Near the end of last year (2015) I said that I would make some predictions for the future. Well I am taking a breather from learning to code to start fulfilling my obligation to you the reader.
This section is to propose things that I believe are reasonably possible over the next 50 years, in many cases sooner (assuming consumer demand).
Our first prediction will be the most obvious, the majority of single family homes will be net producers of electrical energy for the world's power grids. In most cases their ability to benefit the grid will stem from roof-top solar and a collection of batteries (honestly if this isn't the case for the American SouthWest in 15 years, I am going to be upset.) While solar and batteries are an excellent start they should not be the full picture, our current means of handling waste food and waste water are incredibly, wait for it, wasteful. There are any number of statistics on the net food value thrown in the trash by average American households in a given year. Ideally out understanding of technologies like bio-reactors, will allow households to convert their biodegradable waste into intelligently composted soil and a certain amount of methane that can be used to supply power from either a fuel cell or a more traditional combustion power plants. In cooler regions where wood burning stoves are more common, the waste heat from the chimney combined with the cold air outside, might be used for generating power via a thermo-electric generator.
The idea of a home scale bio reactor has the potential to drastically increase the overall resilience of communities, waste water could be treated by the bio reactor system, turning black water into grey water, suitable for the water used in toilets and watering the lawn. In theory, we could create home scale water recycling systems that could take water containing human waste and make it pure enough to comfortably drink, convincing people to drink something that was poo less than a week ago, much harder to do. The phrase "home bio-reactor" would most likely represent a multitude of complimentary elements, the sum total of these parts could treat impure water, grow bio-fuels, as well as algal food stocks that could support local and/or regional animal food production.
(A theme I feel I keep going back to in this post, is embracing multiple uses, and ideally the potential for small scale income from one's property. I hope you are inspired to have some different thoughts)
Continuing the theme of making something that can be consumed on the local level. Robotic farming has the potential to turn your back yard into an incredibly bountiful source of fruits and vegetables. Even in the next 50 years robot farmers are unlikely to be cheap enough so that every home would actually own an individual farmbot. I find it more likely that robots would be owned by a 3rd party, rented out hourly, or in the case of poorer regions of world, it might be something akin to rooftop solar, where an outside party gets permission from the land owner to farm a certain area, in exchange they have access to the future equivalent of our current farm shares. (the above paragraph was inspired by this post)
One cool trend that I would like to see more of is the idea of using the waste heat from servers to keep homes and schools warm. As fiber-optic lines to the home become more common it will become easier to implement even more impressive distributed services. It is possible to imagine that homes would have designated spaces in the basement, garage, what have you... where the homeowner can rent out space for distributed services. They might be server racks (or their future equivalents), large scale batteries for storing surplus grid energy (beyond what the home needs), rapid prototyping capacity, inventory storage, the possibilities are tremendous. The intent of these distributed nodes is to take advantage of our ability to handle a more complicated world. Ideally we would need fewer designated server farms, grid scale battery facilities, resource recycling ... who knows what single use buildings we can get rid of.
Clutter has the potential to take disappear (or at least get more manageable), smart warehouses are already revolutionizing how companies like Amazon manage their inventory, over the next 50 years smarter technologies will make it possible to do away with junk drawers and chaotic attics. Robotic platforms with the ability to learn what an object is and what the object is used for. Now your seasonal decorations can be comfortably boxed up, and when you need your holiday display, the home will queue up your inventory at your convenience. Knick knacks can be sorted and stored as time goes on if you don't look for a given knick knack the system can ask you, "Hey do you want to keep this item or should I try to donate or sell it?" Items in storage could also be added to a community searchable database, have a bike that you don't use very often? your house is going to help you get some kind of benefit off that bike.
Hopefully our culture will come to better grips with the importance of battling climate change, and the design of homes will be more sustainable, beyond solar power and passive design. Making homes from more sustainable resources, be it bamboo, wood, compacted dirt, or any number of other approaches.
The small house movement will certainly ebb and flow over the next several decades, during the next 20 years small communities of retirees living in tiny houses with a number of communal resources will become popular, how long it stays that way is another story entirely. Urban living is the most likely to benefit from the de-cluttering technology, smart apartment complexes will minimize the amount of space devoted to storage, as well as reduce the number of redundant, but underused, items in a home, example, dishwashers, most of the time, you need to use your dishwasher once every 1 to 2 days, in a smart apartment building you could drop off your dishes into a series of trays, a robot is summoned to pick up the dishes, and a few hours later clean dishes are returned to you. You have that extra space in the apartment, the building has a selling point, and the environment benefits from the most efficient dishwasher possible being used. Laundry services might also take a similar vein, but it will take longer for the system to be smart enough to properly sort things.
Ok I am going to take a pause from this post, any thoughts or ideas are welcome.
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