Robotic storage

As with many industries, the future of self storage is robotics. Here's how it might look.

It's the end of the summer, you've just returned from a camping trip and are not planning to go camping again till next spring. You tap a couple of buttons on your smartphone an a couple of hours later a delivery drone arrives at your door with a couple of empty plastic storage crate. You load your camping equipment into the boxes, drop the boxes onto the drone, and forget about it till next spring. Whilst you're packing for your next camping trip, another couple of taps on your phone and your camping equipment is back with you.

You never knew where it was stored, and you didn't much care. All that you knew was that it was cheap, hassle free, and never more than an hour away.

To summarize the features of this technology:

• Storage is containerized (not ISO shipping containers though!)
• Boxes are collected from and delivered to customers' homes (or other location of choice)

This solution is actually possible with existing technology: we already have self-driving cars, and robots that can manipulate stand-sized packages (the storage crate).

Other than the customer-service benefit, there is a significant benefit to the storage company in that the storage does not need to be located as near to the customer as current self-storage solutions. This potentially allows cheaper land to be used, and larger buildings, resulting in economies of scale.

With more advanced robots

With more advanced robots it should be possible to handle non-containerized objects provided they are able to fit into the transportation drone. In the nearer term, the customer may load these onto the delivery drone at the customer's home and specialist drones will unpack. However it is likely to become possible that the delivery drone will arrive with a packing bot onboard. They packing bot would enter the customer's home to pick up the items, and could potentially wrap and box smaller items.

Consequences of such technology

With this service we can more easily own more things than we can fit into our homes, and as such it is likely that our propensity to consume could increase. However, delivery drones can also make it easier to rent items, which would tend to counter this effect.

Home 3D printing

I suspect that rises in distribution network efficiency (particularly in urban/suburban locations) due to automation/drones are likely to outpace improvements in the flexibility and quality of 3D printing, suggesting that the future for at-home 3D printers is limited.

If Amazon stocks just about every conceivable item, and it can be delivered to your home by drone within an hour, do you really need a 3D printer?

Even if you a maker that uses a 3D printer to prototype items and make components, it may still be more cost-effective to use an online 3D printing service that delivers that 3D printed objects to your home, again via drone and probably within an hour of completion of the print job. Such 3D print services would likely be able to afford better 3D printers, and to upgrade them / replace them more frequently.

I believe that at home 3D printing will play an important role in those locations without access to a rapid distribution network.

Self-sustaining underground city

One of the reason's cited by those advocating the colonisation of Mars or the Moon (or orbital, or Venus) is to provide a refuge for humanity in the event of any catastrophe on Earth. A couple of quotes from Elon Musk on the subject are reproduced below (from the Guardian):

"It's sort of a futuristic version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Let's say you were at the peak of the Roman empire, what would you do, what action could you take, to minimise decline?"

"The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not. There could be some series of events that cause that technology level to decline. Given that this is the first time in 4.5bn years where it's been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth, it seems like we'd be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time."

Whilst I entirely agree with doing what we can preserve intelligent life and civilisation, and I am keen that we colonise the solar system, I wonder whether there is a more cost-effective way to create such a refuge here on Earth.

It should be possible with current technology to build a self-sustaining underground city on Earth (or potentially many). Powered by geothermal energy, the city could be a closed ecosystem that recycled all air and nutrients. Food would be grown hydroponically.

In addition to recycling resources it may be possible for such a city to undertake a self-sustaining mining operation (by self-sustaining I mean that enough resources of the right types are extracted to maintain and create additional mining equipment). This would allow the city to slowly increase the living area to support population growth, and to develop further geothermal power sources to increase resource availability.

The city would be connected to the rest of humanity via the Internet, but would otherwise not be connected except in the event of a disaster in the colony. It is important to maintain this separation such that a pandemic affecting the surface world would not affect the underground world.

Advantages over a Moon/Mars/orbital refuge:

• Proximity to Earth's surface for construction (particularly given the enormous cost of transporting material off the Earth's surface)
• Proximity to Earth's surface for recolonisation
• Proximity to Earth's surface for assistance in the event of disaster in the colony
• Earth gravity
• No additional latency in communicate with Earth's surface

Disadvantages compared with a Moon/Mars/orbital refuge:

• Could potentially suffer from some of the same catastrophes that affect the Earth's surface (e.g. if directly targetted by a nuclear weapon)
• Potentially lower availability of energy / resources
• Separation from the economy of Earth's surface would be artificial
• The proximity to Earth's surface would make such an endeavor feel less like a colony, with members (particularly second and later generation members) wanting to abandon the colony and rejoin the population on the Earth's surface

It's all about...

I have had several epiphanies along the lines of "it's all about..." and it occurs to me that I should collect them. The two that I can recall are: it's all about control; and it's all about data. What I mean by an "it's all about" is an aspect that is common to many parts of life.

Control - I mean control in the internal control sense of the word: systems and processes, checks and balances, locks, etc that enable management to control the business. The reason it's an "it's all about" is that this kind of control takes up a huge amount of the resource in our society: we spend a fortune trying to prevent behaviour (whether accidental or deliberate) that we want to avoid.

Data - the reason data is an "it's all about" is that so many of the problems we encounter in society are the result of people making decisions without knowing the likely outcomes. Whilst it's not possible to predict the future, there is a huge amount of past experience and scientific data that we could use in making a decision but don't. The reason is that we cannot process that huge volume of data.

Estimated time of arrival

How long before all of the world's people have representative government?
How long before all of the world's people have reliable access to basic needs (balanced diet, clean water, shelter, sanitation, education, healthcare, employment)?
How long before all of the world's people have their human rights protected?
How long before we have zero crime?
How long before the notion of nationality dies?
How long before the falasy of religion dies?

Am I impatient? Yes. So are the many who will suffer and die before this dream becomes a reality.

When they come

If I were an alien and I was planning to invade Earth, here's what I'd do:

1. Collect intelligence - determine the command and control structures, steal new technologies (unlikely we'd have anything new to the alien)
2. Engineer a supervirus to kill a large proportion of the human population
3. Attach densely populated areas with nuclear weapons (nuclear weapons would be used sparingly to avoid contamination of the planet)
4. Deploy robots or remote controlled vehicles to kill the remaining human beings
5. Land and harvest the resources

Another potential option would be engineering a third world war, however this would probably have a lower casulty rate than a supervirus and would risk contamination of the planet with nuclear fallout.

Unlike most alien fiction, the aliens would not do any fighting, or sustain any losses (asymmetric warfare). If we're sufficiently advanced now that we can use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Iraq and Afghanistan, then it's likely that any alien's would also use (more advanced) robots.

The end of education

In a scene from the Matrix, Jujitsu is downloaded into Neo's brain. Whilst we a years away from that ever happening, when (or if) it does it will spark the biggest revolution in human history. For the first time all humans will be equal, every person could be a doctor, a lawyer or a scientist. There would no longer be any elite or any experts. Society as we know it would cease to exist. Who would do menial jobs when they had enough knowledge to be at the cutting edge of quantum physics? And who would get the key roles of leadership and research when everyone is equal?