Why has no one done this yet?

Quadcopter food delivery.

The concept seems too simple once you put it together, to the point where I don't understand why it hasn't already been done. As in a previous post where I discuss the merits of quadrotor flying robots we have machines capable of physically accomplishing the task, we have programming and flight control technologies to get the bots from point A to point B, and a smart phone provides all the communication infrastructure that could ever be necessary to coordinate movement.

Lets walk through how the process would look from the point of view of a person hungry for pizza. Bob is a average guy living in a house, Bob wants pizza to eat while he watches the game, so Bob calls up the local pizza joint and orders a pizza. The pizza joint takes the order and being for delivery accepts Bob's information to place the order, his name, phone number, address, and credit card info for payment. The pizza joint now has all the information they need to autonomously deliver the pizza as soon as it's out of the oven. At the end of the call the person taking the order asks if front yard delivery or backyard delivery would work better for him, this question is informed by the order taker having input Bob's address into a google maps program that pulls up a location for his address, and providing an overhead visual of the residence, Bob says his preference is the back yard (because the backyard is closer to the couch)

The order is complete and the pizza making team start making Bob's pizza. The digital order ticket is ready and corresponds to the pizza moving through the oven. As soon as the pizza is done cooking and in the box the receipt is printed out and taped onto the top of the box, (the same process that almost every pizza chain uses). An employee takes a few steps outside to where the "delivery coordinator"(the only employee needed to conduct all deliveries for a food delivery business) is setup. The employee carrying the pizza walks up to the delivery bot next in the que, uses the barcode reader function built into the smart phone which is attached to the bot, to inform the bot which order it is delivering. The employee then places the pizza into the pizza container box just like the ones that delivery drivers use to keep the pizza hot, and press a "ready" button on the top of the delivery bot to inform the bot that it can now start the delivery process.

As soon as the "ready" button is pressed the delivery bot becomes autonomous. First the bot powers up all systems while still attached to the charging station and does a quick functions check. Ensuring all the rotors are providing correct maximum thrust, the batteries have correct capacity, the smartphone brain has no faults in it's subsystems or it's ability to communicate. When all the checks are complete the bot will check it's surroundings for anything impeding it's ascension, if none are found the delivery bot will immediately rocket skywards to a preplanned altitude of 400 feet at an inclination so as to establish buffer room from the incoming and outgoing delivery bots.

Although the delivery bot will be following a very specific set of flight plans for each delivery, it will not appear as such to the person observing. The delivery bot will appear to rocket off the ground, flying high into the sky then banking off into the distance. This is because as soon as the bot reaches its first planned flight reference point it will begin it's progress to the second. The second flight reference point will be established as 400 feet directly above the location selected in the order process as the delivery location. Once the delivery bot arrives at the second flight reference point it will do three things simultaneously, start a "FaceTime" video call back to the restaurant, and begin descending to a height of 40 feet and begin a cell phone call to Bob who ordered the pizza. The bot will maintain a hover at 40 feet until the "delivery coordinator" is able to observe the process to oversee the delivery bot's actions. This is important because until we have true artificial intelligence it will be important for the last few feet to be carefully watched for any unexpected hazard.

Bob hears his phone ringing and picks it up, getting an automated message that the delivery bot is at his house ready to deliver his pizza, Bob walks out his back door and sees the bot hovering above his backyard. The delivery coordinator back at the store, seeing that Bob is ready to receive his pizza presses the "deliver" button on his controls. The delivery bot now lowers the pizza warming box from its main body so the food box is several feet lower than the rotor body, and using a laser range finder comes to a hover so that the box is exactly at the right height for a person to retrieve pizza. The smart phone that initiated a "FaceTime" call earlier is with the box. The delivery coordinator sees Bob and greats him, thanking him for his order and explaining his pizza is ready for him to take it. Bob sees his pizza presented to him and slides it out of the warming box. The delivery coordinator presses the "delivery complete" button and the delivery bot immediately begins ascending reeling the pizza warming box in as it rises.

www.cam-and-carrier.com

http://www.cam-and-carrier.com/products/vario-quad-copter.htmlOnce the bot has reached 300 feet it begins it's flight back to the descent rally point over the restaurant. Once at the rally point the delivery bot touches down on a available charging station and wait's for it's next delivery.

I agree that it seems like there are a lot of moving pieces to this idea. What is important to keep in mind is how mature these systems are, and how readily they will work together. Nothing in this idea would require new technology, components would include an off the shelf quad or hexa copter (depending on delivery capacity needed) and a smart phone (doesn't matter what kind, but the same functions of an iPhone5) then you would need a programmer to write the purpose built application to run on the phone that would execute the functions. There would be some digital infrastructure needed at hub to control the fleet of delivery bots but once again all very simple challenges.

The beautiful elegant element to the whole idea is that the Bob character does nothing different, and gets his pizza faster. All the complexity is procedurally executed by the technology and the people can spend more time doing people things, like asking if everything looks correct when Bob opens the lid and finds the pizza totally squished from the G forces the cooks forgot to include onions or anchovies.

Just imagine if you added a couple LED's to the quad copter and maybe a speaker for sound effects, you would have every kid in america begging their parents to "order food from that place that delivers with helicopters" just so they could see the spectacle. 

Could this happen faster than any of us thought?

The prospect of coming singularities happening at a much more violently rapid rate than any of us thought crossed my mind. I read about the Portabee 3D printer the other day, and as I was reviewing the website i came across the fact that the Portabee 3D printer is made by Portabee 3D printers. If that's not an indicator of a run away exponential cycle I don't know what is. The cost of energy is falling, our ability to procedurally build things is growing and how long will it be until the raw materials become dirt cheap. Then there will be hardly any cost associated with creating objects.

There has been new advancements made with another parent-child 3D printer, the RepRap falls into the same category as the Portabee 3D printer, as it is manufactured almost entirely by a parent printer of the same design. The major shortcoming of these parent-child 3D printer relationships is the ability to only assemble structural parts and having to still buy/build separately the electronics which slows down the replication cycle and raises the difficulty of innovation. The RepRap has been taught to print wiring, this is something that more advanced printers have been able to do for a while, however doing this on the entry level printers is truly revolutionary. Imagine printing something any only having to install the circuit boards and motors to get a fully functioning whatever.  

Heads up ski goggles

On the trek back from visiting my family for thanksgiving I was walking through the airport and a pair of  the new Oakley Airwave goggles caught my eye at a ski accessories booth. It struck me how adaptable this technology will be. I put the goggles on and took off running  and was impressed with just how crisp the display was. Oakley caters to a rather specific market, this tech could be very easily be transplanted into other eye protection for all kinds of other fields.

Laundry Robot part 2

As I discussed in an earlier post household robots will herald a revolution in the way we live. Robotic household servants will become commonplace and allow people to live without regard for simple daily tasks.

Above is a great example of a robot which has been programmed to learn form humans how to accomplish a variety of tasks. With no training the people participating in the study were able to teach the robot how to fold a towel or open a bottle of pills. The mechanical usefulness of robots such as this far exceeds our ability to program software to make them autonomously capable of the broad range of things we would like it to do. Learning software will give us the ability to on the fly teach a robot a new task, and then add it to it's catalogue. 

Robot, please have my laundry cleaned and folded when I wake up. 

Smart wristbands

Our technology is growing closer to us, we haven't figured out how to bring components inside our bodies yet however our ability to seamlessly adorn ourselves with all sorts of technology is growing. A few companies have recently released wristbands that have some measure of health monitoring. Nike has their FuelBand and Jawbone has recently come out with their Up. Both systems are great technology for a word on comparing the two heres a review from the new york times.

These gadgets are a great step in the right direction: unobtrusive pieces of tech that provide useful data to us. A recent discovery has revealed an interesting possibility for human sensors. There is a part of the inner ear where our bodies create a natural battery. Work by researchers at MIT have shown on guinea pigs that electrical energy can be directly harvested from the inner ear without damaging the ear's function. This discovery could overcome the stumbling block of most electronics that are designed to be placed inside the body, a power source. Pace makers could charge off the ear, we could implant sensors like the FuelBand and Up inside our bodies and power them off our natural systems. 

Imagine your body telling you if your calorie excess or deficient for the day. 

One step closer to inmortality

Average life expectancy has steadily been increasing over the last century. In 1912, hundred years ago it was about 50 years where today life expectancy is close to 80 years. If you plot this chart on a graph you get a nice trend line that has generally plotted upward consistently. However since it's life span that we're interested in right now and not 100 years ago there is a much more pertinent way to look at the data. Instead to taking the raw average for every year and simply plotting it, take the difference in life expectancy between years and show how many days of life expectancy were added each year. The punchline is that if the data ever shows that we have added 365 days of life expectancy in the course of a year we have effectively built enough road so we'll never crash, thus immortality. 

http://www.uni-kiel.de

Researchers at Kiel University in Germany have brought us another step closer to reaching the goal of unlimited life extension, with their work on the Hydra. A Hydra is a genus of tiny animals with bodies about 10mm long. What makes Hydras a source of curiosity in the first place is the fact that they reproduce by growing a bud which becomes a new Hydra. When the researchers at the Kiel University started to investigate how the hydra could maintain it's immortality they found that there was a very active gene "FoxO" which is responsible for allowing the production of stem cells. Where the story gets very interesting is that this same gene is found in humans except the FoxO gene in human bodies gradually becomes less and less active over out lives. We are already finding ways to correct our DNA and reprogram our genetic code, when we find the switch to keep the FoxO gene perpetually switched on we could very likely find a source of lengthening our life spans dramatically. In a previous post: dna-candy-shop I reviewed the state of the art therapies that give us the ability to cut and past new DNA into our genetic code throughout all the cells in our bodies. When we understand the system that controls gene expression a little better it would be easy for us to add a genetic patch to our DNA that allows us to maintain active FoxO genes. 

The pessimistic response to life extension is that it's a selfish desire and that people should be comfortable embracing the "natural" process of aging and then death. My question is "whats natural about aging and death?" We assume that these things are natural because it is all that we are accustomed to and have yet to see a better model. My favorite way to take someone through the immortality thought experiment is to ask them how they would feel if they could live to 180, the responses I often get are "old, tired, exhausted, done". Then I add more to the scenario, "what if when you turned 180 you felt just as young and exuberant as you did when you were 24, just as full of life, passion, lust, desire, energy, excitement and wonder" the responses change, "hmmm, that wouldn't be so bad". In my experience many of our fears about living longer are based on fears that are fueled by two things, one our lack of experience so it's unknown and we always fear what we don't know, and two a failure of imagination. 

This is not to say that the ability to allow people to live twice or three times as long as we do know won't bring challenges, but me, I'd much rather meet those challenges head on and courageously jump into the void than choose the cowardly option of sticking to what we know.

Noise floor

Conversely the question must be asked, in the growing interconnectedness of the world is such a process healthy for humans to experience? Will it be healthy for us to lower our noise floor's down to zero when the world that we must function in has such a high threshold? Or will the process intrinsically change society by allowing us to be more aware of how much noise is present. 

the world today is more full of information than it ever has been before, the problem is the signal to noise ratio, the amount of quality information to spam/junk/useless/auto generated/content is very low. Our minds have grown better at efficiently sifting this cacophony for the nuggets of useful valuable information, to allow us to function in a world saturated with information noise. 

http://zazenlife.com

What does it take to find respite from the worlds noise? Both literally and figuratively, perhaps anechoic chambers/rooms will become more common. I'd personally enjoy a room where everything would be blocked out to allow me to meditate, decompress, and process.

Find your quiet, whatever that might be.

Idea sharing

Most important ability the internet gives human society: the ability to share our ideas. Twenty years ago if you wanted to get your ideas out to lots of people all you could do would be to attempt to get an article published or if you had means print a book or pamphlet, today the web has allowed us to share our ideas at almost no cost.

Now we can blast an idea out to the world for comment and feedback, then receive the criticism and new ideas provided to us and improve, refine, and evolve orders of magnitude faster than we could have independently. The term that has been given to this is crowd-sourcing, however, croud-sourcing is a little like fishing with a wide net, you get lots of fish but can also pickup a lot of undesirables as well. Where the tremendous advantages come into play is our ability to communicate directly with the originator of an idea. If you read an article that picks your interest you can google the author and with relatively little effort email them with a question or comment. Outside of academia the process is usually more straight forward such as this, a blog which has communication features built in. (could it mean that the future of peer reviewed journals will be online in a format that allows for appropriately credentialed persons to directly commend in the footnotes of a paper?)

Accelerating intelligence is a very exciting idea because we all benefit when we work towards goals together. Now this doesn't have to be an altruistic or selfless process, in fact I think the capitalism model provides the much needed motivation for doing the work, such as in this case, a new design firm is trying to get it's name out there and has chosen Wikipedia as it's means to do so.

The website which is worth a look lays out a road map for redesigning the online encyclopedia to be more user friendly and more intuitive. They did the work free of charge with the hope of getting people to recognize how valuable their services would be, at the same time providing some very expensive design work for wikipedia.

The company referenced : newisnew

Woah

First time i've seen something like this. When we spend so much time thinking about how the internet can improve our intelligence here is the first application i've seen online that will make us dumber.  unintelligencer.com Enjoy!

Rise of the Machines

ROBOTS BUILDING ROBOTS! 

http://www.hizook.com

Foxconn has placed an order for one million industrial robots. With the intent to automate a good deal of its assembly processes. This comes at a time where Foxconn has come under scrutiny for it's treatment of workers because of the suicides, strikes, and riots. With the growing ability to replace workers with robots will we reach a point in time where the factory worker becomes largely replaced with robots? If not what advantages can human work

Once we establish a automated production process that can be easily retasked we will start the run-away portion of the exponential advancement. Such as the video above, a 3D printer that can produce the components necessary for making a copy of it's self. When we add a automated process to assemble the pieces and a brain to improve the system as a whole that will most likely lead to at least a soft singularity. 

Can't wait

Night life post singularity

Will we still go to bars and taverns

How will we approach new people when we all have virtual identities

Bar games?

Will alcohol still be the drug of choice

Virtual bars/gatherings?

Programs we don't have to learn

Intuitive computer programs that start by being highly user friendly, and then have enough artificial intelligence to understand our intent. What will happen when the new version of  Microsoft's Excel program that doesn't take a few months to master. Artificial intelligence compartmentalized within every application that interacts with the user to understand the objectives and goals of every interaction. So the experience changes from moving the levers and dials to get the machine to operate the way you want to having a discussion with an intelligent entity which has the same goal as you. When will we see the first professional grade applications with AI built in? The gaming industry has already put a great deal of work into it's artificial intelligence. When will we see these same capabilities applied to user interfaces on professional applications?

Is the internet making us smarter?

Does TV melt your brain? Will surfing the web make you slovenly? Or perhaps the answer is more about how you use it and not an aspect innate to the technology. There has been writing done about how we are loosing the ability to perceive where our brains end and the internet begins, how often have you been having a conversation and referenced information that you've seen before but must google in order to recall. It's just like giving our minds another level of deep storage accessible through our smart phones.

psychologytoday.com

Some may say that allowing our minds to rely on the internet is a crutch that we must teach ourselves to not need, and function without. I remember when I was learning math the teachers would tell the class that calculators were not allowed because, "how often do you carry a calculator around with you?"  where now everyone who owns a cell phone does. So in the same vein we are growing to a technological point where all the information accessible through the internet is seamlessly accessible to the individual. This advancement will change the way we think, and has already started to do so.

So lets embrace this growing trend and allow our minds to build systems that encourage "deep storage" where we have to access the web to "remember" something. We will become smarter and more capable thinkers as we use these new tools to the greatest extent possible.

So when Intel starts marketing hardware wetware interfaces I'll be excited.

I want my car to drive me to work

Self driving cars have been on the radar for a long time. Google has been testing their car's on california roads for a few years now My question is, how will society and life change when cars can drive safer faster and more reliably than us. Completely automated taxi services, road trains, and push button navigation will all change transportation permanently. Just like the internal combustion engine made horse drawn transportation automation will make the driving professions obsolete. 

How much would you pay for a Laundry Robot?

In the 1950's when home appliances were starting to become available to people everywhere there was a great amount of writing done about how the live of the house wive would become one of leisure and relaxation because the tasks that once consume her time would now be executed by machines. In reality since in truth it is human nature that drives how busy we are and not the gadgets in our houses we will always find an equilibrium of stress and busyness. Once again just like in the 1950's we are on the precipice of another, possibly more dramatic revolution in home automation.

Currently there is a convergence of technologies that will create the same leap in home automation. In some ways it has already started look at the Roombia or the automatic lawn mowers, both of which have automated tasks that would normally have been highly time consuming. The two driving forces behind bringing home automation to the consumer is the combination of improving computation and the ability to manufacture cheap robotics. What good is a computer that can understand housework without means to do so? Its just the same as a robot built do handle such tasks without the artificial intelligence necessary to drive it. Today both technologies are ready and only still need to be put together.

The work being done at MIT to address the computational challenges of doing the laundry:  http://www2.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx?TRID=1082

the first robot that could be brought into peoples homes to do a task like laundry:

The beautiful part of a robot that could do your laundry is that after you have built a robot which is physically capable of doing your laundry you have almost by definition also built a robot which can wash your dishes. All that would stand in your way would be software to drive the process. Much like how today a smart phone can have tremendous new additional capacity added to it with the simple addition of applications so could a household robot also be improved to handle more tasks.

There obviously no end to this line of thinking, but the focus of this post is just how close we are today to having technology which will change forever the way that we live. The conversation should not come to the same false conclusions about leisure as fifty years previous but we should be talking about what will be important to us when we need spend zero time handling any process that a robotic assistant can easily assume. 

DNA candy shop

Bear with me: a few ideas.

#1Fixing our DNA - we now have the ability to change our DNA

And a sampling of the candy store of traits:

high altitude adaptation - Tibeten high altitude genetic adaptation

regrow limbs - http://phys.org/news187879295.html

longevity gene - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/100701-boston-university-health-genes-live-100-longevity-genetic-science/

cancer immunity - http://discovermagazine.com/2006/aug/areyouimmune

Ok,  I completely acknowledge that this is not something that we are able to actually execute today. The point that I believe is so important is for the first time in human history we have the tools and the knowledge to fundamentally rewrite the code that our bodies function on. And yes there will be mistakes and problems hopefully we will avoid the tragedies and catastrophes.

What I anticipate is that these augmentations will start to be perused faster than anyone anticipates, completely out-pacing legislation and the global scientific and academic community's ability to evaluate all the dangers lurking around the corners. This sort of technology is fundamentally destabilizing because we would have the ability to make industries irrelevant. Which is incredibly exciting, however, also dangerous. Whenever you threaten the interests of any large powerful industry, corporation, or nation you will inevitably get pushback. It will be exceptionally interesting to watch how these events play out.

Keep your eyes open!

Quad and Hexa copters

Currently on my mind these past few days: Quad and Hexa - copters. The possibilities seem endless and profound.

From a military standpoint there are almost an absurdly diverse amount of applications. Everything from individual and squad level (CAS and ISR) to airborne resupply for small units with almost zero infrastructure needed. I know that the technology is still immature but even now the potential is obvious. Current thinking on this idea is a combination of two budding technologies.

#1: High capacity hexacopters  - Awesome example of a hexacopter with lift capacity

#2: Oakley's new heads-up display goggles, with ruggedized controller - http://www.oakley.com/airwave

#3(just for background on the state of development for these mini helicopters) super fast hexacopter with GPS

So putting those two pieces of technology together you would have a semi-automious airborne asset that could deliver anything it could carry to a distance that has military utility, or maintain altitude and provide live video of the surrounding area. The best part of this whole idea is that the cost of these devices would be in the area of 1-2 thousand, compared to the 100K of the army's Raven UAV. With only a little development these technologies could transform how the american army fights, allowing units to be more flexible dynamic and light on their feet.

In a completely nonmilitary direction imagine how combining these technologies with an iPhone could revolutionize trivial day-to-day things like food delivery, if your house was within the radius of the flight distance a food service worker would hook the fast food bag onto the Quad/Hexa-copters hook and just like all the incorporated fast food chains have managed orders the copter would already have the destination queued up. The worker would press a button and off the copter would go with the food, (staying low enough as to not breach the FAA rules about airspace). On arrival an iPhone would begin a video call back to the restaurant to execute the payment transaction and check to ensure everything is in order.

(realizing now this may have been partly inspired because it's lunch time) 

Welcome!

This blog is designed to be all about the coming singularity and the events that lead to it. Enjoy!