The Planetary Super-Surface of San Bernardino County

A surprisingly interesting business article in the Los Angeles Times this past weekend pointed out that an "industrial real estate boom" is underway east of the city: "Nestled on the windy plains at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains," we read, "once austere stretches of agricultural land have morphed into the country's most desirable industrial real estate market, and it is growing faster than any other industrial region in the U.S."

[Image: Construction work at a future Amazon.com warehouse in San Bernardino, courtesy of NBC Southern California].

What's at stake? Eager buyers are snapping up "vast warehouses—some are bigger than 30 football fields under one roof—where they can store, process and ship merchandise such as clothes, books and toys to ever more online shoppers and handle the rising flood of goods passing through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach."

It's a logistics rush "so intense" that "developers are erecting more than 16 million square feet of warehouses on speculation, meaning they are gambling that buyers or renters will rush forward to claim the buildings by the time they are complete."

As it happens, though, huge volumes of empty space framed by walls and ceilings are something of the ultimate testing ground for robot intelligence: "Once upon a time, a warehouse was where you stored things for weeks or months, such as toys and canned food that retailers would grab to restock their shelves. Sorting, organizing and moving the inventory was a constant challenge."

However, now, in this age of empty architectural airspace, "Tracking goods in the modern age of bar codes, scanners and computers is a comparative breeze. The location of every widget can be identified with pinpoint accuracy and fetched by robots that can lift and carry 3,000-pound loads with ease."

[Image: An unrelated warehouse photo from CCI Flooring].

I'm reminded of something novelist Zachary Mason said in an interview with BLDGBLOG three years ago. Mason, who has also worked in the field of artificial intelligence, pointed out the spatial problems faced by any truly emergent A.I.:
One of the problems with A.I. is that interacting with the world is really tough. Both sensing the world and manipulating it via robotics are very hard problems, and solved only for highly stripped-down special cases. Unmanned aerial vehicles, for instance, work well, because maneuvering in a big, empty, three-dimensional void is easy—your GPS tells you exactly where you are, and there's nothing to bump into except the odd migratory bird. Walking across across a desert, though, or, heaven help us, negotiating one's way through a room full of furniture in changing lighting conditions, is vastly more difficult.
The prospect of Artificial Intelligence finding its way into the world not by way of unmanned aerial vehicles flying in Mason's "big, empty, three-dimensional void" but, instead, in the vast and echoing elsewhere of speculative warehouse space built in the desert outside Los Angeles is an incredible, and even somewhat frightening, thing to contemplate.

However, I started this post actually hoping to point out one small thing mentioned merely in passing at the end of the L.A. Times article.

One of these warehouses, it turns out, is actually so huge it must be laser-leveled against the curvature of the earth.

[Image: A laser-leveling target used for calibrating car scales, taken by someone named "Butt Dyno," via an evolutionm.net forum].

The building in question "has 32-foot ceilings and enough doors to load or unload 124 trucks at the same time," presenting insane combinatorial possibilities that would make the bridges of Königsberg blush; but, even more unbelievably, this "480,000-square-foot facility recently built for Quaker Oats Co. on land that used to be part of Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino... is so long at 1,000 feet that contractors laying the concrete floor used lasers to gently follow the curve of the Earth and keep the floor level."

Of course, this means that you could also work in reverse, and thus deduce, from the precise leveling of the warehouse floor, the curvature of the planet it rests on, which, bizarrely enough, makes studying this building—an empty warehouse in the California desert—an unexpected subset of astronomical calculation.

Last week, for instance, we looked at various "benchmarks" that have been used for measuring the circumference of the Earth, but perhaps future generations will simply drive out to a cluster of warehouses somewhere on the fringes of Los Angeles—next century's Stonehenge, a new Solomon's Temple, or Superstudio meets Eratosthenes—ritually laser-level the floor on a hot summer afternoon, and thus deduce the limits of our world itself, all by way of the most "fundamental" of architectural interventions: the floor.



The logistical super-surface as planetary analogue.

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Blogger timquinn said...

I am imagining an aside made by a contractor to a young and eager reporter taken too literally.

April 16, 2013 12:05 PM  
Blogger timquinn said...

I am also imagining that conditions for these robots will be better than for their human counterparts simply because some engineer can state their needs quantitatively and back it up with science. Humans are lazy, robots are limited by design.

April 16, 2013 12:09 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, that's one interesting thing about this warehouse construction boom, then.

April 16, 2013 7:09 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It would be better if these warehouses were in the desert. Instead, they're between suburbia and and America's brokest city, in this case between three cities at the core of an urban area at least four million strong. Moreover, the transportation infrastructure they're using is even worse than if they had just continued to store this crap at the port of LA/LB.

Essentially, one crumbling bottleneck highway to the north, one century-old overburdened railroad to the north, and one highway to the desert. To the west, LA.

April 17, 2013 3:11 PM  
Blogger Anthony said...

Anonymous - the Port of LA/Long Beach, the railroads in LA, and various other agencies, are spending billions of dollars to improve transportation links from the Port to the high desert where there's room to store and distribute all the goods which get shipped into the U.S. via the Port.

June 09, 2013 2:01 PM  

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