HELLO FUTURE: Santa by Drone? Will Rudolph get replaced by AI? — The Future of Holiday Delivery

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Nowadays, I feel like Santa and the Elves are gonna
be leveraging Santa by drone. Is Rudolph gonna get replaced
by AI? This is the future of holiday delivery. Hello Future,
It's me Kevin. This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier.
The planet is Earth. The year is twenty twenty five,
and today I'm talking about drone drops to AI optimize logistics.
And I'm talking with the go to expert who Popular
Science Magazine said that he reroutes the world. He's done
logistics for everyone from DHARPA to the United States military.
Who knows, maybe even the big guy himself. His name
is the University of Southern California's professor John Carlson. So
I would imagine that every fourth quarter, all of the
holiday time of the year, there's a lot of people
who are online shopping and it gets backed up. I
think the logistics and apartment buildings that I've lived at
in the past. I mean, it's like talk about a bottleneck.
There's so many boxes, people are stealing them, people are
it's crazy, and it feels like it came out of
nowhere in the last decade. So how are you thinking
of this? Giant demand for holiday packaging every single year.
And what is really the mystery behind the mystique.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Well, it's really all about economies of scale. So the
thing that is really interesting about logistics is you have
this expression that if you want something done, quickly, find
a busy person right because they'll they'll wedget in there.
And logistics is a great example of that because if
I'm driving a van all over town already making lots
of stomps, adding one extra stop in there introduces a
much smaller additional cost. And so what happens is that
as these economies of scale start to be realized, you say, oh,
I can make twice as many deliveries in less than
twice the amount of time because of my smart route
configuration for where my vans are going, or the kinds
of vehicles that I'm using to transport things, if it's
drones or robots or self driving cars, anything like that.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
And so the math.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Works out in a way that as you do more things,
as you have more deliveries requested, the more efficient things
can get and the more likely you are to be
able to roll that dice where you get the same
day delivery on Amazon that we're all happy when that
pops up.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
When you get lucky that way.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
For sure, And it does kind of feel like a
luck of the draw situation. And also, I totally just
want to bold underline highlight what you said. If you
want something done, hire a busy person, but you got
to pay them the same price that you pay the
people who are not busy, but who take a lot slower. Okay,
and that's all I'm going to say about that, Professor Carlson,
But I will ask you this question. Back in the pandemic,
I ordered a couch. Okay, I love my couch. It's
a great couch, one of the best couch, probably the
best couch I've ever had. It's a leather couch. But
my leather couch. I'm watching the delivery date and it's
saying it will be delivered in three to five business days,
and then it became it will be delivered in fourteen
business days, and then it became it will be delivered
in twenty one business days. And this fool, I'm the
full sold my other couch because I thought it was
three to five business days. Next thing I know, for
three months in the pandemic, I was couchless, okay, And
I was sitting in my rear end watching TV on
the floor. It was because of the bottlenecks in some
port somewhere that I didn't have my couch. My point
is what happened.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Yes, So during the pandemic you saw all kinds of
disruptions because you can't get all the people showing up
to the ports on time.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
You can't have everyone coming in.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Generally speaking, what you were experiencing, I would say, is
what you call in supply chains the bullwhip effec It's.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
A whip, the bullwhip effect, the.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Bull whip effect, Yes, because if I have a bowl whip,
how does that work. I hold a whip in my
hand and I flick my wrist a little bit, and
then that makes this wave that shoots out and it
gets bigger and bigger, and then the end of the
whip makes a little tiny sonic boom because it's moving
so fast.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
That's what that crack of the whip is.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
In supply chains, we have that as kind of an
umbrella term to talk about how a little fluctuation somewhere
in that stream of the supply chain from when it's
getting manufactured, when it's getting distributed. Whatever it is, it
has this like ripple effect that causes things to get
worse and.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
Worse and worse.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
Because maybe there was just let's say a single day's
delay somewhere higher up in that chain. Then maybe a
barge that only comes, you know, once a week or
something like that. Then you say, oh, that one day
delay way upstream now propagates to you know, a week
delay somewhere else, which further compounds things because it has
to get placed on some other sort of vessel that
may or may not be overloaded with capacity. So little,
tiny imperfections high up in the supply chain can have
these significant ramifications downstream. And that's probably what you were
the victim of in that case.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
Okay, so flash forward every December when billions of people
all over the world are trying to including Santa Claus,
are trying to get their holiday gifts. How has the
planet been able to handle this traumatic, radical transformational I
always say we're at the start of the Second Industrial
Revolution shift in supply chains. So put it in perspective
and just how fast this shift occurred and companies like
Amazon and other companies had to really adopt to.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
This absolutely actually one anecdote that's it's showing my age
a bit. But it's worth pointing out that there were
attempts to do things like same grocery delivery in the
late nineteen nineties. There were a company, there were two
that I can remember, called Peepod and Webvan that are
sort of held up as early examples of since nineteen
nineties dot com boom that failed. They weren't there, or
they weren't able to succeed because of a lack of volume,
because there weren't enough people using their computers for this
purpose in the late nineteen nineties. Not surprisingly, nowadays everyone's
got a smartphone. The software works so well that anyone can,
you know, pick up a DoorDash Instacart app and learn
how to use it, so you're able to get that
volume in that critical mass of customers who are willing
to use this. But okay, having said that, let's step back.

Speaker 3 (06:41):
From the early days of sort of delivery.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
You had to plan things well in advance because communication
was a big bottleneck. Right. If it was the nineteen
fifties and I wanted to order something from the Sears catalog,
you would, you know, fill out a form and the
mailman would bring it over and then Sears would be
to plan for this and send it to me. So
there was a lot of latency, just expected naturally. Free
market competition being what it is, everyone wants to get
a leg up, and so as soon as the Internet
came around in the nineties and became mainstream, there were
all kinds of attempts to capitalize on that and to say, well, look,
I can take orders from people much more quickly, I
can get that volume up. I'm going to invest everything
I can into every little trick I can exploit to
try to get things to their doorstep as quickly as possible.
So some of that means hardware innovations, it means things
like drones and delivery robots.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
That's part of the equation.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
I would say That's more significant, however, is the kind
of algorithms that have been developed over the years for
optimizing these sorts of plans. My favorite example of this
is something that Amazon and I think JD dot Com
over in China both use. First of all, there's a
ton of automation inside a warehouse, right inside a fulfillment
center where they have all of their cool toys and stuff,
all of the things people are ordering that are sitting
on these shelves. There's a lot of automation there. There's
a company called Kiva that has these robots that move
around on the ground and do a lot of the
picking up of these items and so forth. Now, something
that they do in these warehouses that you couldn't possibly
have done until recently is what's called random stow or chaotic.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
Stow, chaotic stove.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
Exactly what the heck is Conotic stow.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yes, chaotic stough is a practice inside a warehouse where
when you get a new shipment of things coming in,
you just throw them on the shelves randomly. That doesn't
make any sense, right, because in a grocery store you say,
I have my vegetables over here and I have my
dairy over here. Turns out that if you have smart
robots that know where everything is, you can actually show
that it's actually really efficient to scatter things that way.
You say, don't take all the Samson Galaxy twenty five's
and them in the same corner, No, like, throw them
all over the shelves.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
I just had to meet the future moment because what
you just put in my mind is if you spend
too much time being a perfectionist. If you spend too
much time obsessing that every little thing goes in the
right thing, you miss out on being able to get
the gifts to the north pole in an efficient way.
It's chaotic Stoe, John, John, you just taught me chaotic Stoe,
And good lord, I wish that I had that as
ammunition for when I was a teenager.

Speaker 3 (09:35):
Keep going exactly.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
And so that kind of principle is just one of
many that are being adopted within supply chains as sort
of clever algorithms that you can use independent of the
physical technology, whether it's a robot or a self driving
truck or whatever it is, or a drone. But you say, well, look,
technology is able to keep track of all these things
in my fulfillment center, in my warehouse, and so I
can exploit that, and I can use these kinds of
techniques that are totally not appropriate for human intelligence at all,
but are very well suited for machine intelligence.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Another one I would throw out.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
Their innovations along this line would be the scale at
which you can optimize a giant supply chain is sort
of unprecedented. I mean, if I'm Amazon and I'm trying
to figure out, Okay, how do I get these millions
of packages out to people's doorsteps. Right These orders are
being placed so rapidly that you need an extremely fast
algorithm or system to figure out which things are going
to go where, and the technology is barely keeping up
with the kind of demand that you see. In order
to say, Okay, yes, within thirty minutes, I can get
the plan out to my trucks and get these goods
delivered on time.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
Every kid that's listening, don't clean your room tonight. Don't
clean your room. You tell your parents that it is
efficient for you to be disorganized. It is efficient for
you not to put the groceries away. It is efficient
for you not to organize your pantry. Because your human
brain is better than AI and AI. It's not replacing that. Friends,
you got one leg up on the robots because of
what our good new friend, Professor John Gunner Carlson of
the University of Southern California, he's advised, I don't know DARPA,
the military Toyota Popular Science magazine says that he's one
of the folks. He's making our supply chains run smoother,
and it's because of Chaotics, though having great tomorrow today
Thanks Sean,