What Happens if You "Drop a Frozen Chicken"

The following is part of a presentation given to the Lockheed Martin Executive Lunch where I was the key note speaker in June 2015. The format and content has been altered and condensed to make it into a written presentation:

The press loves to talk about spy drones, and pizza delivery but all the hard and difficult questions have not really been asked or addressed, and I hope to address a few here.

We have just passed into a new era of UAVs that has been under-reported and little discussed – the era of the trained pilot died quietly with hardly a mention. The social and economic implications of "anyone can build" and "anyone can fly" are as dramatic and monumental is the birth of internet, the PC revolution, and I will argue more important than the coming of the-space-age itself to the average person.

Lets begin where many good aviation stories start – with the Nazi's. In 1937 the Germans proposed a remote controlled UAV the Argus As 292 for use as an anti-aircraft target and also as a surveillance aircraft. It flew in 1939. Not to be outdone the Americans also have their own OQ-3 which was the radio-controlled target drone which was produced in great numbers in the USA and which flew also in 1939.

The Germans however took the idea a step further and in 1939 proposed a remote controlled flying bomb, which would later be designated the V1. The actual production model was not remote controlled as this was in the end unnecessary. The relevant information here is that the V1 was as effective manned aircraft and at a fraction of the cost to the Germans in terms of their cost to wage war. One could argue that this was the birth of the UAV or Drone revolution.

What do you call Adolf Hitler in Silicon Valley terms? He is an "early adopter".

An early adopter is someone who can see an immediate benefit from using a technology today. The relevant information here is that the V1 was as effective manned aircraft and at a fraction of the cost to the Germans in terms of their cost to wage war. One could argue that this was the birth of the UAV or Drone revolution.

Another man, who like Adolf Hitler, likes to consider himself an "early adopter" is Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon.com. For the record I am not calling Bezos who is Jewish a Nazi, rather an early adopter with a "temperament".

Lets look at what Amazon says:

Now lets talk reality. Reality is that unless you are ordering a memory stick or GPS jammer not much is going to fit into that silly yellow box that drone is carrying.

A UPS driver can deliver any size or weight package with great efficiency and they can do it safely.

Lets assume a UPS Drone delivers just 1/120th of what a driver can do or 55,000 flights, cost would be much lower $0.25 per trip but would not have the range of delivery, the weight capacity, and if it were so reliable they only failed 1 out of 1000 times = 55 crashes per day over densely populated areas.

If 1 out of 200 crashes results in personal injury = 1 injury every 3.64 days. = 100 injuries a year = what cost? TBD

Realistic numbers are a failure rate of 1 in 1000 or 350 crashes per day for Amazon if 10% of their packages go via Drone, and because small UAV's being airborne are more prone to navigational, environmental, and electronic failure than an all weather vehicle that travels on the ground. The economics don't make sense and may never will make sense at all.

I know many people will point out there are flaws in the above UPS, Amazon, last mile freight calculations and there clearly are because those companies do not openly share data, yet the overall conclusion is the same - The drone is not going to be cost effective. Even a drone delivering scalding hot wonton soup from your neighborhood Chinese restaurant is unlikely to happen anytime because when failure happens, and it will happen, it can and will be far far worse than the bike driver.

Now lets turn to a real world industry that can benefit from Drones and has been at the forefront of early adoption – Drug Smugglers.

Lets do the economics.

It cost $11,000 per kilo cost to move cocaine over the boarder between the USA and Mexico. A drone capable of moving a kilo of cocaine cost less than $1,000. The era of needing people and tunnels is over and they are already being used.

Lets look at another group of potential early adopters – Human trafficking

Do you think drones can't lift a human? They can go look on youtube.

These cost more money, but again for cost of a single trip you can buy one and cut out the middle man! You can just fly yourself illegally where you want to go. Everyone listen up because the anti-drone boarder defense contract is coming in the next 2 years. The perimeter low and slow down facing radar will be a big contract to "secure our borders" from evil. Let me point out that the boarder defense contract I just spoke of will be canceled within 5 years when Mexican children are shot down and fall out of the sky in California, because in the end there is no stopping it. There is one thing to track, another to intercept.

What does this all mean? Historically the cost of getting into the sky has been very high.

It means that the key component of getting an aircraft from point a to point b has historically been a human pilot. We spend millions of dollars training them to do a great job. Now the job of the pilot and navigator has been distilled to a cheap micro processor that cost less than $100. From $6M to $100 dollars in just 7 years. This is huge! This is massive! This is not to be underestimated!

Lets go back to the V1. The Operational modern version of the V1 is the cruise missile. at only $1.6M each! Weighs 1300 kilos and has a 10 meter accuracy, it can even loiter now above the target waiting. It's so amazing that here is a 400 gram plane built 6 years ago that actually does the same thing (see this link, and yes there are many such systems now but this is 6 years ago! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmkTZxOe-bE)

OMG! Say it isn't so! Tell me that the defense industry can do better than a flying Roomba?Because yes the company the company that made the vacuum cleaner makes drones too. The answer is not any more. The civilian sector can even do it better. Cheaper, faster, and the implications are really kind of frightening

There you have it. We went from Trained pilot to drone to a guy with an iphone from 10m accuracy to 10cm accuracy in less than ten years. The future is upon us. Airspace is now public space. You need more training today to drive a car than you do to fly somewhere and interact with something. The social impacts of this are huge! What we need to be thinking about is what we learned from the internet. This is what we learned from the internet:

The levels of hate speech on the Internet are ever increasing, says theEuropean Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI)in its annual report released on 25 October 2013. "...as more and more platforms for commentary on websites become available,racist messages are being scattered throughout the Internet."

What I am proposing is that the future release that hasn't yet happened will one day look just like this. "The levels of hate crime via autonomous vehicle are ever increasing, says the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) in its annual report released on 25 October 2018." Don't agree? Wait and see what hate groups do with the drone.

The internet allowed people to act in anti-social ways by virtue of their feeling secure and hidden in their homes. Now the UAV or Drone will do the same exact thing.

WE HAVE ENTERED THE ERA OF FORCED ANONYMOUS INTERACTION:

The drone can kill you and it doesn't need to carry a gun or a bomb. You can drop a frozen chicken on someone from 100 feet up, or onto their car from 300 feet up, with lethal effect. People can now act out the same things they "think" and do it with little fear of being caught. This is a game changer. Watch what grows in the next four years and be aware that along with it there will be anti-drone tech and laws, yet in the end it wont matter because we are already living in this age,

In this race to the bottom there will be moral and immoral uses for the technology. We can not hope to bottle the immoral acts up, we can not hope to legislate them away, but we can choose to also use some of this technology for the human good and be aware of what is coming too.

What Happens if You "Drop a Frozen Chicken"

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/social-impacts-drones-uav-business-drug-trafficking-crime-jon-kitzen

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