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've often wondered where the point is where vacuum-tube delivery to individual apartment buildings becomes cheaper?<p>If the "last mile" 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'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's just hard for me to imagine that over a decade, it wouldn'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.