The speaker (Tony Seba) is talking to entrepreneurs who are licking their lips at the (private) profits to be made, but leaves unanswered questions about disruption he discusses like the following:
1. Will trees grow to the sky? Is there enough lithium, for one example, to make the storage disruption work? How about enough new car buyers...? (sub-prime auto loans are already a problem)
2. If, as Tony Seba says, we would save $11,000 a year in cost-of-ownership by substituting an electric car for an internal combustion engine car....will that be a "boost" for the economy? (Answer: it would be an economic disaster, because car owners' spending is someone else's income.)
3. Can societies gracefully manage transitions from old to new? (e.g. What happens to the unemployed coal miners, oilfield workers, truck drivers?) If the management of climate change is any indication, it will hardly be graceful if it's managed at all.
4. Infrastructure (roads for those self-driving electric cars) will be critical. One disruptive company--ebay--couldn't make it work in Russia because their postal service was so bad. Meg Whitman ran ebay then--then went into politics to attack government and its infrastructure fruits! I know it's often not a straight line between present situation and the destination in public policy, but the American experience is certainly daunting to contemplate.
5. Will the Middle East calm down since oil is no longer so crucial? Good question: climate problems are already in place to make for lots of social unrest (Arab spring, Syrian revolution, etc.)...so it may not matter that the U.S. no longer has a huge stake in the success of the Saudis.
Meanwhile, government as a prognosicator is so discredited, and so hamstrung by the "anti-collectivist" Koch propaganda, it would be a miracle if they didn't lobby heavily, and probably successfully, to continue hanging onto obsolete technology (like their oil refineries and pipelines).
6. Political econonomist Mark Blyth observes that it's impossible to have a democracy and a (deflation-inducing) gold standard. Could it also be impossible to have a disrupted society without a job guarantee or basic income guarantee?
7. For our plutocratic friends: Are the Hamptons a defensible position?
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