Engineering Paradise - Ministry of Infrastructure

Infrastructure is a great many things.  It is our roads, the energy grid, hospitals, schools, bridges… basically every piece of hardware that a population uses and that shouldn’t belong to a specific private entity. 

I would like to redefine this under this new future ideology.  Infrastructure should be every system a nation needs to ensure citizens have basic needs met.  Therefore, the Ministry of Infrastructure is responsible to ensure all citizens have their basic needs met. 

A high responsibility indeed.   While other ministries operate the specifics of the provisioning of basic needs to the population, the Ministry of Infrastructure deals with the hardware.

Like how public infrastructure is built today in most Western countries, our ideal future Ministry of Infrastructure would take direction from other ministry’s needs, considering the feedback from the Ministry of Economy & Trade and as always, the feedback from the online feedback system.  Then, it would intelligently decide how to expend the nation’s resources to build or repair the infrastructure, create innovation programs towards improvements and so on.

Of course, the Ministry itself would not be responsible for the construction or repair of infrastructure.  We always want ministries to be as small as possible and let the efficiency of the private sector take the lead with details following instructions from the ministry.  This takes what is best from both worlds as defined early in this Section.  The Ministry’s job is to take the best decision possible and then guide the execution of a plan that is in line with the needs and desires of the nation’s population. 

Once again, local versus regional and national feedback and recommendation from the citizenry still applies here.  Most likely ministries would need to be divided into sub-offices by region to ensure there are some people supervising different areas’ needs according to the priorities of each part of the nation.  After all, infrastructure needs at the town level, such as the repair of public park structures are different than those of an inter-regional transportation system.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, prioritizing tasks and resources available to have work done should minimize the amount of people required at work within the ministry.  And after a decision has been taken to work on a project, the project itself could go into a simple bidding process with private sector.   The competitive nature of private ventures ensures the population gets the best cost, efficiency and ideas for infrastructure projects.  Some companies could be hired to handle day to day work like fixing potholes and other works that require an immediate response, with a limited contract period, while other companies would be hired through a smart bidding process on a project to project basis.

Frankly, this is quite like how we already operate in the West.  However, in our near future infrastructure construction, evaluations, analysis and feasibility studies could be almost completely done using robotics, 3D printing, smart drones and other automated machines with only the passionate company owners and partners supervising.  After all, why use large amounts of construction staff to build if automated systems can do it faster and better without the help from human workers.

Another important point to make here is government oversight could also use automated drones and analysis AI software to determine if a contractor is satisfying the terms of their contract, further freeing individuals to be busy with other occupations.

Water production and distribution

There are exciting developments and research on localized production of water and energy.  We’re talking about extracting drinkable water from directly from the atmosphere using only sunlight and about a square meter surface area of special material (metallo-organic frameworks (MOF) or special composites).  The current technologies are still unrefined but most I’ve read about recently produce up to 25 liters of water in equivalent quality as distilled water per day.  For the most part, these devices can extract water in those quantities when the atmospheric humidity is at least 20%.  This is sufficient drinkable water for any household.  Though this is insufficient water supply if we consider water used to wash but, if our homes could produce their own safe drinkable water (wells and other traditional means are still valid), it would reduce the strain on infrastructure.  An additional benefit may be people would trust their water supply a lot more and may avoid purchasing environmentally damaging water bottles.

Until we can reliably produce higher quantities of clean water locally, water provisioning infrastructure would still be needed to ensure there is enough wash water available to in urban area homes.  However, other technologies are becoming available today allowing the safe capture and filtration of rainwater, as well as affordable desalination of ocean water, which could supplement the atmospheric amounts extracted.  Suffice to say, we could almost immediately reduce the amount of water that needs to be pumped to every home from a centralized source, which also means less load on centralized water purification systems in cities.  Most villages and rural areas would likely have little to no need for centralized water infrastructures anymore though, which would be great.  This all helps reducing the amount of effort and resources required to maintain a good water supply and gives more freedom to individual households as to the type and quality of drinkable water each home receives.  After all, individuals have specific tastes when it comes to drinking water, hence why there are so many water bottle companies successfully selling their wares in stores these days.

The ministry could set up subsidies on a selection of safe water systems to facilitate the adoption of such systems for every house and apartment building, thus accelerating the conversion from centralized water provisioning to a localized one.

Waste Management

Water in, water out!

We may consume water and use water to wash and bathe in, but then, it must go somewhere.  The water that goes down the drain usually goes back to the land in more rural areas or to a water management system provided by a city.  Putting our wastewater back in the soil is a very good way to recycle as it goes back to a natural filtration system and the water table.  However, in dense urban areas, there just isn’t sufficient land to filter the massive amounts of wastewater produced per surface area, so it usually goes to a centralized water treatment facility, or unfortunately, back to a river or lake.   Recycling and treating water takes lots of energy and machinery running 24 / 7, something best avoided or reduced.

Thankfully, there is new technology out there we could use to decentralize water treatment.  Some companies have been quite successful at finding great ways to treat water in compact ways for individual homes and some that can be used for larger structures like apartment buildings and large commercial buildings.  For the most part, these innovative small treatment systems will recycle safe wash-water back to residences ready to be reused directly with minimal energy loss and whatever water that cannot be recycled back can be used for gardens, lawns and general outdoor city use.

Some small residence waste treatment systems also exist today that can treat organic waste and toilet waste to produce fertilizer and gas that can be used in gardens or to supplement a residence’s energy needs (methane).  Theoretically, paper and cardboard waste could be processed by innovative solid waste treatment systems, but generally we cannot trust residents to understand the difference between plastics that resemble cardboard and actual plastics, therefore, it is unwise to completely rely on residents to properly separate recyclables.

Thus, plastic, glass, metal and other non-organic still cannot realistically be recycled into something usable by the household until scientists find out how to properly break those down to their molecular components and the resulting material later used to build new items or even food using atomic 3D printers….  Something for science and engineers to work on as those don’t exist just yet, even in laboratories.

Until then, we’ll still have a need for waste management trucks to come to homes to pick up our recycling and garbage and bring them to advanced commercial recycling and waste management facilities.  On the upside, gathering of household solid waste can be fully automated and the waste can, , be recycled into useful materials until we figure out how to close this loop for each home.

Though the idea of recycled waste is a bit disgusting to some, remember that everything in our environment Is neither created nor destroyed.  It is the First Law of Thermodynamics.  Our waste today is our food tomorrow.  This is a fact. 

Energy production and distribution

With energy the situation is very similar.  Traditionally, the nation is responsible to provide electricity, gas, or other sources of safe energy to households through specialized public entities or private sector arrangements.  With the progress made in solar energy generation, it is now quite affordable for each household and building to generate its own energy and therefore depending less on centralized systems.  Homes can generate sufficient energy from their rooftops to provision all the energy a family home needs.  In densely populated cities, some commercial structures and industry, current solar panel technologies are insufficient to supply the demand without a lot more surface area exposed to the sun.  So, in urban areas, some centralized energy generation and distribution systems would still be needed until we can demonstrate cold fusion or other clean dense energy production is viable.  We could therefore build large scale solar power plants near each city and industrial district that cannot provision enough energy with its own surface area.  The more local, the better, to avoid the huge amount of energy loss from transferring electricity or fossil fuels long distances.

The Ministry of Infrastructure would reserve the right to choose proper plant types and location for production to provide such extreme power needs to retain control of land use, environmental impact and other regionally important factors to all citizens.

There are some significant advances in energy generation devices these days, making this a viable strategy even today.  Photovoltaic solar panels are getting more and more efficient and inexpensive.  In fact, today, utility-scale solar power is now under $1 per watt and below 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, equivalent or lower than the energy cost of traditional energy generation.[1]  These numbers compete directly with some of the less expensive electrical power generation methods such as coal-fired plants and nuclear power.

Because of this trend, solar panel installations have also skyrocketed.  The extremely good side of solar is that it is impossible to run out of sun.  It’s always there every day ready to be captured, contrary to every other type of energy generation except for fusion, which usually uses hydrogen (also universally available everywhere in the universe).  The only downside of solar is that the method is much less effective in colder regions.  However, scientists and engineers are hard at work to further improve the efficiency of solar capture devices.

Need additional energy sources for your home and business?  No problem, you can use the neighborhood’s methane production from solid waste treatment.  Each community will likely have different excesses from home systems that can be intelligently recycled back as power or other resources and therefore minimize economical and environmental costs.

If that is still insufficient, wind energy can supplement or, if we confirm a commercial version of it, safe cold fusion.  No need to use dirty non-renewable non-locally produced energy sources anymore and hydro-power dams can be decommissioned letting nature reclaim the large tracts of land taken by artificial reservoirs.

Food provisioning

You may wonder why the production of food would fall under the responsibility of one of the ministries.  Well, as detailed prior, the whole reason we have governance in the ideal world is to ensure there is balanced, equal provisioning of basic goods and services to all citizens in the nation.  Private sector can operate the farms, but the government must be involved to make sure there is enough food production for everyone. 

There is also a question of the actual resources required to produce sufficient food, which would fall under the supervision of the Ministry of Economy & Trade (a couple chapters later).  Food production, the way I see it, can be part of an integrated feedback system that the Ministry of Infrastructure can supervise.  The data system will ensure food production is about as close to the demand as possible, and the food doesn’t need to travel too far to get to people’s tables.

First off, we have the ability already to have fully automated farms as well as fully automated delivery systems from farms to markets.  Companies are deploying both already in Europe, Asia and North America (self-driving vehicles, 100% employee-less farms and more).  These automated systems can be run by private companies to be competitive and efficient but regulated to avoid abuse of land and natural resources.  Since the farms are digitized, their production and sales data can be fed into an online data management system that provides a picture of the market offer in different areas.

On the other end of the exchange, grocery stores and markets can easily record product sales to consumers, giving a strong indication of demand for each product in different areas of the nation.

An AI can be used to analyse this data and gradually try to reduce economic costs of food production and transportation by providing valuable distance and demand information to producers.  Naturally, food that is automatically produced local to its consumption will tend to be less expensive than food automatically produced a long distance away.  Additionally, data from every produce and food product can be kept and shared with the consumer, giving more power to the consumer at the point of purchase to encourage local production, for example.

All this data can be publicly available and available to the producers and the Ministry of Infrastructure, where farming companies can react to increased demands in different areas and the ministries can identify new need for land in proximity to the demand, thus limiting resource cost and environmental footprint of new farms.  This way, private sector farming entities can compete and innovate to supply a demand that is well known by region, with full transparency, by season and adapt to changes in diet, taste and climate changes dynamically and efficiently.

Once the system of information exchange is in place and regulations obligating the data for offer and demand to be regularly updated to this system by the whole food chain, we can have a very efficient, competitive and fully automated food production and supply infrastructure.

Now remember, even though all of this can be fully automated, it doesn’t need to be.  Some high-end food production companies may want to have people cultivating some specialty food to supply specific demands who prefer “human-touched” food.  That’s the free market, so it is fine, but it is entirely the choice of the entrepreneur to build this business model guided by a perceived or real consumer demand.  Why not?

Under this model, though it is a very high responsibility to feed a nation, the Ministry of Infrastructure really doesn’t need to assign a huge amount of human resources to the supervision of this at all.  Most of this is automated and can be secured using blockchain technology[2] to prevent loss of data or misinformation from within the system.  Perhaps some on-site checks and balances for a while to make sure every producer and seller is reporting to the system to keep to regulations…

Transportation systems

Taking care of the transportation system is a traditional responsibility for public works in modern countries.  There really isn’t anything wrong with keeping to this.  However, like the idea of automated transportation of goods from farms to markets, the ministry would be responsible to supervise an extended self-driving mass transportation system as well.  Once again, I do not recommend publicly owned transportation systems, just regulation and infrastructure allowing private sector companies like today’s Uber, Lyft and Tesla to compete and fill the needs as they grow and change.  The ministry would encourage compatibility of data between engaged companies in a network of self-driving vehicles that would communicate efficiently with each other to optimize safety and the learning capabilities of each vehicle.  Independent companies would be able to retain their secret sauce and edges by innovating beyond regulatory requirements of sharing basic data such as population densities at different times, travel times and self-driving vehicle position in the area.    All of which help the transportation network adjust dynamically to changes in traveler needs, avoid dangerous areas and minimize the number of needed vehicles on the road at any give time.  This can be done in a similar way that private companies managed to build systems on top of systems based on the Internet.  Consumer usage and preference drove private firms to keep to certain protocols while regulators kept a feather’s touch on everything to ensure information access was fair to the population.  The ideal future can retain those processes as they work very well in the presence when politicians don’t get in the way.

In the ideal future, there is no point for people to drive themselves or each other anywhere as self-driven cars are already, today, safer and more efficient drivers than human beings.  Soon, human drivers will be a safety hazard and a liability as driver.  If you wish to watch people racing each other on a racetrack, that is an entirely different proposition and can be fine entertainment.   

The Ministry’s role here would be to ensure there is proper wireless data coverage for the self-driven vehicles to operate safely and still nominally communicate with the rest of the transportation network.  Encouraging broad network coverage would just give private firms more room to deliver great services to the population. 

Internet

Though it is important for a healthy and safe self-driving transportation network, the responsibility of this Ministry around internet connectivity is more importantly related to the necessity for every citizen to be able to share their needs and feedback to the governance online system mentioned all over this Section.

The ministry would need to make sure there is internet coverage no matter where we go within the nation.  Internet infrastructure capable of covering every inch of a nation can be problematic in some low population density countries like Canada, the US, Brazil and others.  Thus, there are plans underway by some companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to send thousands of micro-satellites in orbit around the Earth to blanket the whole planet with Internet capability.  This would create a global communications infrastructure accessible from anywhere on the planet.  Modern ideal ministries from every nation could encourage their citizens to access the Internet this way no matter where they are within the nation.  In any case, the ministry’s responsibility is to ensure access, not necessarily to provide and pay for anyone’s favorite access.  Just like everything else, people should be allowed to choose their internet providers as they are doing so today.  Citizens could also choose to participate in a decentralized internet that uses the infrastructure but where data flows peer to peer instead of going through Internet Service Providers (ISPs).  That is entirely up to the population as they vote with their wallets.  Typically, a solid peer to peer network would be less expensive than the traditional ISP method since peer to peer eliminates more middle-men.

The important point here is that the Ministry of Infrastructure only needs to lead and create the need. Many technology companies will automatically work to compete to fill the need for the benefit of all.  Once the infrastructure is ensured, then it is a question of programming the secure system itself, probably on blockchain-type technologies to disassociate it from central entities and leaving it in the capable hands of the nation’s citizens.  [3]

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[1] Julia Pyper (September 2017).  DOE officially marks SunShot’s $1 per Watt goal for utility-scale solar. - https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/doe-officially-hits-sunshot-1-per-watt-goal-for-utility-scale-solar#gs.jRhVCdo

[2] Curtis Miles (December 2017).  Blockchain security:  what keeps your transaction data safe?  - https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2017/12/blockchain-security-what-keeps-your-transaction-data-safe/

[3] Alec Ross (April 2018)  Why the time is right for the first blockchain governor.  - https://www.coindesk.com/why-the-time-is-right-for-the-first-blockchain-governor/