BVLOS

Interested to read in today's FT about the drone industry being opened up for the testing of flying drone missions which are beyond the visual line of sight of the flier. Which I take to mean that rather than having to stand at the perimeter fence of an airfield in order to fly one's drone over the airfield, we might, in the not too distant future, be able to do the same thing from some comfortable office (or perhaps bunker), pretty much anywhere in the world. With the company at reference 1 being very much in the frame for this sort of thing.

Now I can see that using drones to inspect some large and expensive bit of infrastructure, quite possibly not very accessible in the ordinary way of things, might be very attractive. Perhaps, for example, to check the state of the paint on the first Forth Bridge without actually having to go to the bother at looking at it for real. 

But I don't know what Sees.ai propose to do at the large building site above, snapped from their website. Is the idea for the various foremen to use drones to check up on their chaps, without having to leave the comfort of the tea hut?

And then we have all the people like BH, who was infuriated a few years ago by a drone from an estate agent coming over our house while she was taking a snooze in our back garden. What about if someone a couple of houses up the road elects to start getting all their medicines delivered by drone? How can you tell that it is delivering medicines rather than, for example, taking the temperature of your roof, this last being a well tried way of detecting roof gardens? Or checking up that you have not lopped or otherwise damaged a listed tree? Where will it all end?

Plus I worry about our doing away with more and more jobs. Is it really so clever to be getting rid of lots of delivery jobs at a time when I believe it is going to be increasingly hard to offer satisfactory employment to everybody? And what about all those rock climbers who leverage their heads for heights doing rope work on big buildings? We only have to look at the various trouble spots around the world to see what happens when you have too many underemployed young men - young men who, generally speaking, are not keen on becoming care workers. Picking Brussels sprouts on freezing cold fens maybe, washing the demented, no.

A worry that first surfaced near me perhaps 55 years ago, in the context of automating much of what had been skilled engineering work, for example the operation of complicated machine tools up north. And I am sorry to say that I paid little attention to the chap who raised this one. While my mother worried about the hollowing out of the working class of her youth by the provision of opportunities for all, by making a lot of the people who might otherwise have become warehouse managers or foreman bricklayers into accountants. A slightly awkward point, but a point nonetheless. A point famously addressed, after a fashion, at reference 2.

Reference 1: https://www.sees.ai/.

Reference 2: Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - 1932.