Droning On

We're only hours away from the drone-pocalypse, or Christmas as it's also known. Authorities are worried about the growing number of drones out there (or more precisely, about the growing number of idiots with access to drones) and  there'll likely be many more after they unwrap them Christmas morning.

As if to punctuate the fears, a drone fell out of the sky at a ski race and narrowly missed a skier. That was a big and presumably professional drone, so one has to worry what happens when they become widespread. People have enough trouble driving, and now we're giving them another dimension to deal with.

Of course, this is another symptom of our modern society, where inventions spread too fast for us to properly deal with them. Take cars for instance: people talk about the revolution brought on by the Model-T, but that was preceded by decades of cars as curiosities for the rich or whatever-they-called-nerds-then. That allowed society a bit of a heads-up. Imagine if Karl Benz had got his automobile patent, then a couple of years later, there are Chinese knock-offs everyone can afford.

One has wonder what's going to become of drones in society. I was - and still am - skeptical on their predicted use for deliveries. But if I'm wrong, there's going to have to be some organisation to stop the Amazon drones from hitting the FedEx drones. No, I'm not imagining Jetsons-style roads in the sky, with neat but fast streams of flying machines. Really, with some sort of computer air-traffic control, it will likely look more chaotic to us. But if this does come to pass, it will be the latest way modern civilization has changed the look of the world. At least it will be prettier than asphalt.