While civil democrats nationwide warn regarding the rise of many states making use of unauthorized drones, municipalities and jurisdictions across the nation are taking full benefit of the technology much to the damage of privacy. The current restrictions on the amount of time a drone can spend in the air are directly linked to the amount of fuel energy an aerial vehicle without fleet is capable of carrying. If realized, this new Boeing patent could change radically or fundamentally the way drones are controlled and utilized. According to the patent, tending to remind something straight out of the Matrix movies, the new system would include drones powered by battery, which would position a tether that is able to connect to a power source. The aerial vehicle without fleet would remain in one place in the air as the tether connected to the energy source. Once fully charged, it would fly off and carry on its pre-programmed task, with other drones taking their place at the charging station. The drone would have the ability to make use of ocean and land-based power stations and would even have the ability of recharging while in flight. The Boeing patent initially filed back in 2013, which was approved this week. There is definitely a list of well intended uses for these drones, like giving wifi or other communications signals to remote areas. However, the US government is great at figuring out all the dangerous ways to put into effect such technology.
A future with pre-programmed automated flying drones which do not require to land except for maintenance could result in a dismal imaginary reality for humanity if handled by the military industrial complex. The use of swarm algorithms in relation to autonomous drone fleets, when taken in concert with substantial advances in AI capabilities, has the capacity to make the unimaginable a reality. While the creation of a more effective means of charging a fleet of drones seems a simple way on the surface to centralize the technology, the long-term implications for civil liberties and privacy could be highly destructive. To the list of concerns add the supply of domestic drones and you have a recipe for disaster. As a society do we really believe in a large group of independent drones, potentially armed, which could almost never need leave the sky in theory? The thought of the “Sentinels” from the Matrix movies immediately comes to mind when inspecting in detail the potential future implications of this newly patented drone. There are no comments from Boeing whether they decide to put these systems into production, and according to the Business Insider, the proposed system only “exists on the drawing board.” Do we truly accept that DARPA hasn’t already heavily invested in this technology? Do you think independent flying drones that almost never need to land are a good thing or are they the next step in our action of moving downward into a dark Orwellian future?
