Unmanned & Automated Aircraft: Are We Getting Too Smart for Our Own Good?

According to the The Daily Planet, the blog of Air & Space Smithsonian, in November troops in Afghanistan will likely be resupplied by the K-Max, an automated cargo helicopter. The video is from a test earlier this year where the unmanned helo exceeded the Navy’s requirement to carry at least 6,000 pounds of cargo per day for five days. Over that period, the K-Max delivered 33,400 pounds of cargo to different locations on a single flight, and nearly 3,500 pounds on one mission.

Not the Navy’s only unmanned aircraft project, its carrier-based stealth UAV, the X-47B, made its first flight earlier this year. I think most will agree that flying a helicopter, especially in squirrely mountain winds, and carrier ops are two of aviation’s more difficult challenges.

So what future do you see for more prosaic forms of flight now that machines are taking over from humans in military operations? And before you dismiss the question, consider this headline in the November 27 Los Angeles Times: Idea of Civilians Using Drone Aircraft May Soon Fly with FAA.

A more pressing question should be, even though we can do this, should we? Have we gotten too smart for our own good? On one hand, the technology and its capabilities are really cool. But what are the consequences, and have we considered them, especially for civilian applications? If history offers us a clue, the answer is clearly a nope.

Since the Industrial Revolutionmachines have replaced an ever increasing spectrum of human effort. This isn’t a bad thing in all circumstances. On the good side it can protect humans from dangerous or boring occupations; on the not so good side, it unemploys people. And with no way to make a living, good or otherwise, people replaced by machines cannot afford the goods and services machines make more quickly and economically.

In aviation this means that one day in the not too distant future pilots will be minimum wage earners who fly a computer screen in a cubicle at some repurposed suburban strip mall. And like their neighbors, they will not be able to partake of the flying bus services they provide to others who earn more than their minimum wage. If you doubt this, project the trend of pilot pay over the last two decades.

And it will come to pass, unless all the humans involved, especially those with power to make decisions, consider more than their own narrowly focused bottom-line and bonus needs and zoom out to see the consequences of their desires. That might happen, but given the history of human nature, any one of us has a better chance of buying a winning Powerball lottery ticket whose prize is some obscene amount.

If you doubt this, may I recommend The War Prayer, a powerful and eloquent essay on human nature by Mark Twain. To summarize, a messenger from God confronts a Sunday congregation with the “full import” of their prayer for victory in some unspecified conflict. Winners cannot exist without losers. A blessing for one is a curse for another.

“When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results that must follow it,”says the messenger. After giving graphic voice to the unspoken consequences for victory, God’s messenger beseeches the congregation, “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High awaits.”

Twain’s final sentence is, perhaps, the most succinct and often used rationalization to support self-serving self-interest: “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.” These are words worth contemplating before making any decision that carries us all, winners and losers, into the future. — Scott Spangler