At last year’s Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International show in New Orleans, the association announced, with flourish, that this year’s convention would be called Xponential 2017. And so it is. The sentiment is obvious and justified, given the apparent growth and potential for unmanned systems. AUVSI’s current catch phrase is: All Things Unmanned. I’d add this parenthetical: Yeah, but most of them fly.
I’d say the plurality if not the majority of technical sessions dealt with unmanned aircraft systems and so do the largest number of vendor displays. So many, in fact, that it takes a leap of imagination to believe that all of those systems are going to find applications and business to sustain them. More on that later.
At the opening day keynote on Tuesday, Intel’s Brian Krzanich lived up to his reputation as a dazzling wizard of technology by weaving gadget demos into his presentation. When commanded, the Loomo Segway robot he had ridden onto the stage duly went to fetch the water he asked for. Krzanich showed videos highlighting the autonomy tech Intel has already produced or is working on. As I mentioned in the news coverage, the only hitch was that he dropped the slide clicker delivered to him by a drone eight feet above the stage. I can’t be certain, but it looked to me like he sandbagged the catch just to make the point that the only weak link in autonomous systems is at the human interface.
Humans like me will need to make certain accommodations in the language. For example, Krzanich said he has been driving an autonomous car for several years and that once people drive such cars, they’ll never want to go back to the way things were. Wait a minute. How can you drive an autonomous car? You ride in it, but don’t drive it and you barely operate it. Clearly, some rethinking will be necessary.
As would be expected, Krzanich is a high priest of the benefits of advancing technology. At the end of his talk, he briefly addressed the grand societal benefits of automation, such as drones that can survey a disaster area after a flood and quickly locate surviving victims so they can be rescued in time. When he was demonstrating the impressively capable Falcon 8+ drone inspecting a bridge Intel erected in the hall just for the purpose, I couldn’t help but wonder about both the wonder of the technology and the human displacements it will cause.
Consider this: That little drone, for $40,000, will inspect a bridge faster, cheaper and more effectively than then, say, the six people who are doing the job now. The software will automatically find faults and flaws they might miss during a routine visual inspection. One or two of those guys will be trained to operate the drone, but what about the other four or five? Krzanich’s view is that the river of data advancing autonomy will create will also spin off new businesses and jobs we can’t even imagine now. Maybe. Maybe not. I doubt if anyone can even hazard a reliable guess. I certainly can’t. But I would say this: the kids in class who aren’t paying attention stand a good chance of being left for dead in the emerging autonomy economy. (Yeah, it rhymes. More adjustments.)
I wouldn’t expect Krzanich to pause the creative process to consider this, for inventors and visionaries have rarely done that. I’ve been reading a biography of Thomas Edison (The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Edison Invented the Modern World, by Alexander Kennedy) that, coincidentally, is the perfect backgrounder for covering this show. As Edison completed his epic struggle to commercialize electric lighting, he gave not a thought to the gas lighting workers whose jobs his invention would eliminate. Well, actually he did. He hated the gas companies because he thought them arrogant in a way that only monopolies can be. If Brian Krzanich has similar sentiments about bridge inspectors, he kept them to himself.
