Now, drones aren’t our usual area of expertise. At Kino we are much more at home in your home than above it. But with the release of the Poke drone and the continuing up’s and downs (yes that was a drone joke) of Amazons delivery system we thought it was a good time to chip in. I’m sure everyone knows what a drone is, and I bet you even know some of their biggest problems. From invading air space, casing homes for robberies and of course their military uses, we can see that drones have been getting a fair bit of bad press over the last few years. But isn’t that to be expected ? Every new technology gets bad press, TV was called out as “the triumph of machine over people”, mobile phones as the end of real conversation, and even radio had (and still has) it’s critics. I’m quite sure that when we first bashed two bits of flint together, someone will have pointed out that fire might burn down the world. But that’s the thing isn’t it, progress is and always has been dangerous. But it’s not nearly as dangerous as standing still, especially when there’s all these fast moving drones about. Now I am not saying there won’t be challenges, if a few thousand delivery drones take the sky it’s going to have an impact on the world. Everything from birds to privacy will be on the news as “the world falls to pieces”…. for about a month and then we can watch them, like every other piece of tech become just an everyday part of life, filling their own niche.
Will drones take off?
Yes, but not in the ways you might think. I have no doubt Amazon will continue to push delivery, but I don’t think it is ever going to replace it’s alternatives. It will be a luxury option that will be reserved for items that need to be there asap, this might even help with organ transplant one day. Where I really think drones will take off is in the arts and technical work. Photography, mapping and surveying have all having really taken to drones. Being able to access high areas to assess damage or wear, checking in on rare bird nests to make sure no one has taken their eggs and even taking pictures of hard to reach city spaces. These are just a few of the uses they have had over the last few years, and which ever way you look at it drones are playing a big part in our future. In each of these cases drones save us time and money, turning them into an essential tool in a lot of emerging industries. I think over the next decade we will see drones become part of the norm in ways we can’t even think about yet, one thing is for certain, they are not going away any time soon. 