Good News: Drones Won't Be Bothering The One Percent

Do Creeper Drones Have Rights? That's what I asked you a few weeks ago, and surprisingly there was a fair bit of interest in the question.

I still don't know what the answer is to that question, but when I say that I mean "I don't know what the ethical answer will be." I'm going to tell you what the actual answer is, and if you're a drone "pilot" you won't want to hear it.

Everybody from Jane's to WIRED is reporting on Boeing's drone-killing laser. If the weapon can see the drone --- and the weapon can see as far as you can with binoculars --- the drone is going down. And it can kill the drone in many fascinating ways, some of which would be hard to distinguish as deliberate from the wreckage.

This weapon is a, ahem, "peace dividend" from larger Boeing efforts to target missiles and combat-sized UAVs with laser energy, and look for it to be thrown in as a freebie for governments who buy the anything from a 747 Cargo to the aforementioned major-league laser. Right now it needs a human operator to identify the drone but it locks and tracks without further assistance. In the future, the software that runs it will identify drones at a mile's distance and cheerfully drop them.

Given some recent drones-dropping-drugs-over-prisons incidents, this is just the ticket for our ever-expanding prison-industrial complex to spend a couple hundred million dollars for non-rehabilitative purposes. O Brave New World!

You, on the other hand, will go to jail if you use a shotgun on a drone. You prole, you. If you want an image of the future, imagine a drone stomping on a human face, forever.