I’m exhausted by the endless tech hype that tries to sell us “the next big thing.” I’m old enough to have lived through multiple tech-hype cycles: PCs, the internet, streaming, iPhones, etc., ad nauseum. Now it’s AI. We’ll get to that later.

Today I want to talk about something REAL. This is technology that is actually useful and is actually working. At the Yimin coal facility in Mongolia the new truck fleet is electric and autonomous:

This checks all the cool, tech-y boxes: 5G, cloud computing, EVs, and AI.

Coal mining is not very exciting. But it is pretty damn important, especially in emerging economies. Getting robots to do some of the dirty work is a hell of an accomplishment. This is the kind of thing that we need technology for—solving real problems in the real world.

Tomorrow we will look at fake stuff.