Sharing brainpower plays an essential role in the development of these alternative models of the automobile, particularly the autonomous car, in a very important respect we should talk more about: road safety. A major goal is to reduce the number of traffic accidents and, above all, cut the number of fatalities to zero. To achieve such an ambitious result will require contributions from a diverse set of integrated players, including owners and distributors of a number of data streams, such as those providing traffic and weather information; GPS software developers; sensing and monitoring chip manufacturers (such as NXP and Intel); technical universities; tech giants, including Apple and Google; and automotive industry leaders such as GM, Mercedes, and Volvo. All must be involved in the development, smart manufacturing, and management of these elements if the autonomous vehicle is to operate effectively and safely. In other words, when it comes to their design and development, these vehicles are the opposite of autonomous—they rely on sophisticated, integrated, collaborative, brainsharing ecosystems of the kind we visited and have described in this book.
This transformation of the auto industry provides a vivid illustration of how disparate new technologies can combine to create a powerful new paradigm whose value is far greater than the sum of its parts. Many things will be different about the cars of tomorrow: how they are manufactured and propelled, what they are made of, how they are owned, and how they are operated. These changes, in turn, will have an effect on key twenty-first-century challenges, including climate change (through the reduction of carbon emissions), urbanization (by easing congestion in ever-expanding urban areas); public health (by reducing accidents and road fatalities, cutting down on the stress of commuting, and providing better mobility for an aging population); and social cohesion (by providing more convenient access to safer cars at lower cost).
The smart car, then, is a key element to a more intelligent, productive, equitable, and safe society.
Smart Farming Closer to Home
Another thorny challenge of the twenty-first century is how to feed the 9 billion people expected to live on the planet Earth by 2050. What role can the development of technology through brainsharing play in that effort? As the global population expands and demand for locally sourced produce rises, innovations such as next-generation greenhouses and automated milking will redefine how and where we produce our food to meet an ever-growing demand. This issue, too, is being explored in the world’s smartest places, not only near Silicon Valley, where tech start-ups deploy drones and analyze big data to help farmers increase their yields, but in lesser-known spots like Wageningen, in the Netherlands, where extensive studies are conducted on the greenhouse of the future, and Lund, Sweden, where the focus is on robots for milking cows.
Not surprisingly, the United States is the world’s largest producer of agricultural and food exports, with about 11.5 percent of the world’s total, but the nation that comes second on the list is a surprise: the Netherlands. A country with a tiny, densely populated land area (less than 0.5 percent that of the United States) contributes about 7.5 percent of the world’s food exports. This outstanding performance results from many factors, including the high productivity and efficiency of the Dutch agricultural sector, the brainsharing collaboration between the agricultural university of Wageningen, and cooperative farmers’ organizations and private companies, as well as effective marketing.
The University of Wageningen started as a professional school for farmers, and its students came mostly from the Netherlands. Today, however, it is ranked second in the world in its field, and its programs are so highly regarded that nearly half its graduate students come from outside the country. It is one of only a handful of universities whose students can transfer their credits to any other educational institution in Europe. It collaborates with state-of-the-art local agricultural institutes and with similar institutes in Sweden and elsewhere in the world. Wageningen researchers explore ways to make Dutch agriculture more sustainable, in addition to addressing issues of food security in Central Asia in light of climate change and methods of improving yields in Africa. They also work closely with start-ups like Plant-e, which is studying the ways in which living plants generate electricity, and Micreos Food Safety, which is looking into how “good” bacteria can be used to replace antibiotics. This work is being done in the light of the tons of new data generated by the Microbiome Project, a global initiative that is defining the genetic footprint of the all-important microbiomes that jam-pack the human gut.14
Holland is well known, of course, for the stereotypical image of a country characterized by lovely fields of tulips and daffodils. However, as with so many stereotypes, this one, though not wrong, is incomplete and out of date. Today, the majority of the flowers, plants, and vegetables produced in Holland are grown in greenhouses.
They are not, however, just any greenhouses—they are advanced greenhouses, developed through an initiative called the Greenhouse of the Future, which was established after a 1997 resolution of the Dutch government and Dutch grower organizations to reduce pollution and increase energy efficiency. The initial goal was to develop methods to control the temperature inside the greenhouses to suit the specific needs of diverse crops while storing heat created during warm periods to use during colder weather. These goals could be achieved, it was believed, through the combination of co-generating heat and power with thermal energy storage of excess heat in an aquifer for feeding it back to the grid.
This concept eventually became known as the “closed-circuit greenhouse,” and the Dutch tomato grower Themato was the first to construct one in 2001.15 During the following decade, more and more growers modernized their greenhouses, with the result that flower and vegetable growers now generate 9 percent of Holland’s electricity.
A new wrinkle was introduced when Casey Houweling, a former Dutch citizen who had moved to the United States, made plans to start growing operations in a town just north of Los Angeles, California. Houweling asked the Dutch company KUBO to design a greenhouse specifically for use in very hot climates, like that of Southern California.16 KUBO responded by focusing on climate-control options that used fans to regulate the greenhouse’s interior temperature. In 2009, these warehouses opened under the name of Ultra Clima, and similar projects are now operating in Utah, France, Slovenia, Mexico, and Russia. Houweling’s tomatoes have earned the “Best” rating for sustainability at Whole Foods. With a year-round growing season, Houweling produces as many tomatoes at a 125-acre California facility as a conventional 3,000-acre farm could produce in a regular season. What’s more, water in the greenhouses is recycled in a closed loop, an extremely important feature in a state where water is scarce. After little more than an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, we were impressed to see how the ripening tomatoes in his massive greenhouses contrasted with the surrounding drought-parched land during our visit in September 2015.17
The greenhouse advances continue. The character and intensity of the light inside a greenhouse are also important to the efficiency of its operation and the quality of its products. In 2014, Chicago-based Green Sense Farms (GSF) and Philips announced a partnership to develop indoor commercial farming installations that utilize LED lighting to maximize plant productivity.18 For its part, Philips is developing its knowledge of the effect of light on plants and their ability to produce. According to Udo van Slooten, director of horticultural lighting at Philips, each type of plant is most productive when exposed to the specific wavelength of light that it favors. “We have developed light ‘recipes’ for different plant varieties,” he explained.19 Meanwhile, partner GSF has set up an experiment in an old warehouse to study hydroponic production technologies using vertical stacks that replace traditional soil with a mineral nutrient solution and do not require any direct sunlight. By using multiple levels, this approach maximizes the interior volume of a greenhouse and thus increases productivity. It also eliminates the need for harmful pesticides, fertilizers, and preservatives. As a result, the plants can be o
rganically grown and are virtually chemical free. And that is another benefit for consumers and for public health.
Such reinvented facilities have the potential to yield twenty to twenty-five harvests per year (in comparison to two or three annually) while consuming 85 percent less energy. Food shortages in developing countries and water shortages in states like California provide powerful testimony that “smart” matters not just in manufacturing but also in farming, to make it more productive, sustainable, and energy efficient, with the additional benefit that consumers can enjoy locally grown foods at supermarket prices.
Smart production embraces many ways of making things, not all of which rely solely on machines and electronics. The push for mechanical innovation in the dairy sector during the 1990s gave rise to advances such as individualized electronic necklaces that control cows’ eating habits and the first milking robots. The leading companies in this field are the Swedish DeLaval and the Dutch Lely group.20 They have developed automated barns—in which sensors monitor and control the quality of the milk, self-navigating robots clean the floors, and other robots spread the cows’ forage according to their individual needs. Such facilities have become the rule rather than the exception in many developed countries. Farmers are able to track their animals digitally and manage the information they gather to create more effective milk-producing facilities.
The productivity gains and enhanced value in the dairy sector do not stop at the farm; the entire process has undergone a revolution. Emmo Meijer, CTO of FrieslandCampina,21 explained Holland’s global leadership in agricultural research to us during our meeting with him in Amersfoort: “In this country, you find the best knowledge and research on food issues in the world. The food sector in Holland spent 6 percent of its sales on R&D in 2013—only Denmark spent more (7 percent).”22
FrieslandCampina applied this expertise to resolving the long-standing trade-off between production volume and production quality. Until recently, for example, dairy producers’ focus on maximizing their output of milk, butter, and cheese substantially diminished the quality of the product. Whey, for instance—a “byproduct” of milk production in the current model—is a substantial and nutritious dairy product, and it is not utilized in the existing production process. In 2005, FrieslandCampina initiated research into alternative processes that would deliver optimum quality for all outputs.
After a new approach had been developed and its positive results verified at a test site, the company opened a full-production installation in 2010 that has the characteristics of a milk “refinery.” After separating out the milk fat, the remaining fluid passes through membranes with successively wider holes. The bacteria, relatively large microorganisms, are the first component to be filtered out, followed in successive steps by the casein, whey-proteins, and lactose. “The new process delivers product streams of high quality,” Meijer explained, “[including] casein for the production of cheese, whey-proteins for infant food, and lactose for the preparation of medicines.” Boosting efficiency through innovations like FrieslandCampina’s milk refinery is critical to ensuring that our limited natural resources will meet our ever-growing demand.
Smart farming is a good example of how advanced technologies such as robots, sensors, clean energy, water management, biotechnology, and information technology can be brought together in ecosystems that include businesses, local communities, and universities to yield enormous productivity gains. Innovations like smart greenhouses, stacked hydroponic production, and next-generation lighting will greatly increase the efficiency of modern farming and will play a significant role in localizing and maximizing food production—and these technologies are applicable around the world. Vegetables and other produce can be harvested in warehouses or on rooftops in the middle of our largest cities, addressing the growing desire to eat locally grown food, while simultaneously diminishing the need for fertilizers and pesticides. There will be less need for transportation over long distances, reducing the industry’s overall carbon emissions. By offering developing countries with hot climates the opportunity to produce their own fresh vegetables anywhere they want, smart farming will contribute greatly to addressing the twenty-first-century challenges of global hunger, food shortages, and inequitable distribution.
Smarter Cities: Technology Serves Community
One of the major trends of the twenty-first century is urbanization. Cities are growing in population, area, and influence—especially in emerging economies—and they are transforming in ways that defy traditional definitions of cities: sprawling over huge areas, comprising multiple centers, separating into distinct subentities of wealthy enclaves and underserved districts, and growing to populations of unprecedented scale. In the “old” economies, millennials are reversing the twentieth-century exodus to the suburbs. Urbanization poses tremendous challenges, including housing, the provision of services, food production and distribution, public health, and even individual resilience. All the smart technologies we have discussed in this chapter—energy, transportation, food production, data analytics—and many others we have not covered, will come into play in the creation of the city of the future.
In cities, the challenge of transportation, for example, is better described as one of mobility: the creation of systems that enable citizens to make their way from place to place conveniently, safely, and in a way that is integrated with a compact city design and customized to the needs of those who are very young and very old. The issues associated with cars and traffic look very different in suburban and rural areas than they do in urban settings, where getting from place to place within a relatively contained area is a constant struggle involving cars, trucks, taxis, buses, vans, trains, subways, bicycles, pedicabs, motorcycles, skateboarders, motorized wheelchairs, rickshaws, three-wheel vehicles, and in some cities, cable cars, bus rapid transit, moving walkways, and escalators, as well as, of course, pedestrians of every size, description, and capability—all plying the streets and contending with congestion and pollution. Products or technologies that improve mobility, through cleaner, smaller, more convenient, safer, and cheaper methods of conveyance should be pursued, and the autonomous car as well as car-sharing are promising solutions.
Food production for city populations is replete with tensions: there is a need for huge quantities of food, in a wide variety of types and price points, available 24/7, that contributes to a city’s health and appeal. The rise of urban agriculture and local farmers’ markets in public spaces where residents can find locally grown produce have the capacity to improve our diets and enhance our sense of community. The reinvigoration of these public spaces—including parks, transport hubs, and entire neighborhoods—as well as the priority placed on crime reduction in Europe and the United States, will reinvent how we think about our city systems and organizations, and the people within them, and by extension, this will completely transform our concept of a city.
The reimagining and repurposing of public spaces has become a collaborative initiative involving artists, architects, developers, residents, businesses, and local politicians. In Eindhoven, for example, an organization called STRP—which is located in the Strijp, one of Philips’s old factories—aspires to bring together art, science, and community.23 To that end, STRP organizes the Biennale, a biannual art and technology festival, as well as regular meetings where practitioners of both “high tech” and “high art” meet to create solutions and products that are as efficient and productive as they are aesthetically appealing.
Lighting is another important element in improving public spaces. Companies such as GE, Philips, and Osram (formerly Siemens) are currently investigating new, smart lighting configurations that will be more adaptable and capable of providing diverse light environments, unlike traditional fixtures and bulbs that are not particularly flexible in adapting to different circumstances and environments. These companies are consulting closely with local authorities and residents to develop proposals for lighting solutions that can respond to people’s des
ires for variations in the color, quality, and intensity of light in an area, using sensors integrated into the system to adjust the lighting instrument, depending on the season, time of day, the amount of activity on a street or square, and other inputs—typically using LED elements that are more economical to operate than halogen bulbs. Borrowing a page from the sharing economy, they lease lighting equipment to municipalities. The city pays for the energy, and the lighting suppliers maintain and update the equipment.
These emerging elements of the smart city—including new approaches to transportation, energy management, food production, and infrastructural design—can only be developed through the sharing of brainpower among all city constituents. The result, we believe, will be the return of a “village” mentality in large cities, particularly among young people. We already see this as part of the “sharing economy” that is composed of sharing services such as Airbnb and ZipCar and that has extended to many products and services, including tools and real estate. It is a form of sharing brainpower and collaboration that goes beyond technological innovation to city reinvention.
Data: Big and Smart?
The extensive Internet research required in writing this book made us acutely aware of how online search tools have changed over a period of just a few years. Basic Google searches are now enriched with information beyond the scope of the original query, and the same is true for other popular sites including Facebook, Amazon, and LinkedIn. But Google is not alone in providing its users with a richer world of related possibilities—other companies such as Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft are doing the same. By allowing these companies increased access to your personal behavior and information through GPS data, e-mail, contacts, and calendars, the information they deliver to you will become richer and more precise.
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