Knives. It all started with a random video on my YouTube feed that the algorithm had suggested to me for an unknown reason. In it, a cutlery enthusiast did an experiment by buying a knife from a dollar store, and then used his skills and sharpening equipment to see how sharp he could make it. By the end, it could cut tomatoes into paper-thin slices.
I’d never thought about knives before, and the video piqued my interest (hat tip to the YouTube algorithm). Why didn’t everyone just use dollar store knives? The question led me down a research rabbit hole, which made me aware of the different kinds of kitchen knives that existed (chef’s knife, santoku, cleaver…), along with the differences in manufacture methods and metallurgy that made some better and costlier than others. I learned about different brands and about the basics of telling high-quality from low-quality knives.
Being a cheapskate, I wasn’t going to buy any expensive knives for myself, but I decided it was worth looking in local secondhand stores for them. After all, if I couldn’t tell the difference between a $10 Farberware and a $100 Wusthof, why should I expect the sorters working in the back of the local thrift store to?
Lo and behold, I started finding expensive knives, priced for pennies on the dollar. I haven’t assembled a complete set yet, but after a few months of stopping in at the thrift stores whenever I was near for something else, I’ve cobbled together a respectable array of quality knives from higher-end manufacturers.
This made me wonder how many other things in the secondhand stores are not being sold for what they’re worth. The enormous racks of clothing are all a blur to me since I care even less about them than kitchen knives, but surely there are many bargains to be found if you know about clothes brands and can analyze stitching and fabric quality.
Then I realized that the bargains won’t be there forever. As I wrote earlier, they only exist now because thrift stores employ low-skilled people who lack the time and knowledge to sort through every item they receive, look up the correct market price, and attach a custom price tag to each. However, that won’t be true in 20 years, when robots and AI are cheap enough and advanced enough to do it. In fact, image recognition algorithms already might be good enough to do this now, by taking photos of objects presented to them, searching the internet for photos of matching objects, and then searching eBay and other e-commerce websites to find the market value. In fact, in 20 years, the machines might have accumulated such a large, detailed database of images that they will be able to recognize any kind of man-made object at a glance, and find its value online or estimate it with high accuracy. (There will come a day when no person or thing is unknown to an intelligent machine.)
While this will be a bummer for bargain-hunters like me someday, it will actually be a healthy development overall since it will make markets more efficient. Capitalism is good at allocating resources only if all participants have accurate information about the things being sold. In this case, machines would let the thrift stores price their merchandise more appropriately: The high-end knives I now collect would get more expensive, but the low-end knives would get cheaper (right now, they’re the same price).
But why assume that only thrift stores will have that level of technology? Won’t average people eventually own household servant robots that could also recognize objects and ascertain their values instantly? Wouldn’t that cut off the flow of expensive and useful objects like high-end knives being donated for free to thrift stores?
I think it will work like this: After buying your robot butler and letting it loose to do chores around your house, within days it will have gone into every room and opened every closet, cabinet and drawer. It would silently create an inventory of every object on your property and each object’s condition. With that kind of information, the robot would warn you if you were about to throw away something valuable, like a nice knife. It would also let you know if you had any particularly valuable things, like unmarked paintings that were probably made by famous artists.
Additionally, over time they’d observe which possessions their human masters never used (in my case, my excess kitchen knife collection), and the robots would recommend they sell or recycle them, and they’d handle every aspect of the transaction. So many of us have boxes of old clothes, cameras, or other disused items laying around our houses that we’d like to sell, but don’t because holding a yard sale or creating online ads is too much work. Robot butlers would eliminate this hurdle, and make selling off personal items as simple as saying “OK.”
Household robots and personal assistant AIs would also manage the converse process of watching out for unmet human needs that could be satisfied by purchasing goods. They would tell their human masters to buy specific things that would make their lives easier or better. For example, a man who was concerned about his diet would be encouraged to buy a blender to make fruit and vegetable smoothies, and convinced through data analysis that the money spent on the machine would reap noticeable health benefits. The large number of used, high-quality blenders for sale through secondhand channels would also lower the prices for such machines, making it even easier for the man to get one.
Though this all sounds weird and unimportant, I think it’s actually a logical outcome of the technology, and that it would improve economies and improve human welfare by lowering the prices of many goods enough for poorer people to afford them. The overall utilization efficiency of the stock of manmade goods would also increase as disused things were put in the hands of people who needed them. This would also benefit the environment since fewer new things would need to be manufactured.
Disused objects that had very low or no value could be recycled, and the materials would make their way back into the manufacturing stream. Through the actions of household robots, peoples’ houses would slowly empty of clutter, and billions of old glass bottles, metal containers, and tons of paper would be gradually sent off to be refashioned into something useful.
And to think, this whole chain of thoughts sprang from one YouTube video about a cheap knife!
A few years ago, I did a thought exercise where I deduced what a robot tank would be like. I concluded that the lack of human crewmen would allow such a tank to be shorter, lighter, and less voluminous than manned tanks, but that it would still look unmistakably “tank-like” and would be in the size range of current tanks. Thus, the future of armored warfare will look much the same as its present, even if a lot of new technology will be hidden under the hood.
Now I wonder if this would be the case for warships. Given their great variety, I have to restrict my analysis to just one type, the aircraft carrier, but my key conclusions can probably apply to the rest. And since there are many types of aircraft carriers, I’m focusing this analysis on supercarriers in particular, which only the U.S. Navy has at present. The newest American supercarrier that is also fully mission-capable is the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, and as such, it’s fair to call it America’s “best” aircraft carrier. So what would a robot George Bush look like?
The USS George H.W. Bush
First, the ship’s gross architecture would stay the same. It would need an oblong hull with a pointed front to minimize hydrodynamic drag. The top would need to be flat and uncluttered so planes could land on and take off from it. Even in the far future, most planes will still take off and land the traditional way on runways. Even with more advanced aircraft technology, fighter planes won’t hover straight up into the air to take off. Vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) will, thanks to physics and the usefulness of “lift,” always be a MUCH less fuel-efficient way to get airborne and then return to the ground than speeding down a runway. Every extra pound that a VTOL plane needs to land and take off is one pound it doesn’t have for weapons.
The George H.W. Bush’s island structure.
In fact, the only external difference between the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush and its robot equivalent would be the ships’ islands. On an aircraft carrier, the “island” is a vertical protrusion on the otherwise-flat flight deck, and it somewhat resembles a small office building. It provides mounting points for radars, radios, and other sensors, and also contains the bridge, flight control room, and smaller rooms for specialized tasks.
These photos show the bridge of one of the Bush’s sister ships.
The captain and his command crew are in the bridge, where they monitor and control overall ship operations. The flight control room is one level above that, and is where other officers coordinate aircraft movements on and off the carrier. It’s obvious why these crewmen need to be situated in a high place where they have good views of the ship’s flight deck and the surrounding waters. In turn, the physical sizes of human bodies and our need for clearance space to walk around each other dictate the dimensions of those rooms, and ultimately, the shape and size of the island. Thus, this part of an aircraft carrier is designed around the human form.
On an automated aircraft carrier, such considerations could be dispensed with since humans wouldn’t be aboard. Visual monitoring of the flight deck and seas could be done with cameras, allowing the bridge, flight control room, and other small rooms in the island that support their functions to be deleted (computers located deep inside the ship’s hull would watch the video feeds). As a result, the office-building-like island would be thinned down to a mast. It might be of a metal lattice design, or could be solid with a geometrically faceted exterior to reduce the ship’s radar signature.
A British frigate with three masts of two different designs. The one at left is geometric, while the two at right are simple metal lattice towers. A robot aircraft carrier’s island would look like one of these.
A thinner island would help a robot aircraft carrier by increasing its flight deck area and reducing the air turbulence over it. The ship’s survivability would also be improved since its command staff wouldn’t be kept in an exposed, vulnerable location. Instead, it’s command functions would be done by a central computer located in an armored room below decks.
A Nimitz-class carrier like the George H.W. Bush typically contains 56 planes (mostly fighters like the F/A-18) and 15 helicopters. Our robot version of the carrier would have autonomous versions of those aircraft. Since the planes lack human pilots and crewmen, things like ejection seats, steering controls, bubble canopies, computer screens, and oxygen pumps could be deleted, reducing gross weight. That weight savings would let the aircraft take off and land a little more easily, possibly reducing the lengths of runway they needed, and hence reducing the overall length of the ship.
However, any such benefit would be tiny since the weight of the pilot and his supporting equipment is relatively minuscule. For example, an F/A-18 Super Hornet that is fully fueled and armed for a combat mission could weigh over 50,000 lbs, less than 1,000 lbs of which is represented by the pilot and his aforementioned support gear. An unmanned F/A-18 might be able to take off and land on a runway a few feet shorter than the manned version, but that’s it. Therefore, the lengths of the runways used for takeoffs and landings on the robot carrier would either be the same as those on the human-crewed counterpart, or imperceptibly shorter.
The reduction of the island’s mass might result in the flight deck being slightly narrower since the port side of the deck wouldn’t need to flare out as much to counterbalance the weight of the starboard side.
A careful look at this head-on view of the George H.W. Bush reveals that the port side of the ship (right side in this photo) juts out farther from the ship’s centerline than the starboard side (left side in the photo). This asymmetry exists to balance out the island’s weight.
The robot ship’s “freeboard,” which refers to the vertical distance between the surface of the water and the top of its flight deck, would be the same or very close to the manned version’s, which is 57 feet. In general, as ships get longer and heaver, they need higher freeboards to keep stable. A high freeboard is also very important for ships meant to sail through rough seas, which an aircraft carrier would need to do since wars don’t pause for bad weather anymore. There’s no reason to think the manned USS George H.W. Bush’s freeboard is not optimal given the ship’s size and function, nor is there evidence that the crew’s uniquely human needs affected the freeboard.
The USS Midway appears to sit lower in the water than the USS George H.W. Bush
The argument for this optimality is strengthened by the example of the USS Midway, another aircraft carrier that served the U.S. Navy from 1945 to 1992. In the 1960s, it went through a major renovation in which the flight deck was widened to accommodate the bigger planes that were entering service, which added substantial weight to the ship and made it sit lower in the water. The reduced freeboard hurt the Midway‘s performance in rough seas, and the ship also had more problems with waves splashing into the ship’s open side elevators, and even splashing over the bow to soak the flight deck. The problems kept it from conducting flights in sea conditions that the George H.W. Bush could still operate in. The contrast between the ships further supports the conclusion that the Bush’s freeboard is already optimized, and wouldn’t be different or would only be a tiny amount different in an autonomous version of the ship.
To summarize this analysis of the robot carrier’s exterior, it might have have a slightly different profile and slightly different dimensions to its flight deck compared to the manned version. However, this would be very hard to see, and by far, the most visible difference would be to the island.
The ship’s interior layout is the most subject to human needs since it is where almost 6,000 people work and live, 24 hours a day, for months on end. Before moving on to that half of this analysis, it’s important to point out that an autonomous aircraft carrier would still need crewmen, though they’d be robotic. They would need to be able to move around the ship for inspections, maintenance, repairs, emergency response, and to transport things. Therefore, the inside of the robotic George H.W. Bush would still be comprised of rooms, doors, stairways, and passageways to enable the crew to access every part of the ship.
To understand how the ship’s interior layout would change if human-centric design concerns were abandoned, first study these cutaway illustrations of the George H.W. Bush’s class of ships:
A simplified cross-section of the USS George H.W. Bush.
The USS Nimitz is one of the USS George H.W. Bush’s sister ships.
A side view of the USS Ronald Reagan’s interior, another of the Bush’s sister ships. A larger version that you can zoom in on is at the image creator’s website: http://patrickturner.com/carrier.html
A cutaway showing the size and location of the USS Ronald Reagan’s hangar deck.
Let’s start by distinguishing the features and sections of the ship that exist because of the presence of humans, or are larger than they need to be because of human physiology, from the features and sections that do not. The hangar is massive and is necessary to house the carrier’s aircraft for maintenance, repairs and modifications. It’s size is dictated by the sizes of the planes and by the need to have enough space around each one to be able to move them around and provide crew with access to them. There’s no reason to assume the size or layout of the hangar deck would be different if the carrier were autonomous, so the largest single room in the ship would be the same.
This is also true for the series of large rooms at the ship’s lowest point, called “the fourth deck,” which contain its nuclear reactors, electrical generators and gearing that connects the engines to the propellers. Smaller rooms on the fourth deck that store jet fuel, munitions for the planes, and water for the steam catapults are also not designed around human needs. (They are stored at the lowest part of the ship to keep its center of gravity low, improving its stability.)
It’s impossible to generalize about all the other decks of the ship since rooms dedicated to purely mechanical functions (e.g. – jet engine repair shop, steam catapult piping spaces) are mixed in with those dedicated to human crew needs (e.g. – bunk rooms, hospital, cafeteria). All we can say is those of the former category would stay, while the latter would disappear, leaving a lot of empty space.
The robot crewmen wouldn’t need to eat, sleep, party, or satisfy hygienic needs, and would probably stay at their work stations almost all the time. The only room dedicated to their unique needs might be a specialized repair shop and spare parts room. Those rooms would take vastly less space than the bunk rooms, bathrooms, cafeterias, bakeries, laundromats, conference rooms, etc. that would need to be there to satisfy a human crew’s needs.
The ability to work constantly would also allow a robot crew to be smaller than a human one without reducing work output. Assuming an average sailor works a 12-hour day and works as efficiently as a robot when he’s on duty, 3,000 robots could to the work of 6,000 humans. The disparity might actually turn out to be more extreme.
Getting rid of the human crew wouldn’t just save internal space–it would save weight. The clothing, beddings, beds, furniture, cooking appliances, laundry machines, bathroom fixtures, lockers, food, and water (in excess of what is needed for the steam catapults), plus the plumbing and electrical/data cables needed to support some of those features add up, and if the humans disappeared, so would all of those things. Ironically, a robotic aircraft carrier would also have fewer computers and display monitors in it since the machines wouldn’t need them because they’d be able to directly interface their minds with the ship’s sensors and main computer. Lessening the number of devices would also save weight.
Moreover, the need to divide a ship’s internal space into rooms that only exist due to human needs, like walling off an area to create privacy for a bathroom, adds weight since the walls themselves are heavy. If the ship weren’t designed around human needs, more parts of the ship could be large, open areas, cutting overall weight.
With these considerations in mind, a low estimate for the amount of weight saved by eliminating the human crew is one ton (2,000 lbs) per person. The total weight savings is therefore 6,000 tons, which is a small but still helpful boost for a vessel displacing 114,000 tons.
Our robotic version of the George H.W. Bush could deal with its excess internal volume and weight savings in a three different ways. The simplest option would be to just accept having more empty space inside of itself, and to capitalize on the slight increase in sailing speed and ship energy efficiency that would owe to being lighter. The ship would have the same number of decks and the same internal volume and the manned version, but the rooms would be larger, there would be less of them, and they would be less full of stuff. This option would let the carrier be more mission flexible since it could double as a transport.
The Nimitz-class USS Theodore Roosevelt undergoing replenishment at sea. Note the temporary cables connecting the ships, which are used to move supplies.
The second option would be to fill the robot George H.W. Bush‘s newly empty spaces with 6,000 tons of other stuff to improve its performance in some way. Nimitz-class aircraft carriers are powered by nuclear reactors whose uranium lasts for 20 years, so it wouldn’t help to add spare uranium rods to the ship (refueling is done in port for the sake of safety, anyway). However, other types of essential supplies are depleted over the course of a multi-month cruise, forcing a carrier to halt operations so it can pull alongside a cargo ship for a tedious resupply process called “replenishment.”
The lack of human crewmen would mean the carrier would no longer need food replenishments, but it would still need replenishments of aviation fuel, munitions, and spare parts for its aircraft and itself. Given that a Nimitz-class ship’s 8,500 ton supply of aviation fuel , called “JP-5,” only last about seven days during routine operations, and even less during round-the-clock combat operations, the robot version of the ship would derive the most benefit from adding more fuel tanks.
If the capacity of the robot George H.W. Bush’s aviation fuel storage tanks increase from 8,500 to 14,500 tons, if JP-5 is 6.8 pounds per U.S. gallon, and if a gallon of liquid is 0.134 cubic feet, then we can calculate how much volume the added 6,000 tons of fuel will take up inside the ship.
Glimpsing at this cross-section of the George H.W. Bush again, we see that aviation fuel in stored in long tanks stretching along the port and starboard sides of the ship (item #8 in the image). At the waterline, the ship is 1,092 feet long, and the draught (the distance between the waterline and the bottom of the ship’s hull) is 37 feet. So if we add 236,470 cubic feet of fuel tanks to the existing tanks indicated in the illustration…
1,092 feet x 37 feet = 40,404 square feet on port side and starboard side (80,808 total) 236,470 cubic feet / 80,808 square feet = 2.9 feet
…then we could fit in the extra fuel by widening the existing storage areas by a mere 2.9 feet. As a result, in the above illustration, item #8 would be very slightly wider on both sides of the ship, and item #10 would be very slightly narrower by the same amount. Adding 6,000 tons of aviation fuel is very doable.
The result would be a ship that weighed and handled the same as its manned counterpart, but could launch airstrikes against enemies for longer periods of time before having to pause to get a gas refill from another ship. The robot carrier’s upper decks would have a lot more empty space than the manned version, but it wouldn’t be able to fill it up without slowing itself down.
The third option would be to get rid of the surplus human spaces by deleting some of the ship’s decks, in turn reducing the carrier’s total interior volume. The mission-essential rooms that remained, like the repair shops and spare parts storage rooms, would then be reconfigured so they filled up the ship’s interior efficiently, with no empty spaces or oversized rooms. If you could explore this robot George H.W. Bush version, it would seem as claustrophobic as its manned counterpart, though it would take less time to tour the latter since it would have one or two fewer decks.
This modification would cut even more weight from the vessel, allowing it to travel faster with the same nuclear reactors, or to travel at the same speed with smaller reactors. The reduced mass would also make it faster and cheaper to build.
“Freeboard” is the vertical distance between the water’s surface and the top of a ship’s hull, and “draught” is the vertical distance between the bottom of a ship’s hull and the water’s surface.
But this design change raises a potential problem: If we reduce the number of decks in the ship, then we reduce its overall height from the bottom to top. As discussed earlier in this analysis, we can’t reduce the freeboard because that’s already optimized. That means we have to reduce the “draught” (also called “draft”), which is the vertical distance from the bottom of the ship’s hull to the water’s surface. However, reducing the draught too much can make a ship unstable.
The George H.W. Bush‘s draught is 37 feet. If one deck were deleted, the draught would be 28.5 feet, and the ship’s weight would also decrease. Let’s say it drops from 114,000 tons to 100,000. Would the ship still be stable? Maybe. After all, there are several cruise ships whose dimensions with nearly identical dimensions, and they’re very seaworthy:
Ship name
Tonnage
Draught (ft)
Length (ft)
Width (ft)
USS George H.W. Bush (manned)
114,000
37
1,040
134
USS George H.W. Bush (robot) minus one deck
100,000
28.5
1,040
134
Carnival Sunshine
103,881
26.25
892
125
Costa Fortuna
102,587
27.23
892
125
MSC Orchestra
92,409
25.75
964
105
Norwegian Pearl
93,530
28.3
964
105
The cruise ships with draughts of 25.75 – 28.3 feet can handle rough seas, so the table suggests our robot aircraft carrier would presumably be able to do so just as well with a draught of 28.5 feet. However, it’s possible the demands placed on a ship designed for war are different from those of a ship designed for recreation, making a 28.5 foot draught insufficient for an aircraft carrier. A warship probably needs to be able to accelerate harder, make tighter turns, and endure worse weather conditions than a cruise liner. Unlike my research on the freeboard, I wasn’t able to find data on the optimal draught for a carrier, so I can’t answer the question, I can only conclude that a robotic aircraft carrier might have fewer decks and less internal volume than a manned counterpart.
In conclusion, while a robot version of the U.S.S George H.W. Bush wouldn’t look much different from a manned version on the outside, there would be substantial differences on the inside. All of the rooms and items that existed to service the needs of the human crew (bunk rooms, bathroom, cafeterias, offices, furniture, display monitors, etc.) would be missing. If the robot version retained the same amount of internal space as the manned version, then it would feel much emptier and more open inside. Its performance would also be superior to the manned version in one or more areas (e.g. – faster, more fuel for planes, better mission flexibility thanks to more storage space). If the robot version were designed to exclude excess volume, then it would feel about as constricted as the manned version, and it’s interior would be smaller, making it faster to do a full walking tour of the ship. A less capacious version of the USS George H.W. Bush may or may not have better performance in one or more areas than its manned counterpart, but for sure, it would be faster and cheaper to manufacture, allowing a country to make more ships for the same amount of money.
Finally, another observed difference would be lower levels of activity on an autonomous aircraft carrier since there would be far fewer crewmen. Moreover, since the crew would all be robots, they wouldn’t need to roam the ship to visit bathrooms, the cafeteria, buddies, or their bunks–they would stay put at their duty locations almost all the time. For example, a robot that fixed airplane engines would spend all its time in the engine repair shop. If it needed power, it would plug itself into a wall outlet in that room. It might only ever leave the room to visit the robot repair shop when it broke.
The robots would be of different sizes and designs to suit different roles on the ship. Obviously, they would need to be waterproof and capable of working normally underwater, to some reasonable depth and pressure level (100 – 200 meters). Unlike human crewmen, if the carrier were sinking, they would stay inside and focus on fixing the vessel, reducing the odds of it being lost. They could even keep working in parts of the ship that had filled with water.
Contrast that scenario with the premature abandonment of the U.S.S. Yorktown in WWII, which happened because the captain erroneously assumed the ship was doomed, and the human crewmen were afraid to risk their lives by remaining on it. The central computer of a robot George H.W. Bush would not make such a mistake, and its robot crew would unfailing execute its orders until the end, even in the worst of circumstances.
Yesterday, a massive wildfire suddenly erupted on the Colorado grassland and destroyed hundreds of structures. It capped a year when wildfires burned 7.13 million acres of land in the U.S., which is actually slightly below the average of 7.47 million acres. Recent years have been much worse, including 2015 when a record-breaking 10.1 million acres burned, and 2018 when the figure was 8.8 million acres, and the “Camp Fire” in northern California killed 85 people.
It’s widely accepted among Americans that global warming is making wildfires bigger and more frequent, and will continue doing so as time passes, and that wildfire damage to infrastructure is unpreventable. To the first point, while it’s true anthropogenic global warming is making fires in many parts of the world worse, its impact is much smaller than the news media has led people to believe. A vastly greater contributor to the problem is human suppression of all forest fires, which allows dead vegetation, underbrush, and dead trees to build up to unnaturally high levels, laying the groundwork for inevitable mega-fires that can’t be controlled.
For example, before white settlement of what is now California, 4.5 million acres of the state’s forests usually burned each year thanks to lightning strikes and Native American land clearing. During 2018, a year that modern people consider catastrophic for California wildfires, only 1.9 million acres of the state burned. Many decades of fire suppression have resulted in the state’s forests having up to 100 times as much woody biomass as they should. Other parts of the U.S. that are prone to wildfires have the same problem.
To the second point, it is actually possible to significantly reduce the damage wildfires do to human infrastructure. Most ecologists recommend having “prescribed burns” (also called “controlled burns”), which are deliberately set wildfires meant to combust excess wood and underbrush. A large area to be burned is marked off, the fire is lit, and firefighters patrol the edges of it to make sure the flames don’t escape. Problematically, these planned fires are expensive, take a long time to get legal authorization to proceed, and are opposed by local people who only care about the short-term impacts of smoke and the threat of the fires getting out of control.
So what solution is left? Well, I have one proposal, and like so many ideas that spring from my mind, it is just as logical as it is crazy-sounding: We use thousands of teams of goats and robots to roam through America’s forests to destroy excess wood and plants. I like it because it fuses something natural and prehistoric (animal grazing) with something futuristic.
A “fuel break” is a natural area that people have cleared of combustible dead wood, underbrush, small trees, and low-hanging branches. It’s hard for wildfires to sweep through fuel breaks, and when they do, whatever flammable material there still is on the forest floor quickly burns up.
Each team would consist of two “sub teams”: a herd of goats that would first eat all the light vegetation and small sticks, and a group of “robot lumberjacks” that would then gather and burn all the larger pieces of wood the goats weren’t able to consume. Between the two of them, they would create a “fuel break,” which is an area where excess biomass has been removed from the ground and the trees have been thinned. Wildfires can still burn fuel breaks, but since there is little combustible material in them, the fires spread through them slowly, don’t get as intense, and are easier for firefighters to extinguish.
The goat/robot teams would roam the forests and grasslands at the fringes of human-populated areas, creating fuel breaks. Since the biomass would either be eaten or burned piecemeal in portable stoves, there would be no risk of the teams’ activities significantly damaging local air quality, or setting fires that got out of control. With mildly intelligent AI, the teams could be almost totally automated, needing very little human oversight.
To understand in detail how the system would work, imagine we’re in a government-owned forest that abuts a suburban development somewhere in California. To make things simple, let’s say the edge of the suburb is a straight line several kilometers long. Looking at it from above, all the back lawns of the houses on one edge of the suburb end at a straight line of trees marking the start of a forest. The part of the forest touching the lawns is divided into imaginary, one-acre squares of land, with each square measuring 63 meters to a side.
A herd of goats arrives in one of the imaginary square acres. Over several days, they eat the living vegetation, leaving behind only dead wood on the forest floor. Their droppings also fertilize the soil.
The goats would wear electronic collars containing GPS locators and metal prods for delivering mild electric shocks. As with an invisible fence meant to keep pet dogs from roaming outside their owners’ yards, the collars would shock goats that started to stray from the designated one-acre zone.
A few different robots would watch the herd and move with it. They would do things like supply the goats with water, help them if they got physically trapped or injured, and fend off predators by using nonlethal means like pepper spray. The machines would also monitor the goats’ health and nutrition status.
After eating the bushes, small plants and low-hanging branches, the dead wood remains and is easy to see and grab
A herd of 30 goats takes roughly six days to eat an acre’s worth of vegetation, and that sounds like a manageable number of animals for the robot shepherds to keep track of, so let’s choose that for the size of our herd. After the goats graze in the 63 meter square of land for six days, the robots visually confirm that the animals have eaten all they can, and then they slowly shift the boundaries of the “electric fence” to drive the herd into the next one-acre box of land to start eating the vegetation there. The shepherd robots move with them.
Some early cars like this 1919 Stanley Steam car, were powered by steam engines (the silver object under the hood). An engine like this, connected to a wood stove, could be small enough to fit in something like an ATV that could drive through the woods.
An all-robot crew then moves into the acre of land that the goats just vacated. Their job is to eliminate any dead wood that remained on the ground, as well as cut down dead trees and excess saplings, and trim all branches up to a height of 3 meters above the ground. A crucial piece of equipment they has is a combination wood-burning stove and steam engine mounted in a small, off-road vehicle. Dead wood gathered from the square acre would be burned in the stove, and the heat from the flames would boil water inside the steam engine, which in turn would spin a turbine and generate electricity. The electricity would recharge the batteries of the vehicle, of the robot crewmen, and of their power tools. The system would be energy self-sufficient, reducing costs. The other robots that were tasked with taking care of the goats would walk to the stove/steam engine to recharge their own batteries when needed, and then go back to the goats.
The all-robot crew’s first on-site task would be to set up the wood stove / steam engine. For obvious reasons, it would probably be moved to the geographic center of the acre. A chimney would be attached to its top to catch sparks and filter the most poisonous gases from the smoke. For the second task, the chimney would contain a removable “catalytic combustor,” which is a common feature in modern American wood-burning stoves.
The robot lumberjacks would then get to work. Thanks to the goats consuming most of the underbrush and low-hanging tree branches, it would be easy for the robots to move around the area, see pieces of dead wood on the ground, and pick them up. All of the biomass marked for removal would be put in the stove and burned. The robots would use electric chainsaws, log splitters, and other tools to cut anything too large to fit into the stove into sufficiently small pieces.
The opportunity would also be used to remove human-created trash from the acre. Anything that was safely combustible would be thrown in the stove while the rest would be bundled in a pile and geotagged for eventual pickup.
Over the course of six days, the robot crew would slowly feed all of the acre’s dead wood and excess vegetation into the stove. They would periodically remove wood ash from the stove, wait until it was no longer hot enough to cause a fire, and sprinkle it on the ground to fertilize the soil. One member of the robot crew would be a small vehicle meant to carry water and spray it on fires accidentally lit by sparks from the stove, as well as douse the ashes before they were spread on the ground. It would use local bodies of water like streams and lakes to replenish its reservoir, and might also provide the goats with drinking water.
What would the other robots look like? To move around over uneven forest terrain, between closely-spaced trees, and under branches, they would need legs, and they couldn’t be much bigger than human adults. Some of the robots in the crew would also need to have body layouts that gave them general-purpose work abilities so they could do things like assemble and disassemble the stove / steam engine, pick up large pieces of wood, replace chainsaw blades, and make minor repairs to themselves and other robots. With those requirements in mind, I think most of the robot crew would be humanoid or centaur-like, and would have one or two pairs of arms and hands for grasping tools and objects. (For a deeper discussion of this topic, read my blog entry “What would a human-equivalent robot look like?”)
Once the excess wood in the area was all burned, the robots would dump the last of their ashes, configure the stove/steam engine and any other equipment for travel mode, and move the system to the next burn site a few hundred meters away, again moving into the new acre square as the goat herd moved out. This process would repeat itself indefinitely, with the goats and robots slowly creating a 63-meter-wide “line” of thinned trees, trimmed branches, and debris-free forest floor. Assuming the goat/robot system spends 50% of its time working and 50% out of action due to adverse weather, maintenance, and other factors, it could transform 26 acres of forest into fuel breaks over the course of one year, making the “line” 1,638 meters long (almost exactly 1 mile).
To stay effective, fuel breaks need full maintenance once every 10 years, which means that one crew of 30 goats and maybe 10 robots could create and sustain a fuel break 16 kilometers (10 miles) long and 63 meters wide. Put into perspective, it would take 116 crews to make a straight fuel brake extending from the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego to the U.S.-Canada border near Seattle.
Of course, one fuel break paralleling the West Coast won’t solve America’s wildfire problem. We’d probably need fuel breaks 100 times longer than that, scattered all over the country, and in irregular configurations around the fringes of towns and suburbs, to significantly cut the amount of damage wildfires cause each year. It might sound like a lot, but doing the math, it’s feasible, at least with the technology we’ll have later this century.
11,600 fuel break crews would require 116,000 robots, which on average would be the sizes of adult humans (the water carrier vehicles, which should be thought of as autonomous vehicles designed for off-road use, would be larger and heavier). That might sound like a lot of robots, until you consider there were 245 million passenger vehicles in the U.S. in 2018. If we can afford to build and maintain that many large, complicated machines, then it should be possible to create a vastly smaller fleet of lighter and less complicated machines.
The crews would also need 348,000 goats, which is indeed a large number, but achievable when you consider the total goat population of the U.S. was 2.66 million in 2020. It would take only a few years of more intensively breeding the existing goat population to expand it by 13%–the amount needed to populate the fuel break crews.
Automation would keep the system’s costs low, and it would be rare for human staff to have to travel to work sites (reasons might include veterinary care for the goats, or major repairs to broken robots). The amount of human deaths and property losses averted by the system would, hopefully, more than pay for its costs. According to my own estimates, AI and robotics should be advanced enough to make the first goat / robot crews sometime in the late 2030s. However, due to public skepticism of the idea (if it is even known to a non-token segment of the public by then), I think this idea or any variant of it won’t come to fruition for decades after that.
‘By some estimates, many of [California’s] forests have up to 100 times the amount of small trees and underbrush than what grew prior to white settlement. Meanwhile, researchers estimate that prior to 1800, some 4.5 million acres of the state’s forests burned in a typical year — more than the 1.9 million acres that burned in 2018, the most in modern history. Yet in a state with more than 30 million acres of forest, only about 87,000 acres of California land were treated with prescribed burns last year to reduce undergrowth prior to the state’s deadly fire season, according to data from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.’ https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/californias-history-of-drought-repeats.html
In my Terminator review and my analysis of what a fully-automated tank would look like, I mentioned that human-sized, general-purpose robots that can do the same physical tasks as humans will not necessarily look like humans, or even have humanoid body layouts (i.e. – head, large torso, two arms, two legs). I’d like to explore that idea in greater depth, and to offer educated guesses about what such robots would look like.
First, bear in mind that there are already countless numbers of robots in the world–overwhelmingly in factories and controlled work settings–and almost none of them are humanoid. Instead, their body shapes are entirely dictated by their narrow functions. For example, a robot that welds the seams between two sheets of metal comprising part of a car’s frame will resemble a giant arm and will have a welding torch for a hand. Since it is meant for use in a car factory assembly line where unfinished car frames will be delivered to it via conveyor belt, the robot won’t need to move from that spot, and hence won’t need legs or wheels. And since the act of welding a seam isn’t that complicated, it won’t need a giant computer brain, meaning it won’t have a head. Likewise, a robot designed to move supplies like medicine and linens throughout a hospital will take the form of a large, hollow box with wheels.
Even as robots get cheaper and more advanced in the coming decades and take over more jobs, the vast majority of them will continue looking nothing like humans, and will be designed for specific and not general tasks. Fully-autonomous vehicles, for example, will count as “robots,” but will not resemble humans.
That said, I think “overspecialization” of robot designs will prove inefficient, and that there will be niches for general-purpose robots in many areas of the economy and ordinary life. Some of these general-purpose robots will be about the same sizes as humans, but they won’t look exactly like us. Consider that the humanoid body layout is inherently unstable since it is top-heavy and only has two legs to balance on. If we had millions of bipedal, human-sized robots walking around and intermixing with us in many uncontrolled environments, there would be constant problems with them falling over (or being pushed over) and injuring or killing people. Something like a 250 pound Terminator made of hard metal would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Off the bat, it’s clear that general purpose robots can’t be so heavy that, if one fell on you, you would be seriously hurt, and/or unable to push it off of your body. At the same time, it can’t be so light that it tips over when carrying everyday objects like full trashcans, or is even at risk of being toppled by wind gusts. Splitting the difference between the average weights of adult men and woman gives us a figure of 180 lbs, which I think is a good upper limit to how much the robots could weigh.
Also off the bat, it’s clear that the general purpose robots should have the lowest practical centers of gravity and need to have soft exteriors to cushion humans against collisions. A low-hanging fruit helps us solve the first requirement: delete the robot’s head. This might sound very weird, but if we’re unbound by the constraints of biology and are designing a robot from metal and plastic starting from a clean slate, it makes perfect sense.
Since robots won’t eat, drink, or breathe, they won’t need mouths, noses, or any associated anatomical features found in human heads and necks. And since signals from the robot’s sensory organs would travel to its “brain” at the speed of light, there would be no advantage to clustering the eyes, ears, and brain together to reduce lag (thanks to the slowness of human nerve impulses, it takes about 1/10 of a second for an image or sound that has been detected by the eyes or ears to reach the brain), meaning the CPU could be moved into the torso. Doing that would lower the robot’s center of gravity and give the CPU more physical protection than our skulls provide our brains. (Distributing mental functions among several computer cores in different parts of the torso and even limbs would probably be an ideal setup since it would further improve survivability.)
In place of a neck and head, there might be a telescoping, flexible “stalk” or “tentacle” with sensory organs (camera lens, microphone) at its tip. It could extend and shorten, and swivel in any direction. By default, it would probably be facing forward and raised to the same height as a typical human head so it could see the world from the same perspective as we. The top of its torso might only be 4′ 10″ off the ground, but the stalk would rise up another foot. The sci fi space film Saturn 3 had an evil robot named “Hector” that had a crude tentacle like this in place of a head.
“Hector” the robot didn’t have a head. Note that the robots I envision would be much shorter than this.
The last safety requirement that I mentioned, the need to have soft exteriors to cushion humans against collisions, could be satisfied by making their outer casings from a spongy material like silicone. However, I think it would probably be cheaper and just as effective to give the robots hard outer casings, but have them wear tight-fitting, padded clothes. The general-purpose robots would know how to wash their clothes in standard laundry machines and would periodically do so. Also, if the padding were made of the plastic foam found in life jackets, it would keep the robots from sinking to the bottom if they, say, fell into a swimming pool while cleaning it, or fell off the side of a fishing boat where they were part of the crew.
The need to protect people from accidental injury will also mean that general purpose robots will be made no faster or stronger than average humans. These limitations would be very helpful to us in a “robot uprising” scenario, but they’d be just as beneficial preventing many kinds of small, mundane accidents that could hurt people. For example, if your robot isn’t stronger than you, it can’t accidentally crush your hand by applying too much pressure during a handshake. If it can’t move faster than a jog, it can’t ever build up enough speed and momentum to collide with you with fatal force.
The NS-5 robots could jump long distances and do acrobatics.
With these safety requirements in mind, it should be clear why the general-purpose “NS-5” robots in the movie I, Robot was unrealistic. There was no reason to give those robots superhuman speed, strength, agility, and explosive movement. Moreover, they all had hard exoskeletons and walked around “nude,” making them collision hazards. (On a side note, I also thought it was unrealistic that a single company–“U.S. Robotics”–would have an apparent monopoly on the humanoid robot market, and that all humans would own the same kind of robot. In reality, there will be many companies making them in the future, and there will be many different robot models and variants that will look different from one another, just as there’s great diversity in how cars look today.)
Now that I’ve covered the safety issues general-purpose robots will have to be designed to address, let’s move on to exploring the other requirements that will affect how they will look. Since they’ll have to navigate human-built environments like houses and to fit into vehicles designed for us, they will need legs instead of wheels so they can climb steps, arms and hands for opening doors and using tools, and they will need to be skinny and short enough to fit through standard-sized doorways. The requirement for them to be able to sit in chairs and climb over obstacles like low fences and fallen tree trunks will mean the size proportions of their limbs and bodies won’t be able to stray too far from those of humans. They will need fingers that are as thin as ours to type on keyboards and push standard-sized buttons, but they might not have five fingers per hand (it will be interesting to see what the optimal number turns out to be).
It wouldn’t cost much more money to make the joints in the robots’ fingers and everywhere else double-jointed, and they’d gain useful dexterity from such a feature, so I think it would be so. Pivot joints in the arms and legs would also allow for 360 degrees of rotation, further bolstering utility. At first I thought the general purpose robots would have a second set of arms–for a total of six limbs–so they could be more able than humans, but then I realized how wasteful that would be since so few tasks require them. 99% of the time, the second set of arms would uselessly hang down off the robot’s body and be dead weight.
Then again, that 1% of the time when you do need the extra pair of hands to do something could warrant some kind of engineering compromise. The prehensile sensor stalks that stand-in for heads on our general-purpose robots could elongate and grasp onto things, acting like weak third hands (our mouths do the same, and can hold smell, light objects). Instead of, or in addition to that, the legs at the bottom of the robot could terminate in hands instead of feet like ours. Chimpanzees are like this, and many birds also have feet they use for grasping and walking. The setup would make it harder for the robots to run, and maybe less energy-efficient for them to walk, but we’ve already established we don’t want them to be able to run fast, and many of the tasks we’d use these robots for wouldn’t require large amounts of walking anyway (ex – robot butler in your house). Aside from giving them an extra pair of hands for those rare occasions when they need it, having hands as feet would let the robots pick things up from the ground, climb ladders more easily, and maintain better balance on uneven surfaces like roofs.
It almost goes without saying that the robots would be able to walk on all fours about as well as they could walk on two legs. If they weren’t carrying anything and were just going from one place to another, walking on all fours would be safest since that would minimize the risks of them losing balance and crushing someone or breaking something. This is again reminiscent of chimps, and I think the robots might use their “knuckles” when walking on all-fours to keep the palms of their hands clean and undamaged. And interestingly, in laying out this new requirement for optional quadrupedalism, the hypothetical general-purpose robot’s design has superficially converged with the real-life “Spot” robot, made by Boston Dynamics.
“Spot” is a real robot you can buy.
One thing I don’t like about Spot’s design is that its torso is a single, rigid piece. The general-purpose robots I’m envisioning–or at least the more advanced variants of it that will be fielded in the more distant future–will need segmented torsos that let them bend and lean a little in all directions. The flexibility of our spines lets us do this, helping us to quickly make small postural adjustments to balance on two feet. The robots might not need anything as elaborate as a human back made of 33 vertebrae, and, as with the number of fingers, it will be interesting to see what the optimal (or sufficient) number of torso segments turns out to be.
Having a flexible torso, four hands, and four, highly flexible limbs that could bend in more ways than we can would also let the general-purpose robots comfortably touch any part of their own bodies, enabling them to self-repair, which would be an invaluable feature. The swiveling sensor stalk plus tiny cameras built into other parts of its body like the hands and torso would also let it see every part of its own body (cameras built into the hands or fingers would also let it reach inside small, tight spaces and clearly see what is inside, letting it guide the appendage, unlike humans who must blindly feel around in such situations). Contrast this with us humans, who have a hard time touching and manipulating some parts of our bodies (like the spot between our shoulderblades) and who can’t see every part of our own bodies because we have only one set of eyes that are in a head with limited rotation.
On that note, having small cameras embedded throughout its body would also eliminate blind spots, which would improve safety since the robots wouldn’t be at risk of running into humans or objects because they were unseen. Whereas human vision is confined to a forward-facing cone, the general purpose robots would see in a 360-degree bubble. The tip of the head stalk might have the biggest and best camera, but losing it wouldn’t blind the robot.
Having “eyes” in the torso and on all four limbs, along with a distribution of its mind and power sources among multiple internal computers and batteries in each place, could enable such a robot to fix itself even if only one limb were operational and everything else were not. Again, this reminds me a bit of something I’ve seen in the animal kingdom, this time among certain insects and spiders. Because they have less-centralized nervous systems than we, their limbs will keep moving after being severed, and, if they are cut in half across the torso, both halves will continue moving and reacting to stimuli.
Additionally, while the robots wouldn’t need to breathe, they should have an ability to suck in, retain, and expel air. This would allow them to duplicate the human abilities to blow out candles or blow dust off of things, and to make our bodies buoyant for floating in water. Of course, the engineering solutions that will let them do this could be totally different from human anatomy’s solutions. A small hole at the tip of one finger could be used to suck in and expel air, and it could be connected to a long tube that would lead to air sacs throughout the robot’s body, perhaps in places not analogous to where lungs are in our bodies.
The robots would also need to be waterproof. This would save them from being expensively damaged or destroyed by something as simple as rain, and would let them periodically clean themselves off with soap and water. Even without sweat glands and shedding skin cells, robots would inevitably get dirty thanks to dust in the air, splatter from kitchen or bathroom chores, or even mold growth. Being able to use a regular shower or a bucket of water and a sponge to clean themselves would be a very important feature, in addition to their ability to clean their clothes.
Another crucial feature would be a built-in power cord that could plug into standard electrical outlets. It might be stored internally in a small, closed compartment, or might take the form of retractable prongs located in one of the hands or feet. I suspect that, rather than get in your way, general-purpose robots will be programmed to run around your house and do chores when you were away at work or school. That would also be safer since it would eliminate any risk of the robots hurting you by accident while they were working. You would come home each day to a clean house and see your robot motionless in its designated corner or closet, plugged into an electrical outlet to recharge.
Machines like this can detect a wide range of poisonous chemicals.
I’ve already mentioned the robots would need to have cameras and microphones to duplicate the human senses of sight and hearing, but they would also need to duplicate our sense of smell and taste to a degree. Those two senses can provide valuable information about the presence of poisonous gases, smoke, or spoiled food ingredients, and there are situations where a robot would be grossly ill-equipped to respond properly if it lacked them. Our multipurpose robots would thus need air sampling devices and some type of fluid analysis capability. The same technology found in smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, and military poison gas detectors could stand in for a sense of smell. To crudely duplicate our sense of taste, the robot might have something like a litmus strip dispenser and water nozzle built into one of its hands. It could spray water on objects and then touch them with a strip to “taste” them.
The fifth human sense, touch, would need to be duplicated by pressure and temperature sensors distributed throughout the general purpose robot’s body. This feature would be simple to implement.
In conclusion, I predict there will be a future niche for “human-equivalent” robots that are general-purpose, human-sized, and can do all of the physical work tasks that we can do. That said, those robots will look very different from us, as they won’t be bound by the rules of biology or by the genetic path dependence that locks us into our human body layout. I’ve gone into depth describing one type of general-purpose robot, which could be described as a “headless humanoid.” However, I think robots with other types of body layouts could also fill the niche, perhaps including “centaurs”, “big ants”, and “dogs with one arm on their backs.” Just as there are many types of vehicles on the roads today that fulfill the same roles, I am sure there will be many types of general-purpose robots. I simply don’t have the time to envision and describe what each one could be like.
General-purpose, human-sized robots will of course not be the only kinds of robots we’ll mix with on a daily basis in the future, and in fact, I think they will be outnumbered by other, specific-purpose robots whose forms reflect their specialized functions. Self-driving cars and autonomous lawnmowers are good examples.
Finally, the general-purpose, human-sized robots must not be confused with androids, which will look identical to humans. I think the general-purpose robots will be used for jobs that don’t require anything more than superficial interaction with humans, like scrubbing toilets, restocking store shelves, and fixing appliances. Androids would be built to provide companionship, and to do service-sector jobs where warm and personable service was expected. If your beautiful android spouse broke, then your grubby, headless, weird-looking robot servant would fix it.
I don’t know what the first multipurpose, household robots will look like or what term we’ll use for them, but for this essay, let’s assume they’ll look like “Andrew” from the movie Bicentennial Man, and that we’ll call them “robot butlers.”
Imagine every household has a human-sized, multipurpose house robot that can do all the same physical tasks we can. What sorts of tasks could it do to make its human master’s life easier? The answers that first come to mind are that robot butlers (as I’ll call them for simplicity’s sake in this essay) will do the most common and time-consuming daily chores for humans, as they loom largest in our minds. These include tasks like cooking food, doing laundry, cleaning house interiors (e.g. – vacuuming and mopping floors), running errands to make recurring purchases of expendable commodity items like food or toiletries, and mowing lawns.
If every household had a robot butler that handled those tasks, it would significantly improve quality of life for humans, primarily by freeing up time for leisure. It’s common for American adults to spend an average of two hours a day on chores, and getting that time back would be transformative for most of them, particularly the busiest ones who are overloaded with commitments and long commutes. Even just one more hour per day could make the difference between, say, raising an estranged child who is bitter that you never spent time with him and raising one who has a good relationship with you because you had the time to help him with his homework every night.
We could stop right there and digest the extent to which robot butlers will benefit us. However, I think they’ll have many other overlooked but powerful benefits to their human masters and to the world as a whole, that at first glance might seem small and unimportant.
Having robots assiduously clean house interiors, clean plates and cutlery, remove trash, and wash clothing will improve their human masters’ health by reducing the number of pathogens they are exposed to. Keeping dust levels low inside houses will also reduce instances of all kinds of respiratory illness. Public health will improve and there could be a small boost to average life expectancy.
Hand-in-hand with that would be psychological and emotional benefits. Every human being has a different amount of what is sometimes called “psychic energy,” which can be thought of as an internal mental and emotional reservoir that gets quickly depleted by stressors and only slowly refills. Things like not getting enough sleep, being sick with a cold, dealing with a bad commute, having an argument with someone, or even just having to make a simple decision all drain a person’s psychic energy reserve to varying degrees. The size of a person’s psychic energy reserve is mostly predetermined and unchangeable, and people with very small reserves often end up in mental institutions or very low-stress lifestyles while people lucky to have large reserves more commonly become high-achievers like CEOs and politicians. Many Americans are chronically stressed out because they’ve bought into the oversimplified cultural belief that success is just a matter of effort, and that anyone can be as rich and famous as, say, Elon Musk if they work hard enough. This is wrong, as it ignores the existence of inherent, individual limitations like psychic energy reservoirs and IQ (on both metrics, Elon Musk was born very gifted). Unfortunately, too few Americans realize or want to admit this, so they overload themselves with work and personal responsibilities that exceed their innate limits so they can chase a media-manufactured vision of success, and then try to ignore the damage it does to their psyche and energy levels.
The work that robot butlers would do would help ameliorate this problem in surprising ways. Just the sight of an unkempt yard or cluttered house causes a person a small amount of stress. Glancing at a sink full of dirty dishes or a basket of soiled laundry drains one’s psychic energy reservoir a little bit since it is ugly and reminds you of unpleasant work you must do. By contrast, imagine the psychological benefit of coming home each day to a clean, orderly house and a hot meal waiting for you at the kitchen table. Imagine the emotional boost you would get from the aggregate effect of your robot butler taking care of all the essential but unpleasant chores I’ve listed so far. Also note that arguments over housework are a common cause of stress among spouses and housemates, so if a robot were doing all the chores, human relationships would be more harmonious.
That’s not all. Robot butlers would also know how to maintain the things you own, and do those million-and-one little tasks that you know you should be doing but probably aren’t, like changing your furnace filters each month or vacuuming your refrigerator’s coils each year. At some point, they will get smart enough to routinely test your devices for signs of impending malfunction and to take preemptive corrective action. The result would be fewer breakdowns of machinery, less money spent on emergency repair bills to plumbers or electricians, and less stress for humans. (I’m planning to explore this idea in a future blog entry that will be entitled something like “Why nothing will ever break in the future”.)
Taking it a step farther, robot butlers will know how to fix broken things, which will be obviously helpful to their human masters. For example, assume one of your coffee table’s legs breaks. Your robot would immediately see this, figure out the model number of the coffee table, contact the company about getting a replacement leg, and ask for your permission to order the replacement part, and install it by itself. If you didn’t have the robot, the task of fixing the table wouldn’t be worth your time, so you’d just throw out the whole table and buy a new one, which would cost you more money ($10 for a replacement leg vs. $50 for an entirely new table). A coffee table that was 80% perfectly fine would also get tossed in a landfill, which is wasteful. Your robot butler would thus reduce the money you spend on replacement possessions and reduce your waste footprint. Poorer people would benefit the most since they would have to spend less of their scarce money replacing their possessions.
Your robot butler would also help you by selling things for you that you would otherwise throw away. For example, assume your coffee table isn’t broken, but you’ve had it for ten years and want to get rid of it because you think it is out-of-date and ugly. You tell the robot you want to do this, and it instantly looks through eBay and other Internet marketplaces to determine how much money you could get if you sold it. If you authorize it to do so, the robot would then list the coffee table for sale on the Internet, find a buyer, and physically carry the table out to the curb to the buyer’s truck when they come by to get it. The money that they paid would automatically credited to your bank account or PayPal account, and the whole process would require no work on your part. If you didn’t have the house robot, it wouldn’t be worth your time to do all of that just to make $20, and you would probably have just tossed the table in the trash. Again, your robot would save you money and make cheap, used goods available to other people. Poorer people would benefit the most from the expanded marketplace of secondhand goods.
Additionally, your robot butler would know how to spruce up or restore items like the old coffee table at low cost, allowing it to sell them for you at higher prices, or improving them enough to keep you from throwing them out. YouTube has many channels devoted to craftsmen of various types who show the process of restoring or “upcycling” things like old furniture or just plain garbage to make them aesthetically pleasing, stylish and useful, all at very low cost (my favorite channel is “Dashner Design & Restoration”). I think robot butlers will someday be able to independently identify ways to make such upgrades to old human possessions, and to do the work themselves. Manmade objects would be thrown out less often as a result, and even poor people and people with no sense of taste would have functional and stylish-looking things.
In Bicentennial Man, the robot butler learns how to fix things and also starts carving creative sculptures from wood. There’s no reason to think robot butlers won’t someday have these abilities.
Having perfect memories and a lot of time to poke around your house, your robot butler would also inventory everything you owned and update the inventories in real time. Over time, it would observe which possessions you never used, would recommend you sell or recycle them, and then handle every aspect of the transaction. For example, your house robot would know that you have an antique sewing machine in your basement collecting dust that you haven’t touched in five years. Based on a personality profile it constructed of you, it would know that your odds of ever using the sewing machine are 1%, and that your vague plan to restore it and experiment with old-fashioned sewing was just a flight of fancy you had years ago and should now relinquish. Without being prompted, your robot approaches you, suggests that you sell the sewing machine, offers to manage every aspect of the sale, and tells you that based on its research you could get $200 for it. The robot would periodically (i.e. – once every few months) approach you with these sorts of ideas. If you didn’t have the robot, it would never cross your mind to sell the sewing machine or any of your other clutter. Even researching sales prices wouldn’t be worth your time, and the idea of having a yard sale would be too tiring to consider. The end result of your house robot’s labor is less clutter in your house (itself a psychological benefit) and the transfer of things you never use to people who actually need them. If every household in your country had a robot butler that did this, the aggregate effect of expanding the secondhand goods market so much would make the prices of all sorts of things decrease. Again, poorer people would be helped the most.
Taking the next step in the “sharing economy,” your robot butler could rent out some of your important but rarely used possessions, making you money. The sorts of objects that come immediately to mind are hand tools and power tools. The vast majority of people only use these 1% of the time, and the other 99%, they sit idle in a garage or work shed (there’s something basically crazy about humans’ impulse to hoard things). Your robot could post an online portfolio of rentable tools for you, and loan them to other people during periods when you were not projected to need them. Again, it would manage every aspect of the rental operation (i.e. – listing the tools, verifying the identities of people who want to rent them, collecting the money, inspecting the tools for damage upon return). You would merely agree to the arrangement and start turning a small weekly profit for no work at all on your part. Once again, if you didn’t have the robot, this small-time enterprise would be too much trouble to consider. As a result, you would make more efficient use of your assets and earn money for doing nothing, and poorer people in your neighborhood would gain access to tools cheaply instead of having to spend a lot of money buying their own. (Let me note that a neighborhood “tool library” would probably be an even more efficient arrangement, as it’s still overkill for every household to have as many tools as they typically do, but that’s for a different blog entry.)
Unused things in your house that had no market value could be recycled, and I imagine billions of old glass bottles, metal containers, articles of old clothing and bedding, and old newspapers re-entering the manufacturing stream as a result. This would mean less strain on the environment and less guilt about the impact humans have on it. Also note that robot butlers would vastly improve the cost efficiency of recycling because they would know how to properly sort recyclable from non-recyclable materials, they would always clean the outgoing recyclable items, and they would always crush/compact the items to reduce their volume. Even well-meaning humans struggle to remember which of their trash items are recyclable and which aren’t since the acceptable items vary from one municipality to the next, and too often they forget to clean their recyclable items, so recycling centers get large amounts of unusable material, which they are forced to filter out at great cost. Your robot butler wouldn’t make these mistakes, so your local recycling center would get shipments of much higher-quality items that would be cheaper and faster to process. Automated sorting machines at recycling centers will also be much better than they are today thanks to the same technology your robot butler will have, further improving efficiency.
Your robot butler would also have the time and knowledge to separate out the portions of your household waste that could be composted and to put them in a backyard bin. Not every scrap of food waste can be composted, which again sets the “bar” too high for most people given how busy they are with other things. Your robot butler would also mix in dead leaves, wood, grass clippings, dead animals, and whatever else it could find on your property that could be composted. The compost would be spread on your lawn to prevent soil erosion and to grow crops.
And that brings us to another benefit: Your robot butler will be able to create and manage a garden on your property. This would reduce your grocery bill, would probably be better for the environment since the food would be hyper-local in origin, and would give you complete control over its production (e.g. – no pesticides, no mishandling, no GMOs). I noted earlier how robot butlers would boost the efficiency of how manmade goods were used and distributed, and now I’ve shown how they could enhance the efficiency of land usage, with grass-covered land put to use growing food. Global food supplies would increase, which will become more important as the human population grows.
In summary, house robots could vastly reduce waste, improve the efficiency of our capital stock usage and land usage, and strengthen the sharing economy. They would give poorer people much better access to all sorts of things (furniture, clothing, tools, etc.), which would flatten out many class-based differences.
Additionally, once everyone has a robot butler, it stands to reason that the postal service and private shippers like FedEx and Amazon will use similar robots to deliver goods to doorsteps (think of it as a robot mailman who rides around inside a self-driving delivery truck), and it will become possible for robots to “hand off” items in place of the current practice in which a human deliveryman drops off mail and packages at your doorstep, unattended. The automated delivery vehicle will probably send a wireless signal to your robot butler informing it of its ETA, and your butler would make sure to be waiting at your front door at the given time. Because of robot handoffs, package and mail thefts will drop to almost nothing, meaning less emotional stress for would-be victims. Since vendors incorporate financial losses due to “shrinkage” into their prices, the near-elimination of these kinds of thefts will lead to slight price cuts to all kinds of goods.
Robot handoffs like this could also be used to send OUTGOING items, which would further boost efficiency in many ways. For example, if you ordered an item through Amazon, then during the door threshold handoff, your robot butler would accept the new package and then hand the Amazon robot an empty package from a previous purchase you made. Your Amazon account would be automatically credited a small amount of money for recycling, Amazon would saves money by getting its cardboard packages and packing materials back, and the Amazon delivery truck would return to its warehouse with something of value inside of it instead of hauling air. Note that this would be a more efficient way to dispose of Amazon cardboard packages than sending them to a general-purpose municipal paper recycling plant.
As a general practice, timing and coordinating outflows of household items and wastes to match inflows of useful items would move us closer to a zero-waste/closed loop economy, and would probably cut transportation costs. Your outgoing items would have to closely match the weight and volume of your incoming items for obvious reasons relating to the size of the delivery truck. To a degree, this model would compete with the one-size-fits-all, periodic waste disposal system we’re accustomed to, where there is a designated day of the week when a large trash truck comes through the neighborhood to pick up all items that residents don’t want.
I think this vision of the future will be realized over the next several decades, with the first, mass-produced robot butlers becoming available to rich people in the 2030s. As with their smartphones, humans will be able to download “apps” into their robot butlers to give them new, and increasingly sophisticated abilities. Initially, they will merely be able to follow orders given by humans, but later, the robots will gain their own powers of observation and reason, and will proactively suggest helpful things to humans (like selling unused possessions). This should be thought of as one small part of the broader trend of humans outsourcing physical and mental drudgery to machines. Every capability I’ve described in this essay (and surely more) should be commonly found in robot butlers by the 2060s.
