which then buys lots of NVIDIA chips and causes others to do the same. And the money goes round and round.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently said: “There is always a lot of focus on technological innovation. What really drives a lot of progress is when people also figure out how to innovate on the financial model.” Unfortunately, some of those innovations are starting to look like innovations Enron might have come up with.

Jonathan Weil of The Wall Street Journal analyzed how Meta was financing the building of a new $25b data center without it appearing on its balance sheets, and concluded: “The favorable accounting outcome hinges on some convenient assumptions. Some appear implausible, while others are in tension with one another, making the off-balance-sheet treatment look questionable.”

Mr. Weil concludes: “Artificial intelligence, meet artificial accounting.”

Then there is insurance. AI benefits carry AI liabilities. Consider AI toys. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund (PIRG) issued its 40th Trouble in Toyland report, and one of the areas of focus was A.I. chatbots that interact with children. It’s scary: “We found some of these toys will talk in-depth about sexually explicit topics, will offer advice on where a child can find matches or knives, act dismayed when you say you have to leave, and have limited or no parental controls.” Privacy is also a concern.

An advisory from Fairplay was also blunt: “AI Toys Are NOT Safe for Kids.”

When AI products might tell kids where to find knives or encourage explicit sex talks, you can imagine that liability concerns come right to mind for actuaries and CFOs. That’s why Financial Times is reporting that insurers want no part of AI exposure. Lee Harris and Christina Criddle found:

Major insurers are seeking to exclude artificial intelligence risks from corporate policies, as companies face multibillion-dollar claims that could emerge from the fast-developing technology.

AIG, Great American and WR Berkley are among the groups that have recently sought permission from US regulators to offer policies excluding liabilities tied to businesses deploying AI tools including chatbots and agents.

Dennis Bertram, head of cyber insurance for Europe at Mosaic told them: “It’s too much of a black box.” Rajiv Dattani, co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company, an AI insurance and auditing start-up, added: “Nobody knows who’s liable if things go wrong,”

The "black box" nature of AI is a liability problem. Credit: Microsoft Designer

We’ve already seen some AI-related losses. The Tech Buzz details:

Google's AI Overview falsely accused a solar company of legal troubles earlier this year, triggering a $110 million lawsuit. Air Canada got stuck honoring a discount its chatbot completely invented after a customer took the airline to small claims court. Most dramatically, fraudsters used a digitally cloned executive to steal $25 million from London engineering firm Arup during what appeared to be a legitimate video conference.

In addition to outright exclusions, insurers are adding amendments that limit liability to certain types of risks or certain amounts of payouts. Aon’s head of cyber Kevin Kalinich told FT that the industry could accept some AI-related losses, but: “What they can’t afford is if an AI provider makes a mistake that ends up as a 1,000 or 10,000 losses — a systemic, correlated, aggregated risk.”

One way or another, the experts told FT,  there will be some AI-related losses, and some of them will end up in court. Aaron Le Marquer, head of insurance disputes team at law firm Stewarts, told FT: “It will probably take a big systemic event for insurers to say, hang on, we never meant to cover this type of event.”

This isn’t unexpected. New technologies bring new benefits, and new risks, and it takes time to factor in both. “When we think about car insurance, for example, the broad adoption of the safety belt was really something which was driven by the demands of insurance,” Michael von Gablenz, who heads the AI insurance division of Munich Re, told NBC News. “When we’re looking at past technologies and their journey, insurance has played a major role in that, and I believe insurance can play the same role for AI.”

NBC News also cites a survey from the Geneva Association indicating that 90% of businesses want insurance protection against generative AI losses, and an Ernst & Young report that found 99% of the 975 firms it surveyed had suffered financial losses from AI-related risks – two-thirds of them more than $1 million.

Clearly there is a need for insurance against AI-related losses, and certainly there is an emerging market, but actuaries need data and predictability, and both of those are in short supply at the moment.  Still, the potential is huge. Deloitte predicts AI insurance could be a $4.8b market by 2032, which seems remarkably low.

Martin Anderson, writing in Unite.AI, suggests we may need some sort of federal backstop, such as what happened with the nuclear industry or for vaccine development. “However, history suggests that forcing AI companies to insure themselves, devoid of government aid, is not the likely path ahead,” he says. On the other hand, “Those that object to the possibility of AI obtaining the same ‘bailout’ status as banks, are not likely to embrace heavily government-backed solutions to the insurance quandaries around AI.”  

Insurance quandaries abound.

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In one sense, it may frustrate AI advocates that mundane things like accounting and insurance might slow down its progress. On the other hand, the fact that they are is a sign that they’re truly becoming mainstream. So give the green eye-shade guys a break while they figure this out.