You have probably had to pop out to the grocery store to pick up something you needed for a dinner party. Or maybe you’ve dashed to the pharmacy to get a prescription refill before you took a long trip. By the early 2020s, small drones will do that, and a whole lot more, for you.
Companies such as Amazon and Google have long been planning drone-delivery services, but the first authorized commercial delivery in the United States happened in July 2016, when a 7-Eleven delivered Slurpees, a chicken sandwich, donuts, hot coffee, and candy to a customer in Reno, Nevada.1 In the United Kingdom, an enterprising Domino’s franchisee had made headlines by using a drone copter for deliveries in June 2013. Hundreds of companies delivering by drone are starting up all over the world. Venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins estimates that there were 4.3 million shipments of drones in 2015 and that the market is growing by 167 percent per year.2
Not since the automobile has a transportation technology spurred such enthusiastic entrepreneurial activity. The barrier to entry into the business of building drones is exceptionally low. Commodity kits compete with commercial models, and Arduino circuit boards and open-source software make it easy for motivated coders and hackers to tailor drones to exacting functions in arcane and lucrative fields. Just a decade after the military began using drones in earnest as remote-controlled killing machines, the same technology is available to everyone (but not to hunt down terrorists).
Drones are also known as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Their evolution is an excellent example of how exponential technology development works. People have been using radio signals to fly aircraft remotely for more than fifty years. The problem with piloting these devices was keeping them stable and preventing them from crashing when there was any wind turbulence. That necessitated piloting by very highly skilled operators. Drones had to carry big cameras and transponders in order to transmit images and data to the operator. Now, cheap, powerful, light computers and sensors can do that job, lowering drone-manufacture costs and enabling exponentially faster processing in the payloads that drones’ propulsion systems can comfortably send aloft.
What has really changed the game is the autopilot. In existence for military and commercial flights for many decades, autopilot software that worked well and was available to everyone came along only a few years ago. In part, it was not considered necessary, because the FAA does not allow over-the-horizon drone operations in public space. But the agency appears to be ready to start permitting it, and drone builders have been experimenting with private over-the-horizon flight for years. The units now entering testing will follow a route set by map pins, and can automatically land or return to a charging station as necessary. You can buy a Parrot AR.Drone, for example, for about $200 on Amazon. This quadcopter transmits 720p high-definition streaming video to the iPad or smartphone controlling it. It is equipped with a three-axis accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer, as well as pressure and ultrasound sensors. Two or three decades ago, such sensors would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and weighed tens of pounds. They are, essentially, military-grade hardware and technology. In China it is now possible to buy drones that are more or less the equivalent of U.S. military models for only a few thousand U.S. dollars.
We are entering what Chris Anderson, the founder of a company called 3D Robotics, calls the “Drone Age.” Anderson was one of the early entrants in the DIY-drone surge and is one of the leading advocates of widespread drone adoption. “It’s safe to say that drones are the first technology in history where the toy industry and hobbyists are beating the military-industrial complex at its own game,” wrote Anderson in a 2012 piece in WIRED.3
This is both good and bad. Drones’ ability to travel directly to their destination on uncrowded flight paths will enable them to replace all manner of terrestrial shipping. In cities and suburbs, drones will replace delivery vehicles. This will reduce urban congestion and possibly carbon emissions, and save money and trips to the emergency room (car accidents kill, you know). Presently, when you order a pizza, delivery of a pound of flour with some toppings and tomato sauce involves sending to your driveway a human being in a two-ton vehicle spewing carbon. A small drone weighing a few pounds will perform the delivery better, day or night, rain or shine.
Drones can also perform jobs hazardous for humans to perform, such as inspecting roofs, cellphone towers, and bridges. In drought zones such as California, drones can perform round-the-clock fire spotting, with nearly 100 percent coverage of the entire state, to quickly locate wildfires.
Because drones are so cheap and are getting cheaper by the month, they hold tremendous potential in the developing world to provide the same aerial services the West will soon enjoy. That may allow these comparatively poor parts of the planet to leap forward into a more modern, more efficient era. In sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, for example, such a service could be critical, because unreliable transport networks can cause the supply of spare parts for farm equipment or medical equipment to take weeks or months.
It’s already beginning to happen. In Malawi, UNICEF is looking to start testing drone delivery of medical samples to remote regions of the country.4 Not confined to the developing world, precisely this service was tested in impoverished rural West Virginia. In July 2015, a hexacopter drone operated by the Australian startup Flirtey was deployed to deliver boxes of prescription medicines to a remote pop-up field clinic in rural Wise County, West Virginia.5 Moving the boxes by drone rather than by traditional means allowed for much faster resupply of critical medicines and, in general, allowed for same-day delivery of necessary items.
That U.S. doctors would choose to use drones to deliver medicines in rural areas hints at another possible profound equalizing effect of drones. The United States has rapidly urbanized. Jobs and resources have flowed to urban and densely populated areas, and parts of rural America have steadily hollowed out, becoming poorer. In combination with decaying infrastructure, this has created a country of urban and suburban haves and rural have-nots. Drones could boost living standards in rural America as they boost convenience in urban America. If a drone could deliver your groceries in West Virginia at a low cost, saving you an hour’s drive to Walmart and the cost of gasoline (not to mention your time), that’s a real improvement in the standard of living. If a small factory needed spare parts from the nearest distributor, then a direct flight by a drone would trump a FedEx delivery both in cost and in speed.
There are also tremendous applications of drones to agriculture, such as monitoring the growth of weeds and crops, spraying insecticides when needed, and tracking soil hydration to adjust watering. Drones can enable a process known as precision agriculture, which optimizes the use of resources and reduces the amount of runoff that could flow into nearby rivers and streams.
In June 2015, a hobby drone flew into the path of an air tanker fighting a 17,000-acre forest fire in California, causing the state fire agency Cal Fire to ground all nearby air operations for the evening.6 The incidence of such dangerous drone near-misses is on the rise. On Sunday, August 16, of the same year, the FAA recorded a total of twelve episodes involving rogue drones, sixteen endangering manned aircraft, in five different states. On that day, flabbergasted pilots reported that two large commercial jets had near misses by drones above Los Angeles International Airport. The FAA has tallied hundreds of instances in which drones have entered restricted airspace or nearly struck other aircraft.
Bad drone behavior is not confined to unintentional transgressions. Criminals have embraced drones. They have taken to the air to smuggle illicit drugs into a prison in Ohio. Mexican drug runners used a drone to carry twenty-eight pounds of heroin across the U.S. border in August 2015.7
And an eighteen-year-old mechanical-engineering student modified a drone to carry a handgun that could be fired remotely. (He was arrested for this stunt.)8
We know too that drones have been adopted into the arsenals of anti-Western groups. The militant Islamist group Hezbollah is building a massive drone air force to take to the skies against Israel. Hezbollah has already dispatched drones over the border on several occasions, flying very close to key infrastructure. In October 2016, an ISIS drone blew up and took the lives of two Kurdish fighters that were trying to stop it from doing surveillance.9
For Hezbollah, ISIS, and other non-state actors, the drone could become a great equalizer, a mechanism for delivering “suicide” bombs that requires no recruits and no explosive vests. Though countries are working on drone defenses, ranging from shooting down relatively slow-moving drones to jamming their GPS signals, it’s unclear whether any country actually has a viable defense against swarms of drones bearing explosives. And other drone-mounted weapons will doubtless follow, such as machine guns and poison gas.
The overall desirability of drones really depends on how much abuse we see and how rapidly we develop defenses against such abuses. Unlike the loss of personal data protection and privacy, we as a society could conceivably opt out of drones by banning their sale, restricting their operation, and constructing electronic countermeasures to their remote control. And we could develop technologies that incapacitate them in certain areas.
Drones offer a healthier balance between promise and peril than most of the technologies in this book, though. And there are things we can do to mitigate the risks.
To start with, there needs to be a core technology framework for collision avoidance. Though this is no trivial problem, it is looking increasingly soluble. Self-driving cars address many of the same issues, and do so in an even more crowded and dangerous landscape, filled with unpredictable humans doing silly things such as texting while driving. The next generation of self-driving cars’ laser sensors will be embedded in the vehicles’ chassis. Drones might not even need that much sophistication in order to avoid collisions: a simple system in which every drone in operation emits a signal to alert other drones to its proximity may suffice (except in avoiding the occasional bird strike).
The next step would be to build a system of air-traffic control for drones. It would need to be automated and to include safety measures such as emergency kill-switches to bring down a drone that is malfunctioning or poses a danger. We would need to specify city air corridors dedicated to drones and to confine the drones to them.
We also need to build private and commercial air-defense systems, such as the military is developing, to shield our schools, homes, and businesses from drone surveillance and attack; eventually, it might be something like the invisible shields depicted in Star Trek.
All of these are technically feasible. Beyond this, we need to debate what is socially acceptable, and to create legal frameworks. Should the cameras of delivery drones be recording and saving all video footage as they enter the airspace of a customer’s home? For that matter, should drones be allowed to fly over private property at all, or should they be limited to public roads between droneports? Should we have the right to shoot down unauthorized drones on our property? If the Second Amendment grants the right of gun ownership to individuals for self-defense, then does it allow them to fly their own defensive drones?
The FAA implemented new regulations in August 2016 for the commercial use of drones in the United States and is working on updating them as it learns drones’ uses and needs.10 It stipulated that drones had to remain in visual line of sight of the pilot; that operations had to be in daylight hours; that operators must be at least sixteen years of age; that the groundspeed maximum would be 100 mph and altitude maximum, 400 feet; and that pilots must obtain certification. These rules governed tasks such as surveying, real-estate photography, and site inspections and did not apply to drone delivery operations—because those use autonomous technology, rather than human pilots, to guide them.
State legislatures across the country are also debating how human-piloted drones should be regulated. They are trying to address the needs of law enforcement and to answer questions that their constituents are asking. Drones can be used for hobby and recreation, and for hunting game. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, as of 2016, thirty-two states had enacted laws addressing issues with unmanned aircraft systems, and an additional five states had adopted relevant resolutions.11
That the FAA and the states are actively researching the issues and listening to business and the public is a good sign. The industry will develop a lot faster, and there will be better protections, if there are clear and sensible regulations.
In the case of drones, these are both relatively easy choices. Everyone benefits from a reduction in the cost of delivery and the surmounting of obstacles to get goods to where they are needed. The poor gain as much as do the rich. After all, drones are becoming so cheap that almost everyone will be able to afford them. And when it comes to autonomy, we have a clear choice: if we don’t want Starbucks droning our morning latte, we can always drive to the store to pick it up. Or we can have our self-driving car take us there.
These considerations over drones illustrate well a point that I have been trying to make: the imperativeness that we, the public, learn about advancing technologies, decide what we consider to be ethical and acceptable, and tell our policy makers what regulations to enact. It is the key to building a Star Trek future.