Human vs. machine story drones on

A drone is doing to take your job. No, not a slinking sycophant, but rather a machine that works longer and harder than you and doesn’t need vacation or sick time.

This sort of warning has been around since at least ’93 — 1793, that is, when Eli Whitney created the cotton gin. But now PriceWaterhouseCoopers predicts a worldwide drone technology market of $127 billion for a nearly unlimited range of applications. The company has established a “centre of excellence” in drones and data analytics in Poland.

PWC is talking about unmanned aerial vehicles and how they’ll transform business and its processes. The biggest chunk of that $127 billion market will lie in what PWC refers to as infrastructure. Lie above it, more precisely, as drones with cameras and data transmission capabilities take over inspection and analysis of infrastructure from people who climb or fly manned aircraft.

Would you do this if a drone could do it instead? PWC doesn’t talk about actuators or robotic devices mounted on drones, but I figure that’s got to be next. Sending a man to change a light bulb 1,700 feet in the air seems like a costly thing to keep doing.

Keep in mind, the PWC figure covers the commercial drone market. And only flying drones. The federal market is also worth billions in military terms alone.

Unmanned, mobile technology has been transforming the military for some time. Army robots to get rid of roadside explosives have starred in movies. The Navy has been experimenting with a humanoid robot to put out fires. The Air Force can’t keep up with demand for the services of its industrial-grade drone aircraft. Unmanned helicopters have been around for decades. Ships and submarines are next.

On the civil side, you can easily imagine drones taking over many of the tasks of park rangers, border patrol agents, or mine inspectors.

It has started already, but the next wave of innovation in unmanned technology will bring autonomy. That is, vehicles won’t require human operators with a joystick flying them remotely. The operator will set the destination, or series of destinations, and the robotic vehicle will decide on its own course, using geographic positioning to navigate and applying weather and traffic data to fine tune. For the military, the big question is whether and when to give armed, autonomous platforms the ability to fire as their silicon brains judge fit.

In the mid-1970s — less than a decade after our family got its first color TV — I had a college photojournalism professor who warned, “Someday a guy with a camera on his helmet will be going to the news scene. Someone back in the newsroom will see what that camera sees and when he sees the right shot, he’ll push a button to capture it. You better be the guy pushing the button.” That is, don’t be the drone with the nerd helmet on. Now the nerd is giving way to a drone-mounted camera. I guess the advice still holds: You be the person pushing the button.

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