![]() ![]() Some will have specialist sensors to identify tricky materials. Some robots will be bigger and stronger to pick up and lug old appliances back to base. I imagine hundreds of robot rats (probably looking more like cockroaches actually), scurrying up landfill with little sensors and dextrous arms, identifying particular types of material, and delivering the sorted rubbish to larger carrier robots that will take the sorted materials back to the recycling plant when they are full. Not some magic-bullet-solves-the-whole-problem race of giant super-intelligent humanoid robots, but a swarm of mostly-small robots with dexterity and a specific expertise, but relatively limited native intelligence otherwise. To me, the obvious answer is autonomous robots. So, after we stop (quite literally) trashing the planet, how do we deal with all those hundreds of thousands of acres of landfill across the world? Or, for that matter, the Texas-sized garbage patch floating in the ocean, made infamous by Sir David Attenborough two years ago? I think what haunts many of us is the idea that we have done too much damage to the planet for it to ever recover. Just stopping making the situation worse isn’t enough though. Though only a tiny fraction of the waste we produce is currently dealt with constructively, change is already happening: there are industrial machines designed to split out construction waste for re-use, disassemble iPhones, and sort in recycling plants. ![]() To be really effective, this would have to happen not just for plastics but for everything: paper, organic matter, electronics. This would involve limiting our use of everyday plastics to those that easily be recycled, using enzymes to break them down into the hydrocarbons we need to make more stuff, and having a much clearer and more efficient recycling streams. I saw Prof Mark Miodownik of University College London give a great talk on how he and his colleagues are working to make this happen for plastics. Imagine that, twenty years from now, we have got our production of plastic rubbish mostly under control. However, in their quest for a truly dystopian scenario, I think the storytellers missed the point about how such robots could really help us. It’s a great movie about robots and, laws of physics aside, shows quite a deep understanding of their potential. Of course, he falls in love and saves the world along the way, but for a geek like me, that’s beside the point. It’s the story of a plucky little robot tasked with cleaning up the world by compacting rubbish into blocks and building structures out of the blocks to minimize the amount of land they take up. I just watched WALL-E for the first time in five years or so.
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