The future has begun, this time really! On Tuesday, Wing, a Google family-owned company, has been awarded the world’s first drone delivery license, as it says in many media. And it’s true somehow, if you understand “world” as usual only “western industrialized countries”.
In China – which is far superior to the rest of the world in terms of networking – the first license for drone deliveries was granted more than a year ago. But such insignificance does not stop the conquest of the airspace. Most of our sci-fi-fed futures contain a veritable throng in the sky, and only taxis make it difficult to reproduce. But now finally come the drones.
Drone swarms approaching
Something is in the air. You could already see that a few days ago, when a short fake video on social media was widely spread: From a slow-moving Amazon Zeppelin pushes a swarm of drones down into a city. Especially funny in the current situation is that it was a copyrighted film that Twitter has now removed from some accounts (here the original Japanese video artist).
That the rigged clip spreads so much proves how obvious and likely most people are to have a near future with ubiquitous flying robots: drones threaten. The most repeated sentence on Twitter was: “This is on the border to dystopia.” You can say that about every technological advance, as the history of technology shows. But the new world of air robots fulfills several scary criteria, including these:
- Drones have long been known as (partially) autonomous weapons, the number of drone deaths is now estimated in the world in the five-digit range
- Drones penetrate into a space that has hitherto been taken for granted as largely free, empty and safe
- Drones are increasingly turning into a privacy nightmare because they are flying cameras used by both tensioners and authorities
At least since Europe regularly paralyzed airports using drones, no one should see in it only a gimmick. But the question of what exactly drones are and what role they will play in the future is not so easy to answer. In my opinion, drones must be seen as something categorically new, namely the digitization of the air .
Drones are a networked, decentralized information and transport infrastructure whose medium-term impact on the economy and society we barely understand. The sensor technology that is possible in drones alone, brings a wealth of completely new, socially changing data streams, from the decentralized measurement of air quality in real time (great) to complete surveillance into every corner (not great).
Dutch police have been training birds of prey to pick up drones from the skies since 2016, but the underlying problem is too big to handle with 3,500-year-old hunting methods. If one proceeds from the drone system as a digitization of the air, one can extrapolate what happens next: between state control and social progress.
Control: Drone driving licenses and kill-switch function
Software used in many privately used drones has long since made it impossible to even launch near problematic areas such as airports or military areas. That you need a drone driving license for certain drones in Germany since 2017, is idle to mention. In India, the government has just instructed drone providers to install a kill switch in each drone that can be officially shut down.
This regulatory path will be rolled out. Drones will only be allowed to start non-anonymously if they can be assigned to a person, company or institution at any time via digital query. Leisure drones will only be allowed to be used freely in certain areas.The rule will be that drones will be routed through a strictly regulated AI, along government-designated routes. All sensors, microphones such as cameras, will have to include an interface for state-wide remote access. Finally, data retention for drone data becomes mandatory.
Still, every infrastructure was used sooner or later in all facets of state control, or at least publicly perceived. Even the introduction of street lighting in Paris in 1667 was accompanied by loud protests, the citizens feared the now possible surveillance by state snoopers.
Progress: emergence of an own drone economy
A drone is a device. Many networked drones are a system. That can stay in the air forever with the help of various technologies such as lasers. Intelligent drone swarms will perform the following, already recognizable features:
- Energy supply, also from other drones
- private alarm systems and urban video surveillance
- Recognize and collect garbage
- Repair and construction work of all kinds
- tends to be environmentally friendly transport and logistics
- Keep animals and humans away from critical areas
- to further digitize agriculture
- to change the health outside and inside the body
- Control of public order and border security
- really everything in the Smart City is based on drones
The list is almost endless, a clear indication that we have hardly seen the beginnings of a drone business with drone deliveries. The digitization of the air can simply be understood as the next level of automation. And if you do that, reveals – apart from the dystopia – the previously rarely addressed, but in my view the most profound problem of the drone future: work. Huh?
Yes, delivery drones will soon become an alternative to urban package carriers, and like most technologies, they will become more efficient and cheaper. What Google is doing in Australia will put even more pressure on the world’s already miserably paid parcel providers.
In capitalism, there is a law of automation that rarely gets fully automated overnight.This usually happens in longer cycles. Therefore, no mass unemployment is imminent, but a further spread into many low earners and comparatively few, high paid special forces.This phenomenon has been observable for decades.
After all, new technologies and even drones are an excellent way to reduce the costs of work. The easier it would be to replace a person with a machine, the less money he can demand for his work. Therein lies the real problem of digitization, including the digitization of the air.