A marine biologist has suggested the future of Scottish tech-enabled tourism could use “ancient organisms” for low carbon electric travel and eco-tours.
Elaine Ford, founder of Electrek Explorer, is looking into the viability of using slime moulds and has conducted experiments to find a suitable food source, finding that it “loves Scottish oats”.
She is using Polycephalum - a single celled organism that has no central nervous system or brain, yet is capable of navigating its way through a maze to find its food source.
Ford discussed her idea at Traveltech for Scotland’s launch of a collaborative project about visualising the future of the country's tech-enabled tourism.
The Edinburgh Futures Institute commissioned four Scottish-based visual artists to create their own visions of the future of tourism in the next 20 years.
Cat O’Neil, Jonny Harris, James Albon and Elaine Ford each presented their personal explorations at the event for the first time.
O’Neil's idea of tourism uses mobile phones to detail the interesting points during a walk, while Harris suggested a version of augmented technology tourism, and Albon proposed an “evolution rather than revolution” of using technology to make tourism more inclusive and accessible.
Anne Vanderpol, a programme assistant with Traveltech Scotland, was responsible for setting up the project and has been working on it since October.
She said: “Covid-19 has brought about some permanent changes to the travel industry - tourism must adjust and put environmental and societal responsibility first.
"The industry was forced to reevaluate how to sustain Scotland as an ongoing destination for the future."
Ford responded to the challenge with a set of experiments to explore the future of travel tech in Scotland and how electric vehicle drivers can plan low carbon road trips between charging points in the most efficient way.
“I placed oats as food resources at historic and neolithic sites, as well as selecting electric vehicle supercharge points as a place to start to allow slime to start to grow.
“The approach relies on an ambitious vision of net zero low carbon electric vehicle travel by working with ancient organisms that have evolved network problem solving abilities over billions of years.”
She explained that scientists at the Jersey Institute said that slime mould behaviour could produce an insight in designing a decentralised system that can be used for the future of self driving cars.
"Slime mold is responsive to disruption so and is able to learn and suggest what roads to avoid if a charge point has broken down.
“We can explore novel partnerships with human technologies like artificial intelligence and other forms of biological intelligence to address computational problems," added Ford. "Here I looked at slime mould decision making problems working as an artificial intelligence travel recommendation engine.”
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