The pandemic is bringing us closer to our robot takeout future
Given just how much our lives in urban areas depend on package and prepared food delivery and grocery delivery, I&#x27;ve often wondered where the point is where vacuum-tube delivery to individual apartment buildings becomes cheaper?<p>If the &quot;last mile&quot; of all deliveries for all items under, say, 1.5 feet in diameter, were handled via computer-controlled canister. (Or these days, if it weren&#x27;t even by vacuum, but just electric motors buzzing down tubes.) Where your hot dinner arrives in 5 minutes rather than 25, and your Amazon Prime purchase shows up from the warehouse in 20 minutes rather than next-day.<p>For places like Manhattan, it&#x27;s just hard for me to imagine that over a decade, it wouldn&#x27;t be cheaper to build and use a system like that, than to maintain our current army of tens of thousands of delivery people across restaurants, UPS, Amazon, USPS, etc.