Much of the world around us is shaped around key infrastructure elements. Many see this as a testament to who we are - a society and part of a cultural landmark that should guide us into the future.
By and large, infrastructure represents a long-term public investment that propels us towards building an efficient and well-functioning society. This is usually the case. But infrastructure comes in many forms, and while we are building complex intricacies of pipes, wires, roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings and waterways, we focus primarily on the here and now, not thinking about whether there might be a better option …
Virtually every piece of infrastructure creates jobs, revenue streams and investment opportunities. New laws, regulations and industry standards are born. The more part of the infrastructure in a particular place, the more effort is needed to replace it. Like an old tree, a giant infrastructure root system feeds everyone and everything.
In any case, the life cycle of infrastructure is getting shorter, technology is becoming more destructive and more complex. Infrastructure projects represent good money for some, investors are increasingly interested in such projects.
Here are ten examples of how our central infrastructure will change over time and what that will mean for the countries and businesses at the heart of this revolution.
1. Cars and roads without drivers
Even though the art of road building has improved steadily since the Roman Empire decided to make roads a permanent part of their infrastructure, the roads of today are simply dumb surfaces with no data flowing from roads to transport. This must change, and here's why.
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Autonomous driving technologies will initially require a driver and will gradually enter everyday life in the same way that airbags once did: first as an expensive option for luxury cars, and then as a safety requirement regulated by the government.
The biggest benefits of this kind of automation will not be realized as long as the drivers keep their hands on the steering wheel. With the millions of road traffic fatalities that happen every year, it won't take the world's leading countries long to make sure self-driving cars are safe.
The driving privilege will be seriously revised.
When cars start to be equipped with driverless technology, important things will start to happen. To compensate for the loss to the driver, vehicles will be equipped with ways to assess the surroundings. Cameras, on-board computers and a variety of sensors will record information over a thousand times per second, from road conditions to the actions of other vehicles. This constant flow will give the car an elementary sense of awareness.
With this continuous flow of sensory information, cars will begin to form a symbiotic relationship with their environment; this relationship will be very different from the current relationship between people on the road, which is mainly dictated by emotions.
A smart car combined with a smart road will become a powerful force. Together they will increase the mobility of our society, and with brilliance. This mobility will be based on three main principles:
1. Compression of the strip. The lane should be as wide as the vehicle itself. Narrow vehicles and roads will take up less space, the variety of shapes and sizes will be quite wide, and smart roads will be able to change the width of the lanes on the fly.
2. Compression of distance. With cars that will be controlled by the cars themselves, there will be no need for a large distance between the bumpers of cars - the robot will never make a mistake, and instead of a distance of several cars, the transport will move with a distance of several tens of centimeters.
3. Compression of time. Smart cars will be significantly faster. They will drive confidently, be fully informed and move accurately. Any travel time will be greatly reduced. You can compare this with the growth in the quality of elevators in advanced countries - if twenty years ago it took a very long time to climb to the tenth floor, and a cable break was a fairly frequent occurrence, today an elevator in a good American hotel can rise thirty floors in just a few seconds.
In the era of driverless cars, smart roads will be able to accommodate 50 to 100 times more cars than they do now. Higher speed, higher safety, fewer cars at a specific point in time at a certain moment, no traffic jams and other bonuses await us. Similarly, the profitability of this transport per square meter of road resources will increase.
In addition, the roads themselves will benefit from these technologies. Since cars will constantly monitor road conditions, it will always be clear when the road needs repair. A constant stream of data will keep road conditions up to date. Repair teams will be able to leave when needed, without disrupting traffic, without blocking the general traffic flow. Even insidious snow and ice will cease to frighten people if the de-icing agent crumbles in time.
2. Networks of transport pipes
When Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk spoke about his work on the Hyperloop project, the combination of mystery, detail, Musk's talent and reputation literally drove media madness.
His announcement added to growing concern over California's efforts to build a very expensive high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco using outdated technology.
While it was the media that helped Musk and his idea gain popularity, Daryl Oster of ET3, who wanted to build a pipe-based transportation system a long time ago, also expressed similar ideas.
Indeed, both entrepreneurs are working on what should be a popular next-generation transportation system. Specially designed cars are placed in a sealed tube and launched like rockets to their destination. If high-speed trains accelerate to 500 km / h, the pipeline can transport people at a speed of 7000 km / h.
Oster himself called it "space travel on earth."
While pipe travel will bypass all other forms of transportation in terms of speed, energy consumption, pollution, and safety, infrastructure remains the big missing link. The pipe network must cover huge distances.
While many look at this and see the lack of infrastructure as a huge obstacle, the exact opposite is true. The construction of the pipe network should be the largest infrastructure project that the Earth has never seen before. It will take 50 years, and the construction will employ 100 million people in a variety of ways. If, of course, someone decides to do it.
3. Collectors of atmospheric water
Of all the water on the planet, only 2% of its amount is fresh water. And only one quarter of fresh water is available to people.
Until now, all of humanity has survived on 0.5% of the available earth's water. But that must change.
We are seeing a rapidly growing trend towards the collection of water from the atmosphere; our ancestors began to work on this several centuries ago. People in the Middle East and Europe developed original air well systems 2,000 years ago. The Incas maintained their culture by collecting rainwater and sending it to cisterns for later use.
Despite the fact that this technology has been around for many years, its practical implementations began to appear only recently. The development went to projects to equip houses with their own water generators, self-irrigated crops and even "waterless" cities.
The Earth's atmosphere is a much more elegant water distribution system than rivers, bodies of water and underground waterways. Our state-of-the-art water production systems include pipelines and pumping stations that are expensive to operate and easily contaminated.
There are about 150,000 trillion liters of fresh water in the air at any given time. The age-old problem was getting it at the right time for people.
However, a new generation of inventors are planning to solve this known problem. Using energy from the sun, wind and other forms of passive energy, our future water networks will be more efficient and convenient than anything available today.
Modern pipelines will be replaced with air pipelines, and we will forget the time when we had to taste chlorinated water every day.
4. Microschools
When Facebook announced its $ 2 billion purchase of the Oculus Rift in March, the company not only gave a giant boost to the technology and its endorsement for its development, but also gave birth to a huge demand for designers, developers and virtual reality engineers.
And although they are unlikely to find a use for themselves in 2014, they will definitely be in 2015.
The same thing happened when Google and Facebook announced the acquisition of solar drone makers Titan and Ascenta, respectively. We soon began to see a huge surge in demand for solar drone engineers, air rights lobbyists, a global network of planners, analysts, engineers, and logisticians.
Bold moves by companies instantly create a need for talented people to help develop new technologies.
When Tesla Motors announced a fully automated battery factory; when Intel bought Basic Science wearable technology company; when Apple bought Beats Electronics; when Google bought Dropcam, Nest and Skybox, the business world began to prepare students from various colleges and universities for their own purposes.
In such conditions, it is impossible to reveal what the world will be like in 5-6 years, necessary for obtaining a fundamental education. New employees are trained faster, in the shortest possible time - in 3-4 months.
As millions of people suddenly change their career paths every year, we will definitely see the forms of short courses soon. They are already being born, just not at the professional level at which the giants of the tech world need it. Microschools, microcolleges and microuniversities will deliver much more than traditional universities in the same time period. Not to mention the current profession.
5. Space power plants
The earth's appetite for electricity continues to grow. Since the 1960s, energy consumption around the world has quadrupled, as has the number of countries choosing to build their power plants to meet demand.
But in Japan, whose economy is growing without large oil and coal reserves, after the disaster at the Fukushima reactor, they decided to focus on a different long-term strategy: building a space energy system. This 25-year plan was recently announced by representatives of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It plans to build the world's first 1-gigawatt power plant in space.
The possibility of collecting solar energy in space and sending it to Earth was first suggested by Dr. Peter Glazer in 1968. After significant research in the 1970s, the scientist found that his concept was not viable, but only and only because the technology was not sufficiently developed. The materials were too heavy, and it would take about 100 astronauts working with a thousand raw robots to create such a base.
Since then, technology has developed massively, so Glazer's plan has become not only feasible, but also optimal for Japan. What most people don't realize is that solar panels in space are 10 times more efficient than on earth, because there are no day / night cycles, seasonal fluctuations or weather problems to deal with year round.
Nevertheless, it is safe to say that most countries will not feel comfortable as long as Japan is the only country with a space power plant. As soon as the first station is successfully launched, 10 or 100 of the same ones will go into space after it, and cheaper and faster.
6. Drone delivery network
Once drone drones are approved for commercial use, they will create a multi-billion dollar industry with hundreds of thousands of jobs in the first three years, according to the International Association of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. In addition to manufacturing the drones themselves, operators, agricultural drone specialists, security specialists, data analysts and many others will be needed.
7. Mass storage of energy
We are now at the beginning of a journey that will lead to a huge global industry - energy storage. It will simultaneously support and compete with traditional power generation, transmission and distribution. Over the next decade, as the industry evolves, new business models, companies and jobs will emerge to develop storage and resource allocation systems. All this will lead to economically stable power grids, intelligent distribution and savings in electricity, as well as reducing unwanted environmental impacts.
8. Global Language Archive
For most of us, the language we speak is like the air we breathe. But what happens when we wake up and realize that the air is almost dry? Researchers estimate that over the past 500 years, half of the world's languages, from Etruscan to Tasmanian, have simply disappeared. By the next century, nearly half of the 7,000 languages spoken by the Earth will disappear as young people opt for the multi-ethnic and popular English, Chinese and Spanish. The Global Language Archive will become a language museum where any of the dead languages can be studied.
9. Genealogy of the whole Earth
Today, the genealogy industry is made up of millions of disparate efforts at once. Duplication of efforts is becoming massive. Despite the significant databases that already exist, such as Ancestry.com, RootsWeb, GenealogyBank and the National Archives, there is still plenty of room for development, right up to the creation of a complete genealogy of all of humanity. All that is missing is an entrepreneur a la Jimmy Wales to bring this project to life.
10. Trillions of Sensor Infrastructure
Over the past six years, we've gone from 10 million sensors - in things like the Nintendo Wii and iPhone - to 3.5 billion. This is why Fairchild's Janusz Bryzek hosted the Trillion Sensor Summit in Palo Alto last year. Meseny expects to see 1 trillion sensors on Earth by 2024 and 100 trillion sensors by mid-2036. Of course, millions of primary and secondary jobs in this growing segment will be a byproduct of this development.
The infrastructure of the future will radically change our attitude to the world around us.
Outcome
We know perfectly well what futurists are doing. They collect data, analyze it and make predictions, which for the most part come true - after all, futurists operate on actual data, and do not guess on the coffee grounds. Reflections on the infrastructure of the future are presented by futurist Thomas Frey at FuturistSpeaker.com.
It is worth noting that the projects mentioned above can only scratch reality. Everything can go much deeper. In any case, large projects like the construction of the Great Pyramids in Egypt, or the Great Wall of China, or sending someone into space and the moon - these projects define a slice of society, humanity as a whole, and raise the bar for future generations.
As our possibilities grow, we just need to keep our gaze higher and aim for the stars - literally. By 2050, we will see not only the proliferation of next-generation infrastructures - we will see fundamental changes in society that are breathtaking even at the planning stage.
ILYA KHEL