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]
[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/
