I want a city or neighborhood hooked up to a pneumatic tube system, like they have in bank drive-throughs, and I want at least one node of the pneumatic router network to be in an Amazon warehouse, and at least one other to be at a decent cheeseburger shop.
Make sure it's wired for fiber internet and I will buy a condo in that development.
Imagine ordering something up to the size and weight of a 3.5" HDD (or bacon double cheeseburger) and having it magically appear in your kitchen five minutes later.
If these things became prevalent, packaging could standardize on the capsule cylinder size, like shipping containers. Units containing e.g. 500mL of milk or 5-7 eggs would be perfect.
So instead of tube, how about a delivery robot that's like an alley cat? One which grew up watching Indian Jones and superhero cartoons. And loves tightropes. And wants to be flying squirrel. And is wired into Google RealTime City Map...
I haz the cheezeburger. My human customer hungrily awaits. So I roll down the alley, and around the trash. Pause for traffic, and scoot across the street. Time for my usual northbound path. Up onto the roof. Down a toll zipline to another roof. Leap, wings out, glide, grab a street-pole cable, wings in. Roll along the cable, dodge pole, cable, pole, cable, etc. Roll down a quiet side street. Roof, alley, jump fence. Quick charge station. I consider Uber, but no! Here comes city bus #1726! Leap, electromagnet, hitchhike. Drop, wait for light, down sidewalk. Jump to porch, landing before the hungry human. A human lucky that it is I, city cat, that haz their cheezburger. And not some blind dumb hulking oft-clogged brute of a straw. Though if the straw ever gets built, I may ride that too. I take my bow, and my leave.
What constitutes travel infrastructure depends on what you can cope with. Wrt power, mechanics, sensors, information, and computes. It may be that those advance more rapidly than our ability to build large-scale physical-plant infrastructure. Like cars were easier than moving sidewalks. Robots that can use custom infrastructure where it exists, but can cope "on the ground" in the infrastructure gaps, would have higher complexity cost than say drones. But as costs change...
And hybrids may be interesting. The midday Amazon truck drives down the main road, shedding drones and robots, and taking on those dropped in the morning...
That third paragraph could make for an awfully interesting short story. It would just need a bit of plot or social commentary added beyond just playing around with the initial idea.
Make sure it's wired for fiber internet and I will buy a condo in that development.
Imagine ordering something up to the size and weight of a 3.5" HDD (or bacon double cheeseburger) and having it magically appear in your kitchen five minutes later.
If these things became prevalent, packaging could standardize on the capsule cylinder size, like shipping containers. Units containing e.g. 500mL of milk or 5-7 eggs would be perfect.