Five Ways Drones Are Going To Change Our Lives
It’s tempting to imagine cities in the future as sci-fi classics: flying cars, strange new high rises, robot dogs. In many ways, though, though “future cities” are a fascinating thought experiment, we’re already living in the cities of the future; it’s unlikely that our cities will change so dramatically in the next few decades at least. What will change is the way we use our cities and the spaces in them.
Part of that, undoubtedly, will be drones. A political and military buzzword for years, drones are just becoming acceptable enough in daily life that it’s not always completely disorientating to spot them out and about — though if the occasional weirdo could stop flying them directly at our heads, that’d be great. But the progress of drones has been oddly stop-and-start, enough that it’s easy enough to forget they’re on the cusp of descending for good. Just to remind you, then, here are five ways drones will infect and inflect our daily life.
Food
Judgment from Deliveroo riders over your extra-large-order-for-one or hungover 10am pizza delivery will, hopefully, soon be so 2018. The first drone hot food delivery — not counting, according to The Verge, a slushie and chicken sandwich delivered by 7/11 earlier that year — was made in November 2016, in New Zealand, where Domino’s Pizza partnered with drone delivery company Flirtey to send two pizzas: one Peri-Peri Chicken, one Chicken and Cranberry (grim, but I guess it’s the technology we’re judging here). In August 2017, CBNC reports, Iceland launched the first drone delivery service, which flies groceries and other goods direct to your house after you order online. And the big names are hurrying to join: Project Wing (Alphabet X’s drone-flying team) reported in a blog that they’ve been trying out deliveries of burritos, chips and guacamole with Tex-Mex chain Guzman y Gomez; Amazon is working hard on its Prime Air service, which will see deliveries of Amazon products including food delivered within a few hours of ordering.
According to CNBC, Yariv Bash, co-founder and chief executive of Flytrex in Iceland, believes that the “drones will reduce the load on the transport infrastructure leading to safer roads”. And your food will get there faster, or potentially at odd hours, making sure those nine PM online grocery hauls are there in time for breakfast. Plus, think of the downtick in creepy pizza delivery guys.
Drugs
Well, don’t get too excited. Fortune has reported that in 2017 California’s Bureau of Cannabis Control unveiled a host of new regulatory rules, including one that bans drones from delivering marijuana. This has got to be a bummer for startups like the San-Francisco based Trees Delivery who had been pushing the potential of delivering weed via drone before they unceremoniously — most of their website links now lead to thin air. Others, like Eaze, have had to return to more standard methods of delivery — though still happily engaged in the present, with the ability to order weed via app.
But it’s maybe not such a huge surprise, and LA Weekly reports that Eaze themselves has “no immediate plans to deliver weed via drone. It just wants the world to see the possibilities.” Sheena Shiravi, Eaze’s head of Public Relations, said, “We really want to showcase the power of technology in this industry and help regulators understand it.” For now, it’s maybe better to wait for drone technology to catch up to its drug needs — so that shooting down random drones doesn’t become every hopeful stoner’s favourite pastime.
Medicine
Here’s some drugs for you, and life-changing ones at that: delivering medicine via drone offers one of the biggest and brightest ways drones could revolutionise our lives. Around the world, countries and companies are coming to terms with the way we can use medical drone deliveries to improve, speed up, or completely overhaul current medical systems.
We’ve already written about Zipline, who are making huge advances in Rwanda and Tanzania using drones to deliver medical supplies around the country. According to Wired, Switzerland is working on similar technology, launching a drone network between hospitals with Californian-based drone manufacturers Matternet — who have also assisted Doctors Without Borders in Papua New Guinea to help speed up tuberculosis diagnosis. Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos told Wired, “We have a vision of a distributed network, not hub and spoke, but true peer-to-peer.” NPR reports that the US, too, is looking into setting up inter-hospital drone networks. The results across the world have the potential to be not just life-changing, but life-saving.
It’s perhaps not the most immediately exciting of ideas, but it’s most likely where we’ll see drones in full effect first, as companies big and small look to the potential of drone deliveries for mail. Amazon is the big name here, who have already launched Prime Air on their website. It promises packages delivered to customers in 30 minutes or less, and has already performed a private trial in the UK; the BBC reported that the “package arrived safely at its destination in Cambridge, 13 minutes after being ordered”. And it’s already looking beyond the scope for what delivery drones can manage — according to the LA Times, Amazon has filed for a patent that will see drones reacting to human gestures including yelling and waving your arms. This is an interesting shift towards ideas around AI and robotics, and suggests a drone that in its reactive abilities will be somehow reassuring, or even cute — and at the very least, prepared for its service industry duties of facing down angry customers.
Where Amazon leads, other companies won’t be far behind. But already obstacles are arising to block the delivery drone’s smooth sailing. One major issue is airspace: drones will need to refine their GPS and detect-and-avoid technology to avoid hitting planes, people, and other drones, amongst others. In the US, The Verge reports, the FAA have issued regulations that require drones to be operated with line-of-sight control; meaning you have to be able to see your drone for its entire flight. We’re guessing Jeff Bezos has better things to do. According to Wired, recent news from the White House, however, suggests that this may change soon as the FAA relaxes its regulations around several new drone programs.
Other concerns around drone deliveries include privacy — drones flying overhead is a little eerie, especially when as Forbes reports they may be gathering information based on your house to sell you more products — and liability: whose fault is it if a drone crashes through a window? There’s also the concern, as James Ball suggests in a Guardian column, that drone delivery is a little over-hyped now, with our infrastructure and legislation not ready for the technology. And for every Icelandic success story, there’s Russia launching its first delivery drone, which promptly crashed into a wall. What this means is that delivering mail, as dull as it sounds, may be where we first properly work out the place drones will have in our future, and what places we will have to make for them.
Weird Shit
It seems to be one of humanity’s great unspoken rules that no matter what new technology we come up with all of its life-saving, revolutionary potential, we’re going to do some weird stuff with it, too. We just like weird stuff. Some of it may be genuinely useful once you get over the blinking surprise; some of it is just bizarre.
It’s why according to Dezeen we see things like Walmart, in a surprisingly sweet move, applying to patent drones that will act like bees and pollinate crops; it’s why The Daily Dot has claimed that dronies (that’s a selfie taken with a drone, for the layman) are apparently now a thing. According to Audobon, ornithologists are using drones to help return the California condor back to its natural habit, by placing a trail of dead cows in the right direction and alerting the condor via drones that would look like birds circling the carrion from above. The Washington Post reports that Aerial Anthropology, an Ohio-based company, use drones to show elderly or terminally ill people favourite locations, like a childhood hometown or favourite holiday, allowing the patients to watch live while the drone is at the location and guide where it will go next. And, in a move that will surprise no one, the Germans are on top of the Window Cleaning Drones game.
If part of the potential of drones is to speed things up, to make our lives more efficient and our technology more useful, another part must be to explore all the intricacy and minutiae of our lives. Like the cities, our lives in the future are already here. We just need to get better at not crashing into walls.
Written by Mikaella Clements/image by Rosalba Porpora
This month’s theme is SPEED. We can’t stop thinking about autonomous vehicles, how we’ll navigate the cities of tomorrow and how drones will change the delivery process forever.
