Revolutions in transportation technologies have always cut time, distances and costs, changing society in the process.

Though billed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as “the future of aviation,” drones offer a much more expansive and exciting future.

Oh, The Places Drones Will Go

Though drones are already bringing change to industries, from Hollywood to agriculture, their real impact remains in the future. Let’s quickly survey how drone technology is changing the commercial and military landscape.

Military—Drones are already used for intelligence gathering and firing weapons “over the horizon.” One future development will be integrating AI and drones to gather more precise information about the battlefield and potentially ushering in non-human battlefield decision-making.

Package Delivery—Already companies like Walmart and Amazon are experimenting with digital transformation, delivering packages by drone as a means of quicker, cheaper delivery at lower environmental cost. More importantly, drones are beginning to be used to transport medicines to rural and inaccessible areas around the world, helping to save lives.

Inspections and Safety—Drones can be used for a wide variety of industries and government agencies to inspect sites and provide security. For example, large ranches no longer need to send out workers to ride the property boundaries for broken fences. Construction companies can use drones to gather data to identify defects far faster and cheaper than on-site human inspection. Drones can also be used to detect gas leaks in the millions of miles of pipelines here and abroad.

Industrial Uses—Drones will increasingly be used on private grounds to automate warehouses or deliver parts and supplies to production lines at the moment they are needed.

The Impact on Society

Similar to how the Internet and the smartphone changed the way individuals interact and view the world around them, drones may have a similar societal impact—both positive and negative.

The biggest concern is whether individual privacy will be further eroded by a future of overhead drones with cameras and other data gathering capabilities. In view of the lessons learned with social media platforms, a drone future will be best served when policymakers create a legal framework that helps people feel protected from privacy breaches and misuse—preferably before their widespread use.

It’s exceedingly difficult to project how drones will transform the way we view our world and interact with it, as well as what the impact of those changes will be (who thought social media could become so toxic?). One thing is for certain … the increase in technology and drone use allows people the chance to see places, people and things from vantage points never previously available.

Please reference disclosures: https://blog.americanportfolios.com/disclosures/