I was coming out of an appearance on the Fox Business channel last night, during which I talked about Jeff Bezos's idea to use small unmanned aircraft to deliver packages, when I met the New York City policeman. He made a beeline for me, eyeing the drone under my arm. I don't always carry UAVs around with me. But the producers of "The Willis Report" asked if Popular Mechanics had any drones in the office, which of course we do. (I took a beaten-up specimen with three counter-rotating props instead of Amazon's eight, but a drone nonetheless.) The cop had been watching the segment on a TV screen facing 7th Avenue. "Is that a drone?" he asked. "You don't really think they'll be flying around, delivering packages, do you?"
I told him it was possible, prompting him to make a sour face. "If I saw one of these when if I'm out on my boat, I'd just, you know, shoot it down," he said, making a gun with his fingers.
Where does this animosity come from? I am confident that the NYPD officer I met (a veteran of Afghanistan and a friendly enough fellow) would not take potshots at freight trains or anchored oil tankers in his spare time, yet his gut instinct is to commit violence on a drone flying past carrying the shoes someone just bought on Amazon. And he's not alone. Deer Trail, Colo., decided to issue "drone hunting permits" that would set bounties to shoot down UAVs, leading to a Daily Show sketch lampooning the town. And plenty of people responded to Bezos's segment on 60 Minutes Sunday night, in which he (umm) floated the idea of using octo-rotorcraft to deliver 5-pound packages, with the same attitude. Here's a quick sample from the collective consciousness of Twitter:
And so on. Michael Toscano, president and CEO of Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a drone-industry trade group, felt compelled to point out that this is a bad idea. "A myriad of important uses will be imperiled if they become targets," he said. "The suggestion that Americans take up arms against unmanned aircraft also endangers citizens on the ground."
It's clear that Disney needs to make a movie about anthropomorphized drones to gain them some mainstream acceptance.
I understand a population rebelling against a disruptive technology. In the late 1700s, workers in Bradford-on-Avon, England, put weaving machines on trial and "executed" them (via dismantling). Those machines were heralds of larger change, and the economic disruption of workers' lives. So it makes sense that communities under threat of change banded together against the machines, even though in the long run they lost out to the inevitability of efficiency. But that doesn't seem to be the driving factor of drone fear. It doesn't seem as though the people threatening to take potshots at octocopters are so ballistically inclined because they're afraid of a faster way to deliver packages.
So What Are People Afraid Of?
Could it be safety? Perhaps, but a little homework would dispel those fears. Drones can be programmed to fly at a safe altitude, following GPS waypoints and roadways until they reach an address. With lightweight sensors, such as laser radar, a small UAV can fly and land without hitting any obstacles. Laser radar generates a point cloud that enables the aircraft to "see" what surrounds it, and this technology exists today.
Could it be a fear of automation? Perhaps, but these same drone haters climb into airliners that spend 90 percent of the flight under autopilot. Most modern planes cannot even stay airborne without computer-assisted control of their flight control surfaces. The same thing is happing to your car, by the way, as new vehicles are festooned with sensors and self-driving abilities. Computers are integrated with our lives, from our careers to our personal communication devices. Maybe the hatred of drones is a symptom of that.
How about disbelief? A good number of observers felt like Bezos's announcement was a PR stunt and that the coming deluge of drones is some sort of media fabrication. One Guardian columnist called it "all hot air and baloney" and beseeched journalists to ignore the news, saying those "who'd like to think of themselves as serious must stop regurgitating this crap."
The Amazon news might be overhyped, but to dismiss Bezos's proposal as impossible or fake is to act as if decades of work on drones never happened, as if NASA doesn't fly jet-powered UAVs into hurricanes or hobbyist drone operators don't have craft that can follow GPS waypoints. It's as if LIDAR doesn't exist, nor does the drone-to-drone coordination devised by researchers like the University of Pennsylvania's Vijay Kumar. The Federal Aviation Administration predicts that 7500 small commercial drones, like the copter Amazon is considering, will be aloft by 2018. It's not hard to find hobbyist operators waiting for the law to change so they can open up a business. (We found them easily enough for a recent cover story.) These will be used for such benign work as videography, forest-fire scouting, property surveys, and crop monitoring. Why not deliver Amazon goods as well?
I understand the skepticism about Amazon Prime Air, and share some of it. Weather would be a limiting factor, as would the number of delivery areas within range of distribution points. A lack of landing areas, particularly in urban zones, could limit the system's reach. It won't be useful for everyone, everywhere. But does a new tech have to be perfect to be worthy of consideration? Do surmountable technological challenges make something baloney?
I think there's a linguistic problem here, too, stemming from the use of the word "drone." The law enforcement and military connotations of the word run deep. As countless news stories from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have reminded us, drones spy and drones drop weapons, and they do it very well. But they don't only do these things.
The word drone also implies that these aircraft are expendable. Robots are useful for doing the jobs humans can't do—or, more often, won't do because of the danger. But that does not make them valueless. While drawing down on a drone (and good luck hitting it at 250 feet with that shotgun), don't forget someone paid for it. Every drone has someone out there who loves it.
Would self-driving delivery vans come under similar attack, I wonder? They'd be a bigger menace, sharing crowded roads with human drivers who violate traffic rules and operate at high speeds. But they'd also blend in better, and as such wouldn't present a target as juicy. Maybe we're just picking on the thing that looks the freakiest, not the one that poses a bigger personal threat.
No matter what the source of this unease, there is one last thing I know about the drone backlash on display this week: If people don't accept these increasingly capable commercial unmanned vehicles, then that intolerant attitude will ground the drones despite the potential. It won't take a lot of bad actors to ruin the play, either. If a small subset of people dedicate themselves to hacking drones or shooting them down just to cause trouble or steal my online order of Walking Dead graphic novel compendiums, then a company like Amazon will shrug and shelve the octocopters and find another way of delivering goods. If that happens, fellow homo sapiens, we won't deserve the drones we made.