DumbFunnery

Technology Can Be Awesome!

This is breaking from my usual type of post, but thankfully I have no standards for my blog.

First of all, UAVs. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. They have become prominent recently with war, and now they may be coming to your home … if you have some time, read this.

Don’t want to read that? Fine. Here’s my quick takeaway: UAVs in the civilian world CAN be really cool, but they could be bad, and they can be slippery.

Cool:

• Delivering tacos to you
• Road signs saying “missing elderly, Ford truck, etc etc” … these bad boys can help look for the missing elderly
• Traffic reporting (as mentioned in the article)

Bad:

• Invasion of privacy (peeping tom, 2.0)
• Hogging bandwidth

Slippery:

• REPLACING HUMANS WITH ROBOTS

Seriously … this is a verrrry interesting thing to me.

A few years ago I was driving with a girl to visit the acquarium in Monterey Bay, California. While driving there we passed by some farms. There was someone out driving some farming machinery through the fields and I talked to the girl about how that job could be automated.

You have the dimensions of the field, you know where crop X is, where crop Y is (in case they need different machines). All you have to do is input this information into a central database (or directly into the machines), and whala, you’ve got yourself some automated farm hands.

With these UAVs it mentions shipping yards that could use drones. Imagine a drone crew lifting debris from the demolition of a building.

Here’s an interesting/bad part – the girl’s dad had a skilled manual labor job. It had slipped my mind at the time, but she was adamently against automation of certain jobs. Unfortunately, her stubborn resistance only made me want to list more jobs where people could be replaced.

You’ve probably been to a grocery store where there are self-checkouts. You’ve probably seen ATMs where you can deposit checks through them (or you can do this through your phone now). There are TONS of jobs people do that can be replaced by robots.

Think about how complex a football game is, and yet we have AI that figures out what to do with that in video games. VIDEO GAMES! I think any consistent motion, or set of motions, no matter how complex, can be automated.

That is both cool and scary.

Other slippery slope things … The article mentions the idea of police UAVs with some ‘crowd control’ non-lethal weapons. Oh, what tangled webs we have.

What do you think about all this? Scary? Cool? Have some brilliant business idea based on UAVs? If so, you should probably keep it to yourself.