Tag: technology

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Home cooling

In the summer months, in Europe, the concern shifts from heating your home to cooling your home. For generations this has been possible without use of air conditioning. A natural way of cooling has been for centuries to dig into earth to take advantage of the rather stable and cool temperatures underground. In home building this has also been a tradition for centuries to build cellars underneath a home.
Wine growing regions have used the cellar as a natural cooling facility for long and short term storage of wine. Digging into a mountain of a valley offered a natural cool storage solution for years without additional energy consumption. Modern buildings should return to this practice and gain cold from below the surface to cool buildings in the warm or hot seasons. Good isolation combined with the cool temperatures from below the surface in summer months will substantially save energy and thereby CO2 emissions. Circulation of the cool air from below to the upper floors is the issue as well as dealing with differential humidity levels. The wisdom of previous generations in home building with no access to air conditioning (avoiding the air conditioning paradox) is likely to experience a revival in the coming years.
Coolness is the new and old wisdom.

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Smart Heat Pumps

The potential to reduce CO2 emissions through the replacement of fossil fuels with heat pumps is huge. The technology is well known and has reached a considerable amount of maturity in the mid 2020s. Noise is much less an issue even at higher compression rates and during the use of booster functions to cater for peaks of hot water or home heating. Combined with solar energy the local production and consumption of energy turn each household into a “prosumer” of energy. Besides the initial investment you have to find capable technicians and enterprises that master the installation of the technology with the necessary care and ensure the adequate calculation of the envisaged energy needs of the household. Household and family size matter, and this is not easy to project into the future. Additional saving potentials can be harvested through the use of smart home applications. Switch off the heating before you leave or if a longer than previewed absence occurs. Just do it if you are away from home. Alternatively, just start the heating when you get on your way back home from work rather than at previously estimated, but fixed times. Smart technology is just perfect for such use cases.

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testing testing

Before the installation of the new AI chatbots or other agentic AI, they need profound testing. Wise statistics are quoted with the conviction: it is all about testing, testing, testing. Any systems that build on statistical reasoning (LLMs or machine learning) will behave erratically on what is known as an area with stronger impacts of, for example, statistical outliers. On both ends of the “normal distribution” of events or reasoning the statistical models and algorithms used in AI will produce “spurious” errors or have larger error margins on such topics a bit off the 95% of usual cases.
This means, testing, testing and testing again for the programmers of such AI systems before the release to the public or enterprise specific solutions. The tendency to keep costs of testing phases low  compared to developing costs bears obvious risks to the “precautionary principle” applied in the European Union. Testing is most important to check the WEIRD bias of the most basic AI systems. In this sense AI development has become a sociological exercise as they have to deal with “selection bias” of many kinds that could have very expensive legal consequences.
(Image: Extract from Bassano, Jacopo: Abduction of Europa by Zeus, Odessa Museum treasures at exhibition in Berlin Gemäldegalerie 2025-5).

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Repairs again

Trying to repair electric or mechanic devices is confronted with multiple obstacles. Spare parts are hard to come by and many pieces needed are no longer in stock. Hence, in many instances the remaining option is to use recovery pieces from other broken or discarded devices. Whereas this is still common for repairs of vintage cars, for example, this is rather rare for consumer electronics like stereo music players or television sets. An aging clientele of the repair market is very used to a specific device and is often reluctant to change habits. 

An additional element in the repair process is access. Only in thinking repairs into the engineering and design of the device will make repairs feasible later on. An economy and business model which is based upon a high turnover as the basis for profitability has no interest in engineering for repairs later on. This makes a preservation of resources tricky. Disassembling is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the repair sector to thrive. At least the basic materials enter into a circular economy as a first step. Further steps consist in preserving the skills needed to disassemble and/or repair more. The habit „buy a new one and throw away the old one“ is hard ro change. 

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Humanoid services

In the shadow of AI enhanced chatbots, agentic AI and generative Ai, the developers make considerable progress in robotics. The humanoid versions like from Persona AI will surround us in months, or maybe a few years from today. Investors believe it is rather sooner than later. There are many use cases for humanoids that may take over dangerous, hazardous or unhealthy tasks from humans. But even simple tasks like carrying home most of our shopping could be done for us by humanoids that follow you around the shopping mall and home. This would be a kind of personal assistant. I even thought of my humanoid robot to walk my dog on some occasions on the usual trail. 

Welcoming visitors at the doorstep could be another function to delegate in offices or even in private homes, although as a sociologist I would recommend to carefully check the sorting algorithm(s) applied to avoid unpleasant situations. The administration of medication might be another option, if only we could trust that the correct dosage would be applied. 

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Berlin building

Yes, 35 years after re-unification Berlin is still building at lots of places. The boom years of building hotels for tourists, offices for ministries, which were moving from Bonn to Berlin, is now followed by a „surprising“ need to have sufficient vacancies in private housing. Berlin is still growing in terms of population and, of course, this creates additional upward pressure on the housing market with particularly high increases on the rental market. In order to achieve a narrowing of the gap between demand and supply, Berlin is building higher as well as digging deeper into its sandy ground. In such huge open spaces near Südkreuz it is then feasible to explore and later exploit geothermal energy for years to come. Maybe it is not a surprise that apparently a Texas (USA) based investor has bought the ground and builds in Berlin. Drilling in Berlin for energy from underneath is a worthwhile business. Hence, drill baby drill has a new Berlin meaning to it. 

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Non-autonomous driving

The more engineers will invest in developing autonomous driving vehicles, the more the value of the few completely non-autonomous cars will rise. A 60 years old car with manual gear changing on the steering wheel like the Peugeot 404 from 1965 (image below) demands a strong effort to steer the car around a city. Apparently, some car producers reintroduce buttons to press or switch on devices since customers seem to prefer some manual activity in addition to the touchscreen technology. Voice guidance and gestures can be helpful for some, but there are also the advantages of manual activities that keep you awake and maybe with better focus. Choice is key to suit diverse user and customer preferences.

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AI-assisted

We used to create and use an artificial word to shorten explications in conversations. It is easy to understand for everyone nowadays to describe an online search as “I googled something” without further concerns about the sources used in answering a question. Apple just announced that its search engine Safari was used less than expected recently. The reason might be that more and more people search online by using AI tools or Apps that directly provide answers to their queries. ChatGTP and Perplexity are 2 AI-programs that might replace the other search engines we have gotten used to over the last decades. Particularly “how to …” queries offer reasonable instructions. In Perplexity you get an answer after you specified a little bit your query and, therefore, the answer is more likely to be right to the point offering text, images and sources. In ChatGPT you enter into a dialogue to further specify your query if unsatisfied with the first response. The judgement of an authoritative response is up to you if you want to follow up. The assistance of an AI-system cares less about the source but about the speed of response that it can provide. For sensitive questions or queries with less obvious or clear answers more interactions with the tools is necessary. The pricing and our willingness or ability to pay in cash rather than through the selling of our data for advertising will determine whether we shall “chat-it” or “plex-it” in future.

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Technology maturation

Technology has its own time of maturation. The time for wind power generation was quite lengthy compared to some innovation cycles in information technologies. Maybe, due to the fact that large wind turbines had only big enterprises or public monopolies as potential clients who were already heavily invested in even bigger nuclear energy projects caused the slow pace of development of this technology. In Germany just like in Denmark, Sweden and the USA the first larger research projects took off in the mid or late 1970s. The technology is explained by Erich Hau in a comprehensive way including the early days like the « Growian » test wind turbine in Germany (extract of image below). Despite the fact that major engineering difficulties were overcome already in the early 80s, the economic and legal challenges took much longer to resolve. Nowadays, we have an additional case of energy sovereignty to add to the cost-effectiveness of power generation from winds offshore and onshore. In the coming years we are likely to see more and more decentral power generation from wind on roof tops or small poles to complement solar energy during cloudy but windy weather or at night. Just like the sunshine we shall praise the windy days for their power generation potential.

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War of drones

The use of drones in warfare is not new in 2025. However, the news reported in the WSJ 2025-05-05 that sea drones from Ukraine with U.S. adapted missiles downed 2 Russian jet fighters made headlines. Compared to jet fighters such drones carrying missiles are a rather cost-effective alternative in warfare. The speed of jets compared to drones made such successful attempts rather unlikely. The information that infrared technology can achieve such identification of targets and guiding missiles is another innovation of the Ukrainian military technology.
Technology is well known to be a game changer in warfare for centuries or across the whole military history. Adaptations of defense strategies will allow Ukraine to hold against the Russian aggression albeit limited financial resources. The defense of air space is one of the crucial elements for Ukraine to deter Russia from moving further ahead through the continuation to increase the costs of war to Russia.
Following a fast moving object and transforming it into a target is an astonishing accomplishment.