Drone can now deliver hot coffee and fast food from shopping centres to the suburbs. An ‘instant now culture’ makes it possible that the highly processed soggy food is directly delivered to your couch. Immediate access to everything, every commodity on-demand can be gratified by drone delivery. Soon tens of thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles will fill the sky over Australia.
The humming noise of the flying machines will hardy be noticed among the cacophony of noise and vibrations from vehicles, mowers, slashers and chainsaws. One is already well accustomed to ubiquitous fossil fuel generated noise pollution.
New information and communication technologies are not perceived as spying machines posing a significant privacy issue.
Should a neighbour object to the disruptive and irritating noise, security risks and privacy invasion then the first line of defence is always the Australian mantra:
“No-one has ever complained about it” and
“Have you spoken to your council?”
Thereafter one encounters an array of Kafkaesque institutional labyrinths where no instance/ agency is responsible for anything. For complainants it is “a morass of laws and buck-passing.” (source)
The decisions to populate the sky with more machines have already been made. The precautionary principle is foreign lingo while the airspace over cities and suburbia is already humming with drones. The slow creep of the ‘outdoor lab’ is gradually and almost imperceptibly becoming a monster interchange in the sky with all the associated impacts.
”The Department of Infrastructure, which has taken control of drone regulation, wants to see expansion in the sector. A political discussion about the desirability of drone delivery services has yet to take place.” (source)
95% of Earth's land surface displays some form of human impact, much of it is human infrastructure. The ocean habitats and many rivers have been turned into shipping and boating highways. Now it is time for the 'highway in the skies’. A full-service logistics will fill the blue sky with heavy aerial traffic.
“The companies involved in drone delivery pilots want the sky for themselves.." The vision is to architect highway infrastructure across our skyscape.” (source)
Time to fast track a sky-highway for business. There is no time to waste for the assessment of emerging technologies.
A disenfranchised public can only look up to the congested, automated and privatised sky highway. "The regulation is moving in a way that effectively gets rid of opportunities for people to have a political say.” (source)
Defaunation of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems seems of no concern to humanity. Wildlife that call the sky and the atmosphere their home are classified as ‘obstacles’ to human progress.
Drones are seen as a panacea for data collection on wildlife such as koalas. They can buzz through their canopy 24/7. Human crowds can also be controlled in real-time. (source) Ultra-high-resolution overhead surveillance of citizens is already in operation. (source)
As a means of destruction unmanned aerial vehicles are widely used for asymmetric warfare in hit-and-run ambushes in the battlefield of the numerous war zones. In the Ukraine combat zones birds now incorporate nests from fiber optic cable from FPV kamikaze drones.
The sky's the limit.
Image: Curated by Bellingen Area Blog, J. M. W. Turner and ChatGPT
Do we want to live under a cloud of drones? The Conversation
