Food Tech

A conversation about food can lead towards a conversation about socialism and capitalism. This conversation about socialism and capitalism can be temporarily avoided by focusing on technology which could be used within many different economic systems.

The food technology I’d like to use would allow me to receive the best affordable food with the least amount of effort. Note that my wife would prefer a slightly different food technology where the ingredients are delivered to her alongside recipes used to make meals. My wife may even want to select meals from a list and have the ingredients delivered to our kitchen.

So we can begin to imagine a technology in the hands of people who need food. A homeless person (or a strange tech guy like myself) could have meals delivered by drone to the location indicated by their device. There could be sensors in the waste management system which indicates deficiencies in the person’s diet.

The technology ultimately depends on open standards. The equipment used by farmers needs open standards. See Celber/Oggun and Open Source Ecology for examples. The technology used by every leg of the supply chain can make use of open standards. In order to get good food into the hands of homeless people at the lowest cost possible we need open standards.

My Wife Likes To Cook

My wife opens an app on her phone and makes decisions about the meals to cook for the week. When she clicks on the spaghetti meal, the software makes an informed suggestion providing the average price of the ingredients for the meal. After creating the meal plan for the week, she is given options for how the meals are provided to her. Note that the average price is calculated based on the price of ingredients from suppliers in the previously configured location settings.

The most expensive option is that the meals can be scheduled for delivery prepared such that the previous meal’s dirty dishes are picked up when the new meal and dishes are dropped off. A chef in a truck parks outside of our house and prepares the meal. Note that this chef in a truck could be entirely run by robots in the future.

The least expensive option in modern times within our country is that my wife is provided instructions to do most of the work in providing meals for our family. She may be given instructions about which store to visit. She may be given instructions about more than one store to visit. She may be given instructions about the picking path for moving throughout the store and selecting the correct ingredients. She may be given instructions about the car wreck or the tire in the road to avoid while traveling to and from the grocery store. She may be given options for recipes in preparing the meals.

In between the most expensive and least expensive options are all kinds of services and technologies which can be provided. Pickers at the store, whether human or not, can have the groceries ready for pickup. Or perhaps the store has a cart which checks items as they are entered and weighs everything to verify that the list of ingredients, previously paid for, matches up with the items in the cart. Another service could deliver the ingredients to our doorstep, whether human or not.

Hungry and Homeless

In Alabama, a homeless person goes to a homeless shelter where they have access to basic necessities. The supply of food at the shelter is monitored and donors can help make sure there is a supply of food for whoever is hungry. Someone like myself could receive an alert that supplies are low at the shelter and I could donate money and select from various food services suppliers so that food is available to those who are hungry. Note that food stamps could operate in a similar way so that the poor can go to these shelters to eat.

In California or a state which doesn’t worry about costs as much as Alabama, a homeless person might get their food in the most expensive way such that prepared meals are delivered directly to the homeless person.

Note that the cost of options for providing food to people could change overtime as technology improves and awareness of the externalities increases and are factored into the prices. The technology allows individuals to make different informed decisions with different costs and tradeoffs.

Status Report

In my response video to Chad’s Cosmological Burrito, I try to point at our goal of providing basic opportunity for all people on Earth. I point out that air and water are essential and I point towards the Convective Heat Engine (CHE) as a means of providing a reliable and predictable supply of water for all people on Earth. I also point at an infant idea (for me) about metapolitech as a means by which organizations of people might begin to solve the underlying sensemaking problems which cause organizations like Xprize to ignore ideas like the CHE.

I have attempted to connect with Society Library because they demonstrated a technology which allows for the collection of problems and solutions with claims and arguments. I am interested in submitting proposals and arguments and claims to the Society Library. And I am interested in using this technology alongside other technology within an organization which transforms the world and creates peace on Earth.