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“The imperative is movement and action in the physical world with a software-like perspective on physical automation – think of it as treating atoms as bits or what we like to call Digitizing the Physical World.”
-Travis Kalanick
If you can parse the excerpt above, I have wonderful news: Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick wrote. around 1,700 similar words to celebrate the transition of his real estate company to a new robot company called Atoms, dedicated to making robots that will perform tasks related to food infrastructure, mining and transportation.
Like Bloomberg noted on fridayKalanick has reportedly been in stealth mode for eight years and has hired thousands of workers, apparently dedicated to turning his City Storage Systems real estate company into Atoms. City Storage Systems is notable for being the owner of CloudKitchens, a ghost kitchen company that famous for a boom and bust during and after the Covid era.
The Bloomberg story details the many disparate threads of Kalanick’s professional life that appear to more or less converge with Atoms: his ambition to bring self-driving cars to Uber before he was forced to resign from that companyits long-standing partnership with the creator of Bowl Builder, a system that seems automate the creation of lunch salads for $20and your investment in Soon an autonomous dump truck company for the mining industry.
But that makes the company seem gloomy and prosaic. It sounds much better when you read it in Kalanick’s words:
“Software has automated language and math tasks, but full automation of the physical world – autonomy – remains largely untouched territory, the main unlock for the next era of progress and abundance. History refers to this kind of moment of radical progress as a Golden Age.”
That’s more like it!
Last year, CloudKitchens’ Middle East division had some kind of problem that prevented it to execute a planned initial public offering and list on the Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia stock exchanges.
