I’ve been thinking about Eric Schmidt’s call for a discussion on the impact of drones, and while that focuses on privacy, it’s also a call to  think about the coming regulatory framework that’s going to have to be hashed out for non-spying private and commercial drone aircraft. I think that’s a really important debate, because whatever we decide is going to shape the development of drone technology thereafter.

A big threat, I think, is the characterisation of drones as hobbyist aircraft, toys that are functionally little different from model airplanes. If that was the case presented to me as a lawmaker, it would be easy to partition of a couple of open parks as drone recreation areas and ban them outright from the rest of the city. The inherent risks - mostly I’m thinking of collisions with people, buildings, and the like - aren’t a palatable trade-off for a few hours’ fun for UAV enthusiasts.

To convince lawmakers that drones have a legitimate place in the city and society, we need to present them as useful tools. So, what possible jobs might a micro-UAV have in the city? (Aside from surveillance platforms, which naturally wouldn’t extend airspace to civilian use).

One idea I had was the idea of drones replacing cycle couriers. For a start, it addresses a specific need within the city - rapid transit of small physical goods - that drones are well-suited to serve. Drones can compete with cyclists for speed and they obviously avoid traffic issues. In general, unskilled labour is always replaced by machinery where possible, because machines perform these roles cheaper and more reliably. One of the major limitations of micro-UAVs is their limited flight time (around 15 minutes for a quadcopter if I recall correctly), but again, that’s broadly within the range needed for delivering a package across the city.

Similarly, cycle couriers perform a job that lends itself very easily to automation. Navigate to the Drone Delivery webpage, key in your details and your bank card. The drone is dispatched to A, picks up package, flies to B, delivers package. At both ends the package is digitally signed for and this information is communicated through the normal mobile network. 

A basic drone delivery service doesn’t require much additional infrastructure. Physically, buildings would need some kind of rooftop landing pad, maybe marked out with a identifying glyph for easier navigation. Electronically, blanket coverage of power grids, cell networks and GPS meets the needs of our aircraft. 

From here, you can start thinking about defined routes that drones would be able to fly along - sky roads - as well as top speeds, weight, load, flight protocols and all that other regulatory stuff that helps define the things we make. 

However, If we plan to fill our skies with drones, our streets will be littered with their broken bodies unless we can stop them colliding with one another. Hopefully this can be solved with on-board crash avoidance systems, because the only alternative as I see it is a centralised air traffic control for city drones (which are already too small and flying too close to buildings for radar to be much use). Perhaps something using inference from mesh networks, I don’t know.  Hopefully the low volume of traffic in the early days of drones will give us some breathing room to figure this out.

In the age of life-casting offered by Google Glass, you’ll need to pick your friends wisely.

As the first of Google’s goggles are dispatched, we’re starting to see serious conversations arise about the implications of always-on feeds beaming every moment onto the cloud.  I’ve seen a few articles expressing alarm at the idea we’ll be under constant surveillance by the people around us, and the necessary etiquette frameworks that will need to be hashed out as this kind of device becomes more commonplace.  Seattle’s 5 Point Cafe became the first to ban the goggles, although this was more a savvy PR move than response to a legitimate concern.  It’s not a particularly  new idea either – anyone who’s visited one of London’s private member clubs will already be familiar with no-phone policies.

However, even as we struggle to get to grips with our own privacy settings on various social networks, we should spare a thought for whether our friends are following suit. It’s not unusual for journalists to befriend someone on Facebook in order to access pictures of their celebrity friend, a leapfrog manoeuvre that my own pal fell victim to (not that it was me these hacks were looking for!). Life-casting promises to dramatically ramp up the sheer volume of data collected about you – locations, movements, activities, and if we want to stretch our imaginations a little, mood, partners, weight, social status…  Facebook’s facial recognition ability should already have made it clear that you don’t necessarily need to be tagged in a picture for Facebook (or anyone else) to work out that it’s you. Unfortunately, many companies still insist on using terrible verification methods (*cough* Apple *cough*) to identify yourself – a weak system that can be exploited by the easy availability of personal data. I mean, postcode? birthdate? phone number? Who on Earth thought those were secure pieces of information? So your friends’ data protection policies should be borne in mind. Are they being sensible about the way they share data that includes you? Can you invite a known loose-hand to a private event?

I thought about this today as I was setting up some encryption on my computers – a long overdue task. Because the content of my hard drive does not only concern me. To give an example, a close friend and avid urban explorers has, despite some close scrapes, managed to avoid attracting the attention of police despite finding his way into hundreds of forbidden areas, including a number of sensitive government-controlled sites.  However, when another group of explorers found themselves staring down the barrels of CO19′s sub-machine guns during an ill-advised jaunt into a disused London tube station, their cameras and hard drives were confiscated and picked over by the authorities. Although my friend has been careful to avoid direct contact with police, these hard drives contain plenty of photos of him from shared trips. Now, should he ever be picked up, it would be easy for diligent police officer to connect him with a number of other trespasses, turning one infraction into many. Ideally, everyone involved should have been encrypting their hard drives and taking stringent data-protection measures, but aside from being impossible to enforce, it would only take a single weak link to expose the group, making such efforts rather fragile.

So, if you’re anything less than a model citizen, the question is: are your friends taking privacy as seriously as you?

today i reading about the Victoria Hall disaster of 1883, in which 183 children were crushed to death in a stampede for free toys. they’d pressed into a stairwell that descended to a single, inward-hinged door that had been bolted from the inside. once the crush began, it was impossible for adults outside to unlock the door. after the tragedy, laws were passed to ensure safer  buildings which notably resulted in the development of the push-bar emergency exit.

this got me thinking about design from disaster. there was nothing to prevent the development of the push-bar exit in 1882, but of course it took a national tragedy to catalyze the public and political will to make it happen.   there are plenty of other technologies birthed by similar events, and retrospectively we can put a human price on those innovations. to wit, the push-bar emergency exit cost 183 dead children. watertight decks and bow-door indicators on roll-on, roll-off ferries required 193 lives, lost on the Herald of Free Enterprise. Improved stadium design required the loss of 96 lives at Hillsborough. Workplace safety standards in New York: 146 lives (in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire). in 1859, Met Office gale warnings were incepted following the loss of 325 ships and 748 lives in the space of two weeks.  

you could say that all of these were disasters waiting to happen, and in a sense they were predictable, but in most cases it took a combination of simultaneous conditions, errors and oversights to happen, the low chances of which helped mask the threat of disaster. it hadn’t happened before, until it did.

so we might say that there’s a certain element of design from disaster in the progress of our technologies. what can we say about this pattern of design - are technologies rushed through instead of grown organically? do these weigh too heavily on trying to solve a disaster that’s already occurred, and in that single minded focus, is there a potential for lost opportunities to prevent future crises? if this punctuated development is the case, i think the kind of technology it produces is worthy of study. and finally, there ought to be role for futurists in predicting disasters needed to advance certain technologies. if that stark message isn’t enough to push legislators to action (and who wants to be the politician who ignored Cassandra’s prophecy?), it might at least help us develop strategies that don’t require huge loss of life to implement better, safer societies.