[melbourne-pug] AI and ML idea

[Mike Dewhirst]

Hi all!

I attended a dangerous goods meeting yesterday and most of the time was 
spent discussing waste.

Some contractors who can no longer ship waste to China now pay a few 
months rent in advance for a factory, stack it to the roof with waste 
and when no more can be squeezed in they disappear leaving the landlord 
to sort it out. Too often, spontaneous combustion works its magic first 
and the Fire Service has to respond.

The scientific consensus was that we need a war on waste.

I was reminded of that Mumbai documentary which showed hordes of 
children sorting through vast piles of waste extracting sellable stuff.

It occurs to me that all the consumption care in the world (today's 
world anyway) isn't going to cut the mustard. We need armies of robots 
which can learn to recognise recyclable material. They can be 
specialised, small, medium and large. They can have gas detectors, 
spectrum analysers and other sniffers and detectors to help.

Eventually I see waste mountains being broken down into more granularly 
unique substances and chemical processes used for the hard-to-extract 
stuff. In (unproven) theory some of the waste should be convertable into 
energy to recharge the robot batteries and power their collaboration 
networks.

Even if some of the recovered materials were not worth selling they 
could be stored until someone thought of a use for them. House-bricks?

I wonder if any of you inventive pyfolk think the world needs swarms of 
intelligent waste converters?

Its an idea but with a self-organising collective it might become a project!

Cheers

Mike



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