Title, or Our Waste Future

I’m not sure how to title this piece, so I’ll write under the vast, blue skies of “Title”.

I’m not sure what to write, either. But there is the kernel of an idea bubbling that wants out. Hopefully not the Alien bursting from my chest, but instead a little puff of wonderment.

I have a feeling that tech can do a whole lot more when it comes to creating a world without waste.

Not just the old trick of virtualising everything. You know, that trick where digital everything transforms atoms into bits and paper becomes a thing of the past.

And perhaps it will.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m instead thinking about a space where real materials are moved first from “waste” to “unwanted materials”, and from there they are connected up into cool new lives for cool new things.

Perhaps I need to back it up a bit.

Waste isn’t intrinsically anything. No, that’s not quite true. Waste is materials in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong quantities or with the wrong concentrations for what is desired.

Of these, the wrong concentrations is the closest to being an intrinsic property of the material. Think arsenic trioxide from gold mining. That’s intrinsically waste (but only because there’s no market for arsenic anymore, not since the days of Hercule Poirot and proper, kill-em dead pesticides…if we had a market for arsenic then who knows…)

Here’s a thought. Waste might be just the residual necessary for the efficient functioning of markets. It might be that an efficient market ejects waste just like a steam engine releases steam. Valuable materials both, but both let loose because the system needs to dump excess something. Pressure. Perhaps waste is the material economy’s way of releasing excess pressure.

Which returns me to my initial thought, which is that waste is not intrinsically waste. It’s just stuff that doesn’t fit into the here and now. And no longer fitting into the here and now, the stuff gets all jumbled up so that entropy kicks in and it’s very difficult to extract value any more.

But before that point of mixing, before entropy is let loose from her stall, before then…

If we can capture unwanted materials before entropy is loosed then perhaps we can create a world without waste. If we can capture unwanted materials before they get discarded to the void, then perhaps we have a chance at creating a world without waste.

And this is where tech comes in.

Entropy is loosed on unwanted materials because the transaction costs of doing anything else is so high. A mixed up bin is the best place for it.

Imagine, for a second, a world where you have a little robotic butler that follows around behind, takes your materials (wanted and unwanted), and scurries it off to the proper place. And it just knows where that place is, because it’s learned what the things are and where they belong, because it is constantly learning through AI.

And then imagine if those places included clever little bins, segregated by material, that whisked themselves out to larger, dedicated bins which in turn consolidated all the way up the line until the unwanted materials ended up at a processing factory where they could be simply, efficiently and cleanly reconverted back into wanted materials again.

And all of this happened without you needing to think, and with micro-transactions all along the way that are optimised by each little robotic player to create breathtaking complexity out of these very simple rules. Fractal complexity where the surface area across which materials are refined in their collection is infinite and forever, and yet bounded and discrete.

A world formed by the massing of swarms of little robotic creatures that see and learn and optimise as they go. A world where processing factories are fed by the materials that lay to waste all around them.

What does that world look like? Terrifying? Or wonderfully abundant? It could be tremendously disempowering if ridden by a monopolies enforcing control over resources, or it could be richly diverse if it recreates a new commons.

That political economy is yet to be, and whilst it could perhaps be designed in advance, it’s more likely to be left to chance.

Now this is science fiction. It is no coincidence that it appears under “Title”, resting under the gaping blue sky of endless possibility.

But it’s not really. It’s a future. A possible future. A possible waste future that, like the quantum universe, collapses into being upon observation. It has now been seen, it has now been felt. It exists.

There is, already, a clear trajectory with all of the existing tech where this future comes to pass. The wave function of possibilities collapses into a discrete reality, and we now find ourselves in a world where the blank “Title” has become “Our Waste Future”, and this future now begins to unfold.

“Title” is become “Our Waste Future”, but the sky above remains blue.

The sky is always blue. The heavens always filled with hope.