We are increasingly surrounded by boxes. A new online purchase arrives on the doorsteps of one-third of American consumers each week. The volume of packages express-shipped by Amazon (more than 5 billion deliveries in 2017) shares an order of magnitude with the earth’s population (approximately 7.4 billion people). Look around your immediate surroundings and you might see the curved logo from one of the company’s boxes smiling at you now.
This tide of packages is unlikely to recede. Technology giants with multibillion-dollar research budgets are working to further embed our everyday lives within an ecosystem of accumulation, assuring that those packages will keep coming. Amazon engineers, hoping to use robots to address the “last mile problem” of transporting packages between warehouses and individual consumers, have contemplated such solutions as parachuting boxes from drones. A company called Starship has already begun testing small sidewalk-traveling delivery robots in some urban areas. But robots won’t just be on the road or in the sky. As boxes pile up beyond the anticipated capacities of apartment-building mail rooms, a few high-end properties are now experimenting with robotic systems to shuttle incoming deliveries to residents or store an owner’s existing possessions. Amazon has imagined a system that sends a robot out from each house to meet a delivery truck. Industry predictions suggest that robots could eventually be able to grasp and move objects within a household — one potential example, a towel-folding robot, has already been exhibited as a prototype. By the time that delivery robots begin arriving at your home, your residence might already be operating as an automated warehouse in its own right.
Automated vehicles for freight have not yet garnered the scrutiny that those for human passengers have, but their influence on everyday life could be just as dramatic. Given that robots can move through space in uniquely nonhuman ways, they wouldn’t necessarily be subject to boundaries between private and public spaces that constrain delivery people, allowing them to move goods in and out of homes in a constant flow. Amazon already has its “smart” lock system allow human carriers to enter a home briefly to drop off packages, and Wal-Mart is testing a similar system that lets its workers deliver groceries to a home’s refrigerator. But fully automated robots could travel deeper into homes without compromising privacy. You wouldn’t need to get dressed to greet a robot, if you noticed its arrival at all. It might unobtrusively enter and leave through an opening the size of a pet door.
Capitalist markets have long compelled consumers to buy as isolated households and fill their homes with new cycles of disposable goods. But emergent online shopping behavior suggests a latent consumer desire to circulate goods out of as well as into homes. E-commerce initially grew on the promise of easy returns of merchandise purchased sight-unseen, and it has become common to order multiple items at once under the assumption that some will be returned. Mainstream classified ad and auction websites are nearly as old as those selling new goods, and new improvised alternatives to the traditional garage sale are still emerging; some eBay sellers offer “mystery boxes” to get rid of unwanted goods, and websites and apps for reselling clothing are also growing rapidly. Facebook recently introduced a dedicated Marketplace platform to accommodate the 450 million users who had unofficially repurposed the site to sell and exchange items on their own. The TV revival of decluttering guru Marie Kondo, too, points to a widespread desire to reduce hoarding and continually re-evaluate which goods we consider essential.
The tendency for more boxes to enter our homes than to leave, then, may be caused in part by technical constraints rather than an endless desire to accumulate more stuff. Returning items remains relatively cumbersome, and a delivery can’t be undone with the same single button-push that brought it there. The additional labor involved creates a noticeable disincentive: 55 percent of online shoppers in an NPR survey reported keeping an unwanted purchase because of the inconveniences involved in returning it. Current “smart” door locks allow delivery workers to deposit packages directly inside homes, but their software does not yet facilitate picking up returns.
If the arrival of automated delivery robots could lower the effort to sell or return goods to the minimal amount it now takes to buy them, users might exchange products through a new kind of logistical network that would make the process of acquiring and trading physical objects as frictionless as that of downloading and deleting digital files. Users might trade products among themselves through new kinds of logistical networks — a kind of peer-to-peer sharing for physical objects.
Just as Airbnb was launched with the initial promise (if not always the lasting result) of transforming underutilized apartments and homes into decentralized competition for hotel rooms, a robot delivery system could turn every home effectively into a warehouse of objects offered for rent or sale. Items robotically transferred from one home to another might not need to pass through any central distribution facility; the system could potentially resemble a torrenting network, only one that was not reliant on “pirated” materials. The ability to request the express arrival of any object missing from your life with a minimum of effort could make it increasingly possible to live as though you already own everything. That is to say, ownership might become an irrelevant consideration in comparison to the availability of abundant options for short-term consumption like those already offered by media streaming services. Once the home becomes seamlessly integrated as an appendage of fulfillment infrastructure, the activity of making shopping decisions might recede from our consciousness altogether.
by Chenoe Hart, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Animal Farm (2014) by Chou Ching-Hui
This tide of packages is unlikely to recede. Technology giants with multibillion-dollar research budgets are working to further embed our everyday lives within an ecosystem of accumulation, assuring that those packages will keep coming. Amazon engineers, hoping to use robots to address the “last mile problem” of transporting packages between warehouses and individual consumers, have contemplated such solutions as parachuting boxes from drones. A company called Starship has already begun testing small sidewalk-traveling delivery robots in some urban areas. But robots won’t just be on the road or in the sky. As boxes pile up beyond the anticipated capacities of apartment-building mail rooms, a few high-end properties are now experimenting with robotic systems to shuttle incoming deliveries to residents or store an owner’s existing possessions. Amazon has imagined a system that sends a robot out from each house to meet a delivery truck. Industry predictions suggest that robots could eventually be able to grasp and move objects within a household — one potential example, a towel-folding robot, has already been exhibited as a prototype. By the time that delivery robots begin arriving at your home, your residence might already be operating as an automated warehouse in its own right.
Automated vehicles for freight have not yet garnered the scrutiny that those for human passengers have, but their influence on everyday life could be just as dramatic. Given that robots can move through space in uniquely nonhuman ways, they wouldn’t necessarily be subject to boundaries between private and public spaces that constrain delivery people, allowing them to move goods in and out of homes in a constant flow. Amazon already has its “smart” lock system allow human carriers to enter a home briefly to drop off packages, and Wal-Mart is testing a similar system that lets its workers deliver groceries to a home’s refrigerator. But fully automated robots could travel deeper into homes without compromising privacy. You wouldn’t need to get dressed to greet a robot, if you noticed its arrival at all. It might unobtrusively enter and leave through an opening the size of a pet door.Capitalist markets have long compelled consumers to buy as isolated households and fill their homes with new cycles of disposable goods. But emergent online shopping behavior suggests a latent consumer desire to circulate goods out of as well as into homes. E-commerce initially grew on the promise of easy returns of merchandise purchased sight-unseen, and it has become common to order multiple items at once under the assumption that some will be returned. Mainstream classified ad and auction websites are nearly as old as those selling new goods, and new improvised alternatives to the traditional garage sale are still emerging; some eBay sellers offer “mystery boxes” to get rid of unwanted goods, and websites and apps for reselling clothing are also growing rapidly. Facebook recently introduced a dedicated Marketplace platform to accommodate the 450 million users who had unofficially repurposed the site to sell and exchange items on their own. The TV revival of decluttering guru Marie Kondo, too, points to a widespread desire to reduce hoarding and continually re-evaluate which goods we consider essential.
The tendency for more boxes to enter our homes than to leave, then, may be caused in part by technical constraints rather than an endless desire to accumulate more stuff. Returning items remains relatively cumbersome, and a delivery can’t be undone with the same single button-push that brought it there. The additional labor involved creates a noticeable disincentive: 55 percent of online shoppers in an NPR survey reported keeping an unwanted purchase because of the inconveniences involved in returning it. Current “smart” door locks allow delivery workers to deposit packages directly inside homes, but their software does not yet facilitate picking up returns.
If the arrival of automated delivery robots could lower the effort to sell or return goods to the minimal amount it now takes to buy them, users might exchange products through a new kind of logistical network that would make the process of acquiring and trading physical objects as frictionless as that of downloading and deleting digital files. Users might trade products among themselves through new kinds of logistical networks — a kind of peer-to-peer sharing for physical objects.
Just as Airbnb was launched with the initial promise (if not always the lasting result) of transforming underutilized apartments and homes into decentralized competition for hotel rooms, a robot delivery system could turn every home effectively into a warehouse of objects offered for rent or sale. Items robotically transferred from one home to another might not need to pass through any central distribution facility; the system could potentially resemble a torrenting network, only one that was not reliant on “pirated” materials. The ability to request the express arrival of any object missing from your life with a minimum of effort could make it increasingly possible to live as though you already own everything. That is to say, ownership might become an irrelevant consideration in comparison to the availability of abundant options for short-term consumption like those already offered by media streaming services. Once the home becomes seamlessly integrated as an appendage of fulfillment infrastructure, the activity of making shopping decisions might recede from our consciousness altogether.
by Chenoe Hart, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Animal Farm (2014) by Chou Ching-Hui
