Howells, a computer engineer, started his garbage disposal mission in 2013 when, while cleaning out his office, he accidentally threw away a hard drive that had all the security codes of 8,000 Bitcoins on it. At the current price, they would be worth somewhere between 170 and 180 million euros today.
Artificial intelligence
Howells has asked Newport City Council for permission several times over the years to graze the local landfill. The garbage bag with the valuable disk would have been dumped there. But the municipality refused him access every time: too expensive, too much hassle, and also harmful to the environment.
Now the 37-year-old Welshman has a new plan with which he hopes to reconcile the municipality. The total of 100,000 tons of waste must be excavated in parts by a large robot arm. That dirt is thrown onto an adjacent piece of ground on a conveyor belt, where other robot arms specially trained with AI (artificial intelligence) filter the promising pieces of debris from the masses.
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This first selection is then subjected to a second inspection, by both robots and humans.
In order not to give any hijackers a chance on the coast, the search is secured by – yes – robot dogs, from the company Boston Dynamics. Their dog Spot can be seen at work in the images in this tweet:
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The unfortunate Howells has since found a financier who is willing to invest 11 million euros in the technology and programmers needed for the search. Among the experts he wants to hire are environmental experts, in order to limit the ecological impact as much as possible. The project would take about a year to complete.
Ecological risk
If the hard drive is found, then it is by no means certain whether the data on it can still be retrieved. If so, Howell promises that some of the money will benefit the Newport community. He wants to set up a data mining center, the profit of which will go to the community. He is also thinking of facilities that generate green energy, such as wind turbines.
The municipality, meanwhile, does not seem inclined to give him his way. “We have to carry out our duties,” a spokesman for the municipality told the British krant The Guardian“and part of that is managing ecological risks to the population. Mr Howells’ proposal poses a significant ecological risk, and we cannot accept that for the sake of our job.”
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