Am I wrong to hate drones and driverless cars?
We already have to suffer jam-packed roads. Forgive me if I dread a future that turns our skies into an aerial superhighway.
An enterprising start-up in the Irish town of Oranmore, whose two drones deliver shopping to residents, has raised £18 million to expand this service into the suburban towns of Britain by the end of the year. The drones’ deliveries involve an average three-minute flight from the supermarket to the customer’s front door.
Last month, a significant step was taken towards the routine use of such deliveries in the UK. At present, drones must normally be flown within a pilot’s visual range. The Civil Aviation Authority has now granted permission for Sees.ai, a West Sussex-based technology company, to trial-operate drones beyond the line of sight and without needing authorisation for each flight.
“Removing this limitation,” said the CAA, “fires the starting gun for the next phase of growth of the drone industry.”
Are hearts universally lifting at this prospect? Am I alone in dreading the prospect of drones swarming in the air above my head? Might it be curmudgeonly to point out that the one space that is currently gloriously empty and pure could soon become a crowded aerial superhighway for whirring bits of metal?
Ready Player One’s Pizza Hut delivery done right!#dji#phantom3#phantom4#inspire1#inspire2#djimavic#mavic#mavicpro#djispark#sinfromabove#seizethemoment#drones#dronestagram#dronephotography#aerial#drone#drones#airvuz#fromwhereidrone#ai… https://t.co/uQeTkszuO2pic.twitter.com/SCR76XnVum
— itcowup (@itcowup) June 20, 2018
We already have to suffer jam-packed, polluted roads. Look upwards, however, and apart from the occasional aeroplane (unless you live near an airport), the only moving things between you and the wide-open sky are birds and insects.
The air above us is the last zone that’s free of man-made objects but now drones threaten to become an environmental blight. To some this will sound like railing, Canute-like, at the marvellous ingenuity of technological progress. The same argument might well have been advanced in earlier times by reactionary individuals who bewailed the invention of the motor car, yearning for the lost idyll of open fields and transport by horse and cart.
So it’s easy to mock. And it’s true that drone deliveries will make shopping more convenient. There is, however, a tendency to assume that scientific or technological advances are always beneficial, allied to an assumption that technology is innately superior to human activity.
By the end of this year, according to the Department for Transport, drivers will be able for the first time to fully relinquish control of their “driverless” cars when travelling at under 60km/h on motorways. They can rely instead on the car’s automated lane-keeping system technology with no human input.
Drivers will be able to take their hands off the steering wheel and eyes off the road. They’ll be able to check text messages or emails, watch TV shows or read a book.
This is madness. Thatcham Research, which works with the Association of British Insurers, says it will put lives at risk. This automated system, it says, can’t see certain obstructions on the road or a pedestrian moving to the offside of a car.
There are already enough concerns about fatalities on so-called “smart” motorways, where emergency lay-bys and electronic tracking are meant to compensate for the lack of a hard shoulder.
The death of a pedestrian hit by a self-driving Uber car in Arizona in 2018 was an early indication of how difficult it might be to assure the public of the safety of driverless vehicles. Last month, two men were killed in Texas after a Tesla driverless car they were in crashed and caught fire. Police said neither was in the driver’s seat, though Tesla disputes this, saying that the car’s “Autopilot” system was not engaged.
In Britain, the transport department insists that the mass use of self-driving cars would dramatically reduce road accidents because human error contributes to more than 85 per cent of crashes. Well duh — that’s because cars are driven by human beings. Conversely, how many crashes are avoided by the use of human sight and hearing? As Thatcham Research observes, good drivers anticipate hazards to stay safe.
Of course, science and technology have brought us inestimable benefits and will continue to do so. However, the assumption that progress is always good doesn’t follow. As the joke has it, some of the words you most dread hearing your doctor say are: “I’m afraid it’s progressive.”
Advances can bring both good and bad. Splitting the atom brought us both clean energy and nuclear weapons. Genetics can both help treat disease and promote eugenics. The internet brought us both unprecedented access to information and invasion of privacy by the tech giants.
The environmental movement fingers industrialisation as harmful. Even those of us who don’t hold with every aspect of this agenda may agree that mechanisation sometimes causes people to harm the natural world. At the same time, devotees of artificial intelligence claim that it won’t be long before machines make people redundant altogether.
Supporting both ideas at once suggests that while we don’t want human beings to use automation to destroy the rainforests, the ozone layer or polar bears, society is less alarmed about using it to replace humanity itself.
If you think this suggests such a total absence of joined-up thinking that you despair of life on earth, never fear — Elon Musk says he’s well on the way to starting up communities on Mars.
— THE TIMES
