Michael's Metaverse for Dummies
(Updated November 2022)
First, let me start by saying today the ideas of "metaverse" and "Web3" have been conflated to mean just about anything. PE and the like are pushing a bunch of ideas that drive this market size to stratospheric scale. That's not my bandwagon, and it's really disappointing to see credible VCs launch "metaverse podcasts" just to host mostly philosophical discussions by wealthy founders with expensive websites for companies that don't really do anything.
Innovation requires a velocity, in other words there must be a clear direction and force driving it in that direction. For me, the direction for metaverse is clear and can be summed up into one word:
Presence.
Without presence, there is no difference between a metaverse use case and any number of things that have come before. Just because a service has a UGC business model, looks like a version of The Sims and is hosted on a blockchain, doesn't make it part of the metaverse.
Services like Fornite, Roblox, and Minecraft could arguably be placed on an evolution of the metaverse because "Presence 1.0" could be summarized to mean a service that includes a personal, customizable identity in the form of an Avatar. However, the metaverse has always been more immersive than that.
A true metaverse experience should be built with presence in mind. The most immersive, presence-providing technology today is Virtual Reality. However, Augmented Reality is coming and will also makes its mark on the metaverse. One day, probably (for real, and finally!) when 6G rolls around. Other interesting use cases are emerging already as well, like remote piloting drones.
My value chain therefore focuses on technologies that enable presence. They are, from top-to-bottom:
1) The Use Case - Borrowing from definitions of "spatial web" and older mental models for "metaverse" they must include a Virtual World, Avatars, and NPC (which can be any kind of agent, including plants or animals. A use case could, using this definition, include a Web or Mobile use case like World of Warcraft, or even Quake for that matter. However, there must be a guideline -- for which one day some persons savvier than me shall, I pray, create protocols to allow for cross-integration like a "metaverse middleware" -- that includes the Mechanics, Aesthetics, and Dynamics of the use case. While they could be anything, again I stress that anything without presence (even Presence 1.0 aka just an open world game (or even a gameless world in theory but... boring!) wouldn't really be metaverse material.
I would break down what I consider valid categories of metaverse use cases to be:
Virtual Reality (VR) - bring my consciousness to a virtual environment;
Augmented Reality (AR) - bring a virtual environment to my consciousness;
or, Advanced Peripherals (AP) - bring my consciousness to a real world with a virtual body.
2) Interfaces - These enable an end user to Access the metaverse. Today, devices like notebook computers and especially smart phones are ubiquitous. However, HMDs like Quest 2 are proving that the time for Virtual Reality has arrived. The adoption curve is working in favor of new Virtual Reality headgear, we will start to see them taking marketshare from consoles, notebook computers, and tablets in the coming years. Some credible sources predict that by 2027-2030 (thereabout) we'll start to see smartphone-like scale in the 1-2B device range. This will depend on the use cases that emerge for the devices in the meantime, it's a bold prediction but I wouldn't bet against it.
The three types of interfaces that exist today and correlate to the categories I use for use cases are:
Head Mounted Displays (VR), people wear them to experience VR;
Augmented Reality Glasses (AR), people wear them to experience AR;
and, Drones (AP); people use them in combination with an HMD to pilot in first-person.
3) IoT - Another victim of overly-hyped PR fueled arguably by too much liquidity, IoT is actually alive and well. You just don't hear about it anymore. In fact, some would argue the most exciting thing about 5G, and why you could consider it a transitionary technology, is the LTE capacity it frees up for Narrowband IoT and CAT-M1 mobile use cases (less data, more data respectively). The meta data that is enabled for use by IoT is enabling the "meta"verse. Much of the sensory information used in VR or AR today is on the local hardware, but more will be moved to the edge and those edge data sets will be move to the metaverse as well. IoT will enable RT modifications to virtual environments and provide allow for accurate depictions of real world places virtually.
4) Blockchain - So much hype around blockchain, what to believe? The fact remains that it is a great technology for attribution, and no other system for attribution allows for so much flexibility and resilience. We are still at the nascent phase of this technology, but the ability to interact in a hyper-realistic way while using VR, AR, or AP will require new ways to verify identity, ownership, and potentially enable entire worlds to "fork" from a primary platform on a foundational blockchain like Etherium to generate its own economy while borrowing from the rules and protocols of the main blockchain.
5) Multi-access Edge Computing or MEC - This darling of the telecom industry has been around for probably twenty years, and it's finally seeing daylight with the advent of 5G. If you had to pick one technology that if you removed from 5G the whole telecom community would be yelling "jenga" it would be probably be MEC. This moves some of compute from the core network closer to the end user which makes for the low-latency so hailed by the industry. Today the technology is solid, but the search for a use case that is truly mobile and economical has still turned up no major victors. Most experts see presence-drive use cases for the metaverse as the likely candidate. Who pays, and how, is still anybody's guess.
6) The Cloud i.e. Data Centers - Believe it or not, the cloud isn't mature at all. It's growing fast, and the data center race is on especially as companies eye the metaverse - again, meaning presence-driven use cases like VR, AR or AP - as a rapidly approaching reality. Virtual Reality is the fastest growing form of digital media, and as soon as AR is mature you can rest assure every telecom will dump billions into adoption of those use cases. Metaverse will boost traffic on high-throughput / low-latency networks like none other. Cloud technologies, working in coordination with MEC (which is a derivative of cloud) will move that content off the end user device making them lighter and far more portable.
7) Connectivity - I know, everyone hates the their mobile carrier. They're boring utilities that barely deserve the right to be called "Tech", right? Wrong, so so so wrong. I would encourage people unacquainted with how Youtube gets from the cloud to their smartphone to take a few hours to dive into what makes these technologies so amazing. Telecom is pretty amazing, period. Everyone thinks rocket sciences is amazing. Everyone thinks the Pyramids of Giza are amazing. Well, telecom is way more amazing in my opinion.
Finding a way to divvy-up incomprehensibly small wave-lengths moving at unfathomable speeds then somehow send a Netflix movie over-the-air, through the ground and under the ocean -- or via outer-space -- back through the air to find it's intended target... you. Anyway, no-one would argue it's important. Maybe just take a moment to appreciate it more.
8) A.I. - Another victim of the hypecycle, AI is advancing rapidly. The point of AI is to optimize things, not find new business models necessarily (although that happens too) but to make existing things work a lot better. Think about electricity, it didn't make the industrial revolution happen, coal did. But it made factories exponentially more efficient at making goods once we found the best way to optimize production using it. Same thing with AI.
For the meteverse it's tempting to jump to the alluring General AI, and sure that is pretty cool and fun to imagine. But the applications of AI to the metaverse are happening all the time already, just good old fashion AI. For example, the physics in a virtual world, or rendering in real-time while predicting where the eye will be focusing in the next oh, 2 milliseconds. Generative Adversarial Networks are also really fascinating, as they could hold the key to creating data for building models for worlds we imagine rather than relying on collecting training data from real world sources. They are also the technology used for things like AI's writing essays or music, and paintings about cats and other things.
In conclusion...
The convergence of these technologies is what has gotten me excited about the metaverse since, well at least since before it was the latest tech trend or buzz word. This value chain of converging technologies will generate an enormous amount of creativity in the coming decade. Even by 2025, five years from when Epic founder Tim Sweeney announced he was earmarking more than $1B to build a "metaverse" -- the moment which first initiated this new buzz around an old idea -- if you take a moment to reflect on how much has changed between that future date and 2020, it will be much like looking back at 2005 from 2010. Take a guess when Netlix started streaming movies? (Answer: 2007)
Michael's Metaverse for Dummies by Michael A. Lesniak is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at /www.malesniak.com//2020/09/blog-post.html.
Securing Mobility
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| SKT at MWC2019 |
Last year SK telecom announced our True Innovation program (www.true-inno.com) at MWC. True Innovation was founded to make collaborations with SK telecom fast and effective, whether you are a large technology-driven company or an innovative startup. In our first year, we had several successful collaborations in Korea and with global partners.
But more about True Innovation's inaugural year accolades later, having just returned from MWC '19 I wanted to share one of those collaborations in particular: our V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) Secure Central Gateway. As one of the founding members of True Innovation, I was personally inspired by the overwhelming interest this collaboration received from some of the world's leading auto manufacturers, mobility service operators, and tier-one suppliers. Based on the feedback from several industry insiders, it's fair to claim the V2X Secure Central Gateway is several years ahead of the competition.
The collaboration combines the innovative prowess of two of Korea's high-profile startups Gint and FESCARO, as well as SK telecom's subsidiary ID Quantique. In addition to representing a technological breakthrough for mobility, the collaboration is a symbolic culmination of the past 12 months as both Gint and FESCARO came through SparkLabs, True Innovation's strategic launch partner and Korea's No. 1 Accelerator; while SK telecom also announced the acquisition of IDQ at MWC last year.
The V2X Gateway ensures the safety of passengers by monitoring in-vehicle networks (called CAN buses) in real-time and without omissions for abnormalities. If any unusual activity is detected, this is immediately sent to the cloud where it is analyzed along with information from every other vehicle in the fleet to determine if it is a security threat, and to determine an appropriate course of action. The gateway encrypts both the in-vehicle networks as well as end-to-end communication between the gateway and the cloud, enabling features such as initiating emergency calls, or secure OTA (over-the-air) updates.
Bluetooth Mesh Networks for Retail
Disclosure: I currently work for SK planet, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SK telecom, one of the companies which sets Bluetooth standards.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) confirmed the introduction of new standards to support mesh networking via bluetooth. There were a few startups like Ubudu and Zuli.io that didn’t wait for the standards and these innovators are the first-movers in creating futuristic customer experiences with bluetooth mesh networks. Now that the standards are out, and it’s a watershed moment for IoT.
Bluetooth Beacon Mesh Networks
A mesh network could hypothetically extend the range to whatever distance you need. When a beacon is stand-alone it can advertise itself up to a few meters. Even with two-way communication (transmitting or receiving small packets) the potential utility of the beacon is limited to hyper-localised use cases. For example, while near a beacon in a store the client can request specific information about that location from the server; or, perhaps I could use my phone to turn on/off a lamp while near that lamp.
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| Bluetooth Smart Mesh Network |
A mesh network allows me to extend the range by linking the beacons together. It accomplishes this in two ways: 1) by routing directly to a beacon somewhere in the network to enable a specific experience (e.g. turn-off the kitchen lights downstairs); or, 2) by flooding the entire network or a subset within the network to create an experience using multiple beacons (e.g. set living-room to mom’s profile). Using a mesh network subsets can also be created allowing for unique experiences for connected devices within a specified subset of the network.
Futuristic Consumer Experiences
Smarthomes have been all the rage for a couple years now, and the new standards for mesh networks will accelerate that. However, there are some exciting opportunities for retail consumer experiences as well. Here are a few ideas for implementing bluetooth mesh networks for in-store experiences.
Custom Subsets or “Rooms”
Custom subsets are probably the most well known IoT use case that leverages a mesh network of beacons. This is the oft given example of Smart Homes: dad walks into the living room, the lights dim and TV switches to Bloomberg News. The living room is a subset within the network, and the settings of all devices within that subset can be adjusted to fit the preference of a user. Additionally, a hierarchy of users can be created (i.e. Dad overrides son) and those settings can be engaged simply by walking into a room.
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| Experiences Adapt To You From Room To Room |
In retail, you can easily imagine this being used to create unique experiences at furniture, luxury audio and video showrooms. The question remains, how is this triggered? An end-user with a smartphone application is the answer most of the time today. Whether or not the use is a customer or salesperson is another question. On the one hand, the lure of customising your own experience while in a showroom could tempt customers to download your software, it may be more efficient to create software for clienteling.
Shopping Efficiency
How much time have customers wasted trying to find products within large department stores, shops within large shopping malls, or the toilet? Networked signage could be used to assist customers and make their journey more efficient. A customer could select the target destination within an app on their smartphone or on a digital sign. As he travels through the store or mall, visual cues can be triggered to guide the customer on his journey.
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| Signage Alerts When You Arrive |
These cues can be in-app via notifications (“you’re going the wrong way”) or via digital signage (“Customer XYZ here is your destination”). In this use case, a mix of proximity technology like geomagnetics or wi-fi would be the best way to guide customers. However, incorporating visual cues will reassure customers and probably create new opportunities to surprise and delight them.
Personalised Signage & Electronic Labels
Networked Signage and Electronic Labels are another opportunity for retailers and customers. A label which displays a price with e-ink can dynamically display discounted prices to customers subscribed to loyalty programs or with a digital coupon. In fact the packet-size of data needed to display a price is small enough it should be possible without the internet. A networked electronic labels could dynamically generate prices for a section of a shelf, so customer can compare discounts on multiple brands.
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| Dynamic Prices On Electronic Labels |
More dramatically, personalised media could be presented to customers at any digital sign. Digital Signage connected to a mesh network could request content from the cloud via the network.
Dynamically Adjust to Audience
With enough connected signage and labels, retailers could abstract further to create experiences for audience types. For example, customers of a given profile at a given time of day within a given store could tend to coalesce within a certain subset of a mesh network. At the same time another group of customers of a given profile could coalesce within another subset. This would allow for digital experiences within either subset to be tailored for those audiences.
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| Flooding Subsets To Adapt For Audience Profiles (Green vs Orange) |
In Conclusion
Without a doubt the experiences retailers can create leveraging bluetooth mesh networks will be essential to the success of their mobile software. A few technology startups like Ubudu and Zuli, as well as large companies (SK telecom among them) are already moving to make bluetooth mesh beacons a commodity. Digital Signage will be the obvious choice for retail, but the real question will be what unimaginable use cases will creative marketers invent for mesh beacons? I’m not simply referring to engaging content on a screen, but beyond that what new devices will we connect and how will they create more value and efficiency?
Will We Live Forever?
The future is bleak or brilliant depending on who you ask. Whether you consider the displacement of hundreds of millions of people due to rising sea levels, or droughts so severe they force us to abandon entire cities, or food shortages, or the extinction of bees. The list of dystopian outcomes to our collective failure to resolve the most important challenges facing our species is long and intimidating.
Providing a contrary view, futurists like Ray Kurzweil, pioneering entrepreneurs like Peter Diamandis, or visionary researchers like Aubrey De Grey, and ordinary folks like yours truly believe we have a lot to look forward to. Enough to want to live forever, or at least a really long time.
Is this possible? Is it just a dream deferred from a pioneering generation of western yogis and siddhas and vegans? A misplaced optimism instilled in the children of baby boomers throughout western civilization? Can we really live forever?
All Cataclysms Held Constant A Doomsday Lurks
If we hadn’t brought the environment to the brink; if we hadn’t rationalised the deployment of nuclear weapons; if we hadn’t socialised (in the USA that’s subsidize) industries that undermine natural alternatives to chemicals, plastics, coal, oil, etc; if we had been a perfect inhabitant of Earth… we would still be doomed.
Antibiotics have saved lives, tens-of-millions of lives. Penicillin alone is attributed with saving more than 200 million lives. Microbial diseases which plagued families, killing or disabling untold millions of children, have been… well, cured. Today we hardly think of pneumonia or meningitis as life-threatening, and most diseases mean a day-off from work for additional bed rest, tea, and a regimen of antibiotic medicines.
But those days are numbered, the bugs are evolving. As early as 2005 researchers estimated 4% of hospital deaths were caused by antibiotic resistant disease. 25,000 people died a couple of years ago in Europe due to antibiotic resistance strains of disease causing bacteria. More than 10 million people could die each year due to antibiotic resistant disease according to some estimates. Pneumonia, Gonorrhea, Tuberculosis have the potential to be resurgent killers to name a few. In addition to disease, common life-saving procedures become impossible (or life-threatening) when antibiotics fail such as transplant surgery, a burst appendix.
Are we really on the verge of losing our gains in extending life and greatly improving its quality? If we are entering a post-antibiotic era than it seems likely.
Dirt And "Bones"
Doomsday scenarios are both relevant and critical to mobilising people to innovate new ways to cure disease and extend life, and they are successful at doing just that. There is hope, in dirt and "Bones."
First, dirt. More than 10 billion bacteria and fungi live in a single gram of soil. Penicillin comes from one of these, as well as “many other well-known antibiotics.” The challenges has been how to discover new antibiotics from this abundance of microbial life. In fact all the medical achievements of antibiotics have come from just 1% soil bacteria. 99% remains to be explored, and if that is any indication of future discoveries (fingers-crossed) we should be able to combat antibiotic resistance for hundreds of years. Imagine 100 years of drugs without resistance for each 1% of soil we explore… doomsday seems really far away.
A new technology called iChip promises to deliver hundreds if not thousands of new antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, anti-virals, anti-cancer agents, and immunosuppressives. This simple innovation has inspired “citizen scientists” to submit dirt samples from around the United States, soon the world. Combinatory innovation at its finest, a simple new device for sampling dirt combined with unprecedented connectivity to crowdsource new soil samples, thereby exponentially accelerating the process of discovery. Undoubtedly we will have to reform regulatory bodies to facilitate new drugs to become commercialized more efficiently.
So we will overcome resistance, can we live forwever? Well, it is a key part to extending life. There are additional advances in other types of treatments, prevention, and procedures which will help us achieve immortality.
Diagnosis by a medical doctor are only correct 55% of the time, according to the team at Tricorder X Prize, sponsored by Qualcomm. And that’s after you wait 3 weeks to see your doctor, feeling sick and getting worse. Often we are forced to take higher doses of medications to combat diseases that have fester for weeks, and nearly half the time we are being treated for the wrong condition.
Enter “Bones,” Doctor McCoy from Star Trek. Among the new procedures on the verge of emerging from sci-fi lore to real-life are diagnostic tools that promise to make anyone with a smartphone a better diagnostician than a medical doctor. The famed character from Star Trek has inspired inventors to create the solution, a real-life tricorder that can diagnose up to 21 conditions including vital signs, allergens, TB, stroke, and more. The prize has existed for about 3 years, and today there are 10 finalists competing for $10 million. It may be unlikely that any of these companies succeed to diagnosis all 21 conditions this year, but within 5 years it is conceivable our ability to treat disease will radically change.
Will We Live Forever
Undoubtedly there are challenges ahead of us, but the rate of innovation… rather that speed at which sci-fiction is becoming reality… gives us much to be hopeful for. The next gen tricorder could even administer treatments, using programmable nanites. Not to mention regeneration to replace failing organs… but will we live forever?
Maybe, if we can effectively extend life to 95. Some researchers have found that aging effectively stops after 95 years old, and today billions of dollars are being invested to understand how. But living forever at 95 doesn’t sound appealing next to living forever at 25, so researches like Aubrey De Grey are trying to understand if it be stopped sooner. The techno-philanthropists of Silicon Valley including Larry Page, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, are all invested in efforts like the Palo Alto Longevity Prize and ventures like Calico.
In other words, it is entirely possible that a healthy person today could live significantly longer, and that the first person to live to 1000 years old has already been born. Assuming other calamities don’t end your life, the potential you will live well into your hundreds seems pretty good. Indefinite supplies of effective antibiotics and other treatments, dramatically improved diagnostics, and a host of new tech like nanotechnology, bionics, and regeneration mean that we will at least live long enough to know for certain whether or not we can turn-off aging indefinitely.
Mining Space in 2030
Technologies like nano-bots which can enter your body to repair internal organs or fight disease have captured the imagination of the masses for since the 80s. Remember Inner Space? Mining, is less attractive… it’s downright dirty work. Most of us think of blood diamonds or tragic accidents in West Virginia, and fail to realize just how amazing the future of mining will be. And just how much it will impact our world.
Mining Space in 2030
While the idea of space tourism has been around for years, leisure rides on fancy spacecraft are not what’s driving innovation in space travel: resources are. There are at least two types of resources we know of that are abundant in space. First, the kind that makes deep space exploration possible (i.e. rocket fuel); and second, rare-earth materials.
Making rocket fuel in space is a critical part of deep space exploration, or even mining. The amount of energy it takes to leave Earth is more than the amount it takes to get to moon from Earth orbit. Being able to refuel from space (building in space, say on the moon, would be a next step) would significantly reduce the cost of space travel.
Once we can produce rocket fuel in space then we won’t need to carry the fuel it takes to reach the Moon or Mars (or some mineral rich asteroids) with us on launch. Carrying less fuel, which is really heavy, would dramatically reduce the amount of fuel required to escape Earth’s gravity significantly reducing the cost of every launch. Planetary Resources, arguably the coolest space company out there (sorry SpaceX), has a great video explaining all of this:
Once we can produce rocket fuel in space then we won’t need to carry the fuel it takes to reach the Moon or Mars (or some mineral rich asteroids) with us on launch. Carrying less fuel, which is really heavy, would dramatically reduce the amount of fuel required to escape Earth’s gravity significantly reducing the cost of every launch. Planetary Resources, arguably the coolest space company out there (sorry SpaceX), has a great video explaining all of this:
Critics would argue that science and exploration are not the primary motivations for companies like Planetary Resources (nor their benefactors, among them Google). Rather, they claim they are motivated by profits alone. Perhaps, that's true (though I don't agree). Another abundant resource in space is platinum. Platinum and other rare metals found on Earth come from meteors, and we now have the ability to speculate asteroids to identify which ones are likely to contain them. It’s estimated that just one asteroid of moderate size could contain as much or more platinum than has ever been mined on Earth. Control of these resources could potentially mean a shift power from those who control terrestrial resources to those who control extraterrestrial resources.
That said, while it may be profitable to mine for platinum and other rare metals in space, the motivation for doing is not purely capitalistic. It’s an essential step forward in human civilization, and the technology required to mine space will lead to incredible innovations that benefit everyone.
Lunar Base Stations
The moon could become a critical base for long-term space operations, as well as a source of valuable resources. Turns out that while asteroids are full of platinum and water for rocket fuel, the moon is full of a unique form of helium called HE-3. In fact, this stuff is so valuable it makes sustainable lunar mining operations fueled by robotic space miners hauling in nearby asteroids sound reasonable. That’s because HE-3 is considered a key component of nuclear fusion, and while it is extremely rare on Earth --and extremely expensive at $75,000 per ounce-- it is abundant on the moon.
40 tonnes of HE-3 would power all of the United States for an entire year, without accounting for innovations between now and when it becomes available. The United States, China, and Russia all have plans to build mining operations on the moon. In fact, Russia has announced plans to have a permanent settlement on the moon by 2030 stating “we are going to the moon, forever.”
Current estimates say there is about 1,000,000 tonnes of HE-3 on the moon. There are 35,274 ounces in 1 tonne, and each ounce is worth $75,000… so that is $2,645,550,000 per tonne. So multiply that by a million. The price of HE-3 will come down once we can mine it safely and efficiently, but even even a steep reduction in price-per-ounce would leave lucrative margins.
And that's without considering the iron, gold, and other valuable stuff to be had on the moon. Taking into consideration HE-3, additional resources, and the potential value of more than 600,000 asteroids (and counting) many of which could contain more platinum than has ever been mined on Earth in history, and continuous operations on the moon to mine and refine space resources quickly becomes a priority.
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Lunar base made by 3-D printers: http://bit.ly/1Dom6hr
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Moving Forward
Technology is advancing so rapidly it’s difficult to imagine what the world will be like even 15 years from now. That said, what is currently being developed is pretty amazing. Semi-autonomous robots that swarm and work together to complete complex tasks like navigating to an asteroid, confirming it has the desired resources (i.e. water, platinum), bagging and tagging said asteroid, then hauling it back to the Moon where the minerals will be extracted, all the while harvesting the water along the way. That's amazing.
To accomplish this the robots will be at least semi-intelligent, able to improvise and avoid obstacles, and probably learn. Laser communications, Artificial Intelligence, new propulsion systems, advanced solar energy collection and storage, more advanced avionics, data science and predictive algorithms, assembly and materials, not to mention the next duct tape or tang!
To accomplish this the robots will be at least semi-intelligent, able to improvise and avoid obstacles, and probably learn. Laser communications, Artificial Intelligence, new propulsion systems, advanced solar energy collection and storage, more advanced avionics, data science and predictive algorithms, assembly and materials, not to mention the next duct tape or tang!
Naturally, robotic space miners will be limited to the abilities we provide them. The prospect of swarms of space-bots can be troubling though. By 2030 at least four nations could be launching fleets of robotic space miners: Japan, China, Russia, and the United States. While space is abundant, Earth is not. It is within reason to assume that conflicts might arise, but with any luck the abundance of resources in space will be enough to avoid them. Laws are already being written to address the issues around mining and ownership of lunar plots and asteroids.