Hear the word drone and you’ll likely think of military predator drones: forces of death and destruction. But what about drones as a force for restoration: emergency relief, education or even saving the planet?
I explored the future of drones at the San Francisco Bay Area Maker Faire, on assignment for the BBC World Service; and spoke with drone experts from GoogleX, OpenROV and even….R2D2. The latter was one of my toughest interviews ever. Next time, I’ll bring a droid translator.
R2D2 sets the scene (translations welcome via Twitter)
van Diggelen: I’m here at the SF Bay Area Maker Faire, a “show and tell” gathering of tech enthusiasts, hobbyists, artists and engineers. You could say I’m here to meet my maker… to explore drones designed not for destruction but to make the world a safer, more egalitarian, greener place. Here’s Adem Rudin, who works at GoogleX.
Rudin: This is Project Wing. We’re doing drones for delivery and our end goal is to deliver anything to anyone, anywhere and do it quickly.
We’re trying to build a platform that people can use in whatever way they can dream up…In 2014, we went to the Outback, near Brisbane and met up with a couple of farmers out there, operated for about a week, delivering bottled water, food, two-way radios…
van Diggelen: Does it have some kind of attachment you can put things in?
Rudin: The package is on the underside and when we want to deliver, we bring the aircraft into a hover and actually winch the package down to the customer waiting on the ground.
van Diggelen: It looks a bit like a stingray…
Rudin: We tried to make it look friendly…unobtrusive and it also is fairly quiet up in the air…
van Diggelen: When you see what’s going on in Nepal…do you see that being a future potential application for this drone?
Rudin: Yes … It would be a very quick, very low cost way to get out, take aerial photographs of disaster areas and deliver emergency supplies directly to people.
van Diggelen: Since this is one of the secretive GoogleX projects, Rudin was unable to give me a timeline for when we might see these Google drones filling our skies.
Audio: sound of bubbles, submarine drone reaching surface, diving down again
van Diggelen: The beauty of Maker Faire is discovering what’s just round the corner. I found Zack Johnson standing by a huge paddling pool operating a submarine drone – about the size of a shoebox.
Johnson: It goes down to about 75 meters and films live video that goes back to the shore and you control it either with an Xbox controller or a USB joystick or with a laptop.
There’s basically two things stopping people becoming Jacques Cousteau. One is price… The other one is know-how.
van Diggelen: Johnson’s DIY kit sells for $900 to a global market. The company supports an international community of users who share their expeditions online.
Johnson: We call it Open Explorer: it’s a web platform for sharing expeditions. There are people who’re using ROVs to look for sunken tombs, buried treasure, marine archaeology, water sampling, coral reef monitoring…
There are some academic applications. Especially regarding coral reefs. That is a big focal point for the environmental movement right now because it’s a great litmus for the health of the ocean.
van Diggelen: So drones will be used in the fight against climate change, to help save endangered species, to deliver emergency supplies and even bring the Internet to remote places in the world. The future of drones is as vast as the open sky. Its only limit? Our imagination.
Want to explore more BBC reports and commentary? Click here for archives on everything from sexism in Silicon Valley to tech solutions to the California drought.
Six years ago, she founded the first community supported agriculture (CSA) farm in China. Today, organic farming pioneer, Shi Yan and her team serve hundreds of city dwellers in Beijing; and her thriving Shared Harvest Farm has inspired dozens of CSAs across China.
Shi Yan is one of a growing group of farmers in China who are bucking the trend of young workers abandoning agriculture and being drawn to cities like Beijing, one of the world’s largest conurbations. By helping bring young people back to the land and serving the growing demand for sustainable practices and organic food in China, Shi Yan has attracted the attention of major media outlets, NPR and the BBC.
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On July 10th, I was invited to join BBC host, Fergus Nicoll on BBC World Service program, Business Matters to interview Shi Yan about her mission; and explore the economic and social drivers for organic produce in China.
Fergus Nicoll: We are going to devote much of the second half of the programme to environmental issues. We’ll hear about Community Supported Agriculture in China and our guest Shi Yan is with us from Beijing…Let’s welcome Alison van Diggelen of Fresh Dialogues. Alison, we’re going to leave your microphone open.
Alison, as anybody who knows her website Fresh Dialogues, is a professional asker of questions. Alison: jump in when you fancy and we’ll make this a three-way discussion.
Shi Yan, tell us a bit about Shared Harvest…and the concept of community supported agriculture.
Shi Yan: Our farm Shared Harvest is located in Tongzhou district of Beijing. Right now we have about 15 hectares of land we rented for 15 years. Most of our produce is vegetables and we also have almost 2000 chickens and 50 pigs. Every week we deliver our produce directly to our members. CSA is a way that links the farmers and the consumers directly and we build the trust between the consumers and the farmers. Right now we have about 600 families in Beijing; most of their food comes from our farm.
Fergus Nicoll: Is that entirely organic or are you allowed to sneak in some pesticides or herbicides?
Shi Yan: Actually we call our produce “organically produced” because we don’t have the organic certification but we don’t use any chemical fertilizer and pesticides.
Fergus Nicoll: What about the market for that, because in different countries the market for organic food has waned and grown depending on economic circumstances…a growing middle class wants a purer production mechanism…even if it’s not organic with a capital “O.”
Shi Yan: In China in the last seven years, organic agriculture is growing pretty fast because of issues related to food safety, environmental issues. When I started in 2009…very few consumers knew about the concept of CSA, but right now a lot of people in Beijing know this model.
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Fergus Nicoll: A lot of people who buy organic face criticism from people who don’t. They’ll say: I go to the supermarket and I see a box of six perfectly produced apples, they all look 100% identical like clones, selling for “X” and next to that are organic apples that are kind of lumpy, they’re all different shapes and they cost “X plus” Do you ever get that complaint?
Shi Yan: If you order the vegetables from a CSA farm (in China) the price is about 2/3rds of the price in the supermarket. Right now, consumers care more about the food quality rather than the price. A lot of them are rethinking our food system because if you only look at the appearance of the fruit or vegetables…a lot of food (in non-organic farms) is wasted because of their appearance.
Alison van Diggelen: I’m curious about the drivers in China. Do you have a feel for your consumers…Is the impact of pesticides etc. on the environment is that a major driver? Or would you say the main drivers are food scares and the quality of produce?
Shi Yan: At the beginning the food safety issues…a lot of food scandals happened and people started looking for healthy food. But later they found the deep reason is not the market or the food itself, but a lot of problems happened in the rural (areas)…food comes from the village and in last 10 years, fewer and fewer young people stay in the village. Right now most of the farmers growing the food are above sixty years old, struggling for their livelihood. Can they really take the responsibility of producing healthy food? It’s a big problem.
Fergus Nicoll: Can I ask you about “labor shifting” consumers actually doing the farming themselves? Because they’re extremely motivated but may not know the best way to do it.
Shi Yan: We have two models: one part you can order our produce, we will deliver to your door. (Or) you can rent a piece of land: 30 square meters of land, as a farm. Every week you can come to your farm, grow your own food.
Alison van Diggelen: I’m curious about how you’re delivering your food. Are you using electric cars, non polluting cars, delivery trucks?
Shi Yan: We use conventional small vans.
Fergus Nicoll: In the US, if I go and see friends in Davis, I know when we go down to the farmers market, there’ll be really good stuff. This is relatively well established, certainly in California?
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Alison van Diggelen: Absolutely, yes, CSAs are very established here, since the 1980’s. Here’s an interesting anecdote for you, Fergus: I’ve been a subscriber to a local CSA called Planet Organics and just this month they’ve had to close up shop after 19 years. They’ve been squeezed out by major players. Walmart is getting into the organic food business. Wholefoods has been there a while. It’s becoming so mainstream that it’s hard for these CSAs to compete.
Fergus Nicoll: So they’re getting priced out of the market…
Malala Yousafzai is the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. An advocate for girls’ right to education via The Malala Fund, her name is now synonymous with courage, passion and hope after after a gunman shot her in the face; and she didn’t back down. In her short 17 years, she’s done more than most to change the world, and her remarkable life is the subject of a new documentary “He Named Me Malala” to be released in October.
On Friday, she joined her favorite author, Khaled Hosseini (of Kite Runner fame) at San Jose State University in Silicon Valley for a hard hitting conversation about Islam, education, and her dream of one day becoming Prime Minister of Pakistan. In his eloquent introduction, Hosseini described how the gunman boarded Malala’s school bus in 2012 and “shot the wrong girl.”
“Technically he shot the girl he was meant to shoot, but in every other way, he shot the wrong girl. The girl he shot at age 11 was already a fierce advocate for girls’ right to education. If the gunman thought he was going to quiet her with his bullet, then he was wrong. His victim became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. But what he was most wrong about was the apparent belief that human beings aught to settle their differences with bullets. Malala would school him later when she said, you must not treat others with cruelty but through peace, and through dialogue and through education.” Khaled Hosseini
Here are highlights of the conversation:
On why Malala is motivated to keep speaking out
If you want to change your society, if you want to see the change, then you have to step forward to bring the change. It was my duty to speak up. Either we just had to remain silent and live in that situation of terrorism forever or fight for our rights and try to bring the change. I felt I had a mission and had to continue. There was this feeling in my mind that something can happen to me, but I thought: the Taliban are cruel, but how would they take an 11 year old girl? Malala
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On Islamic religion and culture
Cultures, traditions are not sent by God to us. They are not being written by him and saying, ‘these are the things you that you have to follow.’ We humans create them, so then we should have the right to change them…The traditions that go against basic human rights should not be protected and should be clearly denied. (For example) education is every child’s right, but the Taliban want to stop women being educated. They fear that if you allow girls to go to school, girls will become out of control. Some Pakistani scholars think girls like me are infidels, they don’t know I read the Koran. Malala
Hosseini points out that the Koran begins with a mandate for literacy:
The first word is ‘read.’ That Islam says the Koran is against girls being educated is perverse. Hosseini
On critics who say she’s being used by the West against Islam
There’s a lot of hopelessness, tragedy (in Pakistan) They’ve seen a lot of dishonest politicians, corruption…People lose hope. It’s a small minority who are critics. Pakistan has already supported me. When I was attacked they raised the banners “I am Malala.” They were speaking out (saying) “Shame on the Taliban” which was never ever said before. And people started their activism and to speak out for education.
Keeping my courage and ambitions strong…the support from Pakistan and all over the world overcomes all this hatred… it becomes “like nothing.” I have to stay strong and believe in myself and know that what I’m doing is right: it’s for the education of girls. Malala
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Our own people are our harshest critics. Hosseini
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On the violence of her gunman
I have forgiven him. That boy, he was only 15. The terrorists did not believe in the freedom of women, they did not believe in women’s rights, to get an education… They’ve been radicalized…they need some education so they can be helped… know the real value of Islam and justice, know that Islam is not about killing. Islam is used to support Jihad. When they’re told “it’s God’s message” people will obey. Malala
On the Malala Fund & Her 10 year Goals
I’m hopeful I will have gone back to my home in Pakistan… I’m hopeful The Malala fund will have educated hundreds of thousands of girls by then – in Nigeria, in Kenya, in Jordan (for Syrian refugees), in Pakistan….I’m hopeful through your support we can achieve these goals. It’s when we all come together, we make our voices stronger…We will do it together: see that every child will be getting quality education. Malala
On Becoming the Prime Minister of Pakistan
When I met the (Pakistan) Prime Minister, I was frustrated by his ‘talk talk’ I wanted to have his power… If I get an opportunity to help my country through politics I will. It’s good to have big dreams. Malala
Here’s an extract of our conversation about Tesla’s new battery storage products:
Alison van Diggelen: Tesla has a big announcement next week about batteries. Of course, I’m not going to ask you to preempt Elon Musk’s announcement…but give us the case for battery storage. Why is Tesla going into battery storage for the home and utility scale?
Steve Jurvetson: This may be the first peek into a unified theme across companies. So as people know, Elon Musk is an incredibly prolific entrepreneur, having come up with, or been at the founding team of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, PayPal, all different industries that seem to have nothing to do with each other.
Now the troika of perhaps SolarCity, and the Gigafactory (which is an incredible initiative underway in Nevada right now), and Tesla comes into light for the first time: There is synergy. Say 20 years out, there’ll be a distributed utility where Solarcity has the solar cell installation, leasing and basically ownership, installation and the whole shebang, actually building panels as well for solar on homes, everywhere.
Well, once you get enough of that (last I checked they have around 40% market share in the US) you start to generate so much energy that you are like a variety of utilities combined, but it’s ephemeral. If you’re not using that energy when generated, it goes away. So right now, you push it to the grid and it’s expected the utility can use it, especially since solar is produced at peak hours. But what if you wanted to get rid of the grid altogether? You’d need distributed storage …if every solar cell came with a big battery that could smooth out your daily needs, then you could just disconnect from the grid. You could certainly lower the generation capacity of the grid…that pushes on fossil fuels and nuclear.
How to pull that off? As a customer of Tesla and SolarCity I see my solar cells and I see my car and think, can’t we just connect these together? If I need to suck energy out of my car, I can use it to buffer the load from my cells, but it’s not so easy…
Part of the synergy and leverage is that Tesla is planning to build an enormous plant of batteries, anticipating the 3rd generation vehicle…you’re going to have some excess capacity, potentially for some period of time as you ramp up.
There will be blocks when you produce a lot more batteries than you might need in that particular month…well what are other interesting things you can do with them? What would you do with those batteries at the end of life of a car? Those battery packs are really useful for secondary storage uses.
For folks who don’t know this…the Gigafactory isn’t named that just out of hubris. It would be the largest factory in the world by footprint and they’re going to eventually build many of them. That one factory alone at scale would exceed global capacity today. So this is an unfathomable amount of batteries.
I really have to credit Elon for realizing that these numbers pencil out to be so enormous and to share that with the world, before he had the solution in the bag.
van Diggelen: Talk about the utility scale side. If you were a utility…in charge of PG&E today, talk about how you’d be feeling and what you might be doing to deal with this?
Jurvetson: On the one hand, you’re threatened by solar and you’re going to do all your dastardly deeds to try to quench and kill innovation, because that’s what big companies do, it’s in their blood. That’s what they’re expected to do.
But on the other hand, they need this too because whether by mandate or the goodness of their hearts…so mandate…they do more wind, do more solar. Many of those wind farms you see, on Pacheco Pass, they’re not doing anything useful. They may be spinning but they’re not even hooked up sometimes. There are rules and regulations to generate the capacity but not to actually make use of it. So part of the problem with time shifting is you have different needs at different times, wind is often a nighttime peak, so storage is needed throughout to pump water…there are all kinds of things you can do….in demand response. There’s a lot of inefficiencies in the utilities where they’ll build peaking gas fired power plants that are just turned on for a few hours in the year at most for those peak needs. So all that infrastructure just because you couldn’t do needs sharing or have the capacity to buffer.
If you had big old battery sitting there on the grid, you wouldn’t need that. So distributing that allows you to put it near the point of consumption and point of generation in a solar context.
van Diggelen: What are the markets for these utility scale batteries? Would it be companies like Apple that are going solar in a big way or is it to sell to PG&E?
Jurvetson: Good question. In general, there’s a whole cascade of markets: everything from consumers for their home, businesses and utilities themselves. The utilities can go to all kinds of technologies, even Telcos like for a cell phone tower you need storage there as well, especially in places like India and elsewhere.
There are technologies like flow cell batteries, compressed air solutions being developed…there is a variety of ways to approach this. Tesla’s approach is just leveraging what they know best which is lithium ion chemistry and batteries and a battery management system…so you can potentially address a whole range of these.
van Diggelen: So it’s the same batteries they use in their car?
Jurvetson: Exactly…
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Check back soon for more highlights from the Steve Jurvetson interview.
Why are robots getting close and personal? Here’s my BBC World Business Report about The Brave New World of autonomous cars and social robots. It aired on BBC World Service Monday April 13, 2015.
Two pioneers, Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and Cynthia Breazeal of Jibo Robot, explain why autonomous cars and robots are poised to invade your home and (potentially) make your life easier and safer.
Here’s the program. Listen at 12:16 on the podcast.
WBR Host, Susannah Streeter: The era of robots is getting personal. They’re slowly moving into our homes and our garages. What’s the business case for robot cars that can chauffeur you autonomously and desktop robots that can be your personal assistant? Will they be job killers or job creators? Alison van Diggelen reports from Silicon Valley, California where two pioneers recently described a brave new world full of robots.
Jen-Hsun Huang (Nvidia CEO): Ladies and Gentlemen, Please welcome Tesla CEO, cofounder, Elon Musk [applause]
Elon Musk: In the distant future, people may outlaw driving cars. It’s too dangerous. You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine. [laughter]
That’s Elon Musk, the CEO of electric vehicle maker, Tesla Motors speaking at a recent Silicon Valley tech conference. He helped revolutionize the world of electric vehicles by creating a sexy, high performance car that left the “golf cart” era in the dust. Now he’s joined the charge in autonomous driving, led by Google, and claims that taking a self driving car will soon be as everyday as using an elevator. But are you ready to step into a robot car?
Elon Musk: You’ll be able to tell your car: Take me home, go here, go there, anything…in an order of magnitude safer than a person. It’s going to be the default thing and could save a lot of lives.
Although you might grimace at the thought of relinquishing control, for Musk, Google and several major car manufacturers, the business case for autonomous cars is a no brainer – they say it could save $400 Billion a year in accident related expenses. Researchers at Columbia University found that a shared driverless fleet of cars could reduce personal travel costs by 80%.
But will robotic cars and other types of robots kill jobs?
Cynthia Breazeal argues they won’t. She’s a pioneer in social robots – ones that focus on human-robot interactions. She invented Jibo, a singing, dancing tabletop robot that looks like a cross between the Pixar lamp and an iPad.
Jibo Announcer: Introducing Jibo, the world’s first family robot. Say hi Jibo…
Jibo: Hi Jibo! [laughter]
Jibo Announcer: Jibo helps everyone out throughout their day [music]
Jibo is a personal assistant robot that can photograph, video, entertain and educate you and your family. It can remind you to call your mum on her birthday and even read your children bedtime stories.
Jibo: Let me in or else I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!!
Girl: [Giggling]
Jibo announcer: He’s not just a connected device, he’s one of the family.
Girl: Shhhhh. Good night Jibo! [Computer sounds]
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Although some people might find Jibo a bit creepy, the company’s crowd funding campaign showed its strong consumer appeal. Last year, it raised over $2M from Indiegogo in just 8 weeks. This year, it secured $25M in venture capital. Jibo goes on sale next year.
Breazeal acknowledges that robots were viewed as job killers, historically.
Breazeal: When robotics first came onto the market, it was a lot about replacing human labor. (So that’s been the assumption) Social robotics as a whole research discipline has been about a very different paradigm. So Jibo is not being designed to replace anyone or anything. (Sometimes people talk about, ‘it’s going to replace my dog…’ it’s not about that.) Jibo creates a different kind of relationship…like with your doctor, your dog for example. It’s about supporting the family, those who help care for the family, doctors and nurses…This high touch high tech technology is much better able to address those in need.
Her robot might one day be a job killer for healthcare workers and personal assistants. But for now, Breazeal is on a hiring spree, looking for engineers and she has MILLIONS to spend.
Ultimately, the brave new world of robots envisioned by these pioneers is as inevitable as the relentless advance of tech innovation.
Musk is only half joking when he says this:
Musk: I just hope there’s something left for us humans to do…
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The report was recorded at the Nvidia Conference, Silicon Valley on March 16, 2015.
van Diggelen: Does it have some kind of attachment you can put things in?
Johnson: It goes down to about 75 meters and films live video that goes back to the shore and you control it either with an Xbox controller or a USB joystick or with a laptop.
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Elon Musk: In the distant future, people may outlaw driving cars. It’s too dangerous. You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine. [laughter]
