Dilettante

With all the AI voice assistants around today there are lots of interesting applications people are dreaming up. Here’s another one.

You could set your voice assistant on the table and start having a discussion or debate that inevitably involves bringing up facts about news or history or how something works. A lot of times when someone doubts what was said a phone will come out to do some fast wikipediaing or other searching. If a AI could somehow either know or be triggered to check something, that’d be an interesting new dynamic to the conversation. It could do things like:

• Correct misquotes and other slight error in the discussion, e.g. “Actually, the NOAA temperature data were corrected in 1950 because the volunteer network switched from morning readings to afternoon readings.”
• Fill in details about a headline someone read (person: “Didn’t I read a headline about radiation dose in beagles?”, AI: “The recent UC Davis study shows a correlation between dose rate and lifespan.”)
• Look up details and say them when they’d help

It’d have to be a really smart AI to know when its utterances would be useful in a dynamic conversation. It could start by just lighting up when it thinks it has something to contribute and people could allow it to chime in, rather than having it chime in only when someone wakes it. Then eventually once it’s smart enough it could chime in on its own. The future is fun.

You know how some airplanes can get their gas filled up while in the air by tankers (aerial refueling)? And how ships at sea do this too (underway replenishment)? And you know how self-driving cars and trucks are taking over everything soon? Well there’s going to be a need for mobile gas stations on the road.

Think of it! Long-haul trucking will want to go non-stop, and to do so there can be little sections of road where a tanker truck drives alongside the main truck, hooks up a hose, and refuels it for 10 minutes while everyone’s moving. Then the self-driving truck carries on and the tanker truck crosses the road, services a truck going in the other direction, and repeats until it eventually has to fill up from a bigger tank nearby.

Another manifestation is a thing on a long rail that refuels you as you drive alongside it. The hose could be on a sliding coupler that maintains a hermetic seal.

This could happen with passenger vehicles too. Presumably people will hop in their cars at night and expect to wake up in Florida the next day so they’re going to need automated gas refilling as well. Ideally this would be underway but I guess if gas stations could just fill up cars that roll in that’d be acceptable too. It will be more comfortable and less disturbing if this happens while on the road though.

That’ll be a billion dollar industry soon. If they’re electric cars, these will be charging stations instead of refueling stations.