Alix: [00:00:00] Welcome to Computer Says maybe this is your host, Alex Dunn, and in this episode we are going to our next terrain. This guy with Dr. Julia Powells, who is an academic at the University of Western Australia. She does lots of cool stuff. This is one project she's working on. If you haven't seen her work, look her up.

She's cool. This episode is specifically focused on research that she and others within her center have done on the new frontier of the sky, and how lots of companies have decided that maybe you want to order a coffee to be delivered to your backyard by drone in the next five minutes. Personally, I'm not that excited about that future, but also as we've learned in lots of different places and lots of different sectors, companies.

Just like wanting to do something seems to be enough to make that thing happen. So we're gonna unpack what research they've done in Australia, what community resistance is happening to combat the rollout of these drone highways in the sky, I guess, for lack [00:01:00] of a better word, and sort of what it looks like to fight this fake, inevitable future thing that happens when there's a bunch of venture capital that goes to a project.

That's kind of a bad idea. So with that, Julia Powell's and I unpacking drones, delivery Australia, all things laws of the sky.

Julia: My name's Julia Powells. I'm a law professor at the University of Western Australia, where I direct the UWA Tech and Policy Lab. We're an interdisciplinary research center. Both building technology and thinking about its regulation. And we have a particular interest in technologies beyond the screen. So technologies that are on our bodies, in our bodies, carrying our bodies, observing our bodies.

And one of the areas [00:02:00] we've researched for the last six, seven years is delivery drones. They fascinate me because they are such a visceral incursion into our lives. The policy space around them is really. Emergent and needs really critical thinking. I think it challenges lots of our ideas about tech inevitability and resistance, and it's been a really exciting area to work on.

I really have had a long interest in looking at specific tech companies. I. Especially, uh, Facebook, Google, and Uber, and how they're expanding into new markets. And this particular expansion is one that is a story essentially driven by Google and its expansion into now becoming the platform of the sky.

Uh, which having studied how Google expands into areas like health and cities, uh, and education, I think it's a really warring prospect what this particular company will do when it has control of their space. [00:03:00]  

Alix: Okay, well let's start at the beginning. So Australia is like a famously not dense place. Um, everybody lives kind of all over the place except for lots of people who live in cities on the coasts.

Is that generally right? Yeah. On the coast looking out. Yeah. Okay. So basically if you wanna get something delivered in Australia, it's difficult. I imagine generally, I mean kind of like everywhere, but the lack of density feels like, is that a one of the driving things here of like we need to innovate?  

Julia: I mean, we've been very rapid adopters of Uber Eats, to my surprise and disappointment we have, yeah.

Really embraced the food delivery market. It's lots of satellite cities and a sprawling population, people with backyards where these drones can deliver delivery. Drones are one of those features of our collective imagination of the future from the Jetsons to. Contemporary ideas of how do we take a military [00:04:00] technology and make it a civilian one.

But it's been this failed project. We've been promised flying cars and delivery drones for at least a decade, but in the last five years, this has really taken off and actually it's taken off. Principally in Australia and also in Ireland, although still in relatively modest scale in both places, but it is coming very seriously for the us.

'cause the US is the market that. Drives food delivery. It is much better set up for it in all sorts of ways in terms of the distribution of cities and merchants that would like to be able to get people supplies that they're currently paying to have delivered by vans and motorbikes and people. It's a very attractive economic proposition to replace all that labor with little drones that buzz around and deliver you single cups of coffee or cokes or frozen burgers in three minutes.

Alix: I immediately think this is a waking nightmare, like how it's an  

Julia: absolute [00:05:00] nightmare,  

Alix: like immediately, but I don't understand. Okay, so you keep explaining how this vision has been developed, but to me it seems like I go straight to why this would be terrible.  

Julia: I mean, I do too. I been concerned about it and sort of actually have this bit of a dilemma, Alex, about how much to talk about it because in some way.

My assumption is that people will think this is a collective dystopia, but actually the adoption rates in places where these drones are available are really high, and there's some distorting market realities of that like. You don't have to pay for it. So you just pay for the cost of goods. And there's the novelty factor of being able to get it by drone.

But let me wind back. So the company that has now made this a reality in a number of cities globally, still at small scale is Google. So Google has had a project in delivery drones for over a decade, and they actually started testing on Australian farms. They tested in the US on some campuses at Virginia Tech.

And then in a more serious way, [00:06:00] since 2017, they've been working in, ironically, the Australian capital, which is where they have shut down, and in a more remote region in Queensland. Delivery drones, I think, have been marketed in various jurisdictions as being able to deliver on essential goods. So whether it's blood supply, pharmaceuticals, medical defibrillators, and so on.

But the market that has taken off in Australia and in Ireland, so the two companies wing, and now it's Competitor Manor, which is an Irish startup. Their number one delivery is coffee and the unit economics of coffee. I think terrifying in how they may enclose the sky. It's a daily demand for people to get.

Hot coffee. It is not a prospect at all that you could currently get a coffee delivery by road. And so the companies that are looking at aerial logistics are thinking that it is the use case. The killer app as [00:07:00] the CEO of Manna says, is delivering cups of coffee in a few minutes for a few dollars to a family that might order several coffees, some pastries, and those.

Drones don't require anything more than the coffee maker and someone who, for a minute loads the drone with a little package that then scoots to your house at 60 miles an hour in low airspace and drops off the coffee several minutes later. So that is the use case that in Australia and Ireland in these cities has taken off.

But there's also been a very interesting story of resistance, and it's one of the things that. Those two companies don't like to talk about, which is what is the reality for people living in neighborhoods where your least agreeable neighbor is ordering all afternoon long, you know, fried chicken and milkshakes.

How do you navigate those dynamics? How do you navigate the dynamics when you have a child that is [00:08:00] particularly vulnerable to noise? How do you navigate the reality of walking in your local park? Where there's disturbance to insects, birds and wildlife from these drones. The story of resistance really parallels.

I think what we've seen with cities where you've got the deployment of data centers and the very real material effects of having this. Intrusion into your lived environment.  

Alix: I mean, if there's more than one of them, it would be deeply irritating.  

Julia: I think the, the market only works if there's more than one of them, and this is one of those, exactly.

Alix: Yeah.  

Julia: Side of hands of the companies, they love to talk of techno fixes and it's amazing. The playbook is the same globally. So the line of the industry is, well, we've made the drones quieter, we've put them higher up in the sky. We change the propellers, so there's less disturbance. By the way, we've had so few complaints.

It's really interesting. Their metric of community tolerance as they describe it, is [00:09:00] the number of complaints received. And I don't know about you, but it takes me a fair while before I get to the point of actually registering a complaint, and it doesn't mean it's not. Totally annoying and totally intrusive.

Alix: Yeah. By the time I've made a complaint, I am fucking pissed.  

Julia: Exactly. Exactly.  

Alix: So like I, yeah, I don't think that's a very good measure of this. Yeah.  

Julia: At all. And yeah, that's exactly what's happening in these cities. So essentially, the story of the rollout in various cities has been. A bit of greasing the local councils and so on who get flown to Silicon Valley to see this whizzbang technology and how smooth these drones are, how they're electric and you know, low emissions and this sort of false equivalence that now they're gonna replace road transit rather than new wandering down to a coffee shop.

And then they. Essentially write these love letters from cities to these companies. Come develop your operations. In our city delivery operation is seen as just an extension of your average warehouse, [00:10:00] notwithstanding that it's gonna suddenly put these vehicles in the sky. At the order of up to 10,000 drones a day over a city, that's when the economics actually work for these companies in the moment, they're all lost leaders.

Manna has just started to turn a profit on its coffee deliveries in Dublin, but essentially you have to be able to get to scale for this market to work. And so at the moment, they're testing with some socially beneficial uses that help people see, oh, well maybe we do wanna have drones like medical emergency, drone delivery.

By far and away the biggest use of these drones is for on demand consumer goods. In Dallas-Fort Worth, during the Super Bowl, they were saying, well, you know, isn't this great? You can just get limes if you need them free, uh, guacamole. And there we go. There's, there's the future of the city. Have you had something delivered?

Well, ironically, when we went and met with Logan City Council, which proudly wears the T-shirt for being. The drone delivery capital of the world with a few hundred [00:11:00] thousand drone deliveries. It's a outer suburb of the city of Brisbane. We met with the council officials and in an act that I think they thought was destined to impress, they ordered a single bottle of water packet of what we call in Australia, lollies or candy.

A Coke that came in a separate box. And so we go out the front of the council office this absolute din. As the drone comes flying in, hovers overhead, noisily lowers the package, and then proudly these council officials bring over the contained goods, which is a bottle of water and a packet of candy. And it just is indicative of the kind of novelty feeling of the deliveries.

When we then followed some of the drones to try to identify where they were all coming from, there was initially a warehouse operation where essentially a really grim setup where you have stacks of consumer goods inside a a [00:12:00] warehouse. You have some guys making coffee and a windowless shed, and then sending these drones out on a hot roof.

Where they're running out every few minutes to carry a little package with someone's burger or whatever up into the sky. We tracked back, well, how do things get into the warehouse? And of course, in the morning there's still a big van that is driving things from the retailers. Then keeping it in storage in these warehouses for the day.

So there's a lot of promise about how this is this super efficient delivery from the producer to the consumer. And I think the reality of it still is very materially intensive in a way that would probably undermine any of the environmental claims that are made. About this kind of delivery?  

Alix: Yeah, I mean, again, like I just immediately am like, this is a terrible idea.

I don't know, like the acceleration of consumerism at a time when basically the primary conversation is us barreling towards climate catastrophe. Like I kind of thought, if I'm honest, like [00:13:00] two or three years ago that they would be a. VC reality check about the 15 minute to an hour delivery thing so that like I wanna get something delivered same day as a value proposition.

I kind of thought that we would just like grow out of that as a society, and it feels like we kind of have, but that the business models and investors are basically like the only vector for making more money is by jacking up quote unquote, like convenience to like a laughable. Degree, I don't know. It's kind of like Catherine Bray's book that basically we now apply a tremendous amount of pressure scale resourcing to things that aren't actually useful or innovative, using an old logic that if we had a breakthrough technology, I.

That would transform society, that if you applied risk capital to it, that that would ultimately make you money, but also be beneficial. But we've like lost the first part of the formula. We're just like seeking a [00:14:00] hundred x returns and then getting this like very shallow endorphin hit business model strategy.

And this just feels like such a good example of that. And that in five years we're gonna look back and be like, what? Who makes money? Who, because they must know this, like, so who makes money if and when this all fails, do you think?  

Julia: Well, I don't know who makes money when it fails. My worry, two or three years ago, I hoped and thought this would fizzle, and I'm now really worried it's not going to.

I don't think the drone technology is that interesting. I mean, mostly it's used for the worst kind of application in military settings. I started to work in this area about six, seven years ago because I saw these trials in Australia, and I've done a number of deep dives into Google, specifically moving into new markets where it has no.

Particular background in areas like health, where they partnered with the NHS and other major public health providers with cities, and the whole sidewalk story that you've spoken about with Bianca. The move into drones fascinated me [00:15:00] because I don't think you have to explain the technology to people.

They can see it. They can hear it. It's an eye saw as well as being. A pain in the butt to listen to. The thing that has concerned me over recent years is that this food delivery market, which is estimated to be 5.2 billion orders a year globally, is something that has continued to grow in this last six, seven years, and economically doesn't make a lot of sense for that 15 minute to hour last mile delivery.

When it has the kind of road requirements of vehicles and drivers, and what the drones do is take down to a few percentage points of that cost, the actual cost of delivery. My worry about it is, can our consumer impulse for indulgence, can we inhibit that in any way? Because the net result is that for your convenience of getting a [00:16:00] coffee.

The entire city has to experience skies littered with drones carrying those damn coffees. So it's this really interesting collective problem. Now, we studied this in the city of Canberra, which is the national capital. Really interesting place where Google first delivered drones to commercial scale, and actually the residents of Benit, the first suburb where they launched.

Successfully shut down Google's operation. It's a story Google doesn't want told, and my collaborator, Anna Zenz, and I have written about it. And really this remarkable story of people who had never been organizers before. Activists who banded together across a wonderful array of talents from ex bureaucrats who were good at compiling a community newsletter and door knocking to an ex aviation expert.

Two young parents who were concerned about their children and their neighbors, and they managed to band together, I think, against the [00:17:00] core intrusion of these products, which isn't, oh look, just make them a bit quieter or a bit smaller, and then we can tolerate them. It's, we do not wanna have our skies.

Filled with commerce. That is not a proposition that is attractive to life in a city. There's a sort of fascinating philosophical dimension to this about, you know, what is the sky? My collaborator, Anna Z, is writing about this around, you know, isn't a commons that we need to collectively utilize? Is it an anti commons?

Is it something that is. Literally is the air on which we depend and on which whole habitats depend? Is it something that we actually should refuse to, which is my perspective at scale, build roads in the sky, which is very much the vision of these companies. It doesn't mean we don't have incidental, occasional, necessary uses of delivery drones here in Australia for things like shark spotting or water bombing for [00:18:00] wildfires.

But it doesn't mean that you suddenly put what is log jams on the street up in the sky. I mean, that just seems like the worst osis of our current city realities.  

Alix: I think it's interesting you mentioned the water bombing. I. I follow Fein Greenwood on Blue Sky. I don't know if you follow them, but like Epic posting, like frequent, amazing poster.

They're a drone expert who for years I've like learned minutia around drones because of things they've shared. There was this drone, aerial photography taken in like the third or fourth day of when the Pasadena fires were raging in la. And then all of these drone nerds come onto this thread and they're like, you are gonna go to jail, you motherfucker.

And I was like, oh my God. Like guys, like what? What is this? You're seeing like expert after expert, after expert saying this, you've committed a felony. The skies need to be clear for the purposes of [00:19:00] planes that are dropping water bombs on the city. And basically by doing this, you're essentially putting those missions at risk.

And actually an airplane was downed, I don't think permanently by a drone that hit it while it was trying to do one of these things. And it was probably a media drone trying to like take aerial imagery. And it was like the first time I thought about. Not the first time. I've seen drones in the air while on an airplane that was landing and you get that feeling of like, oh, I hope that doesn't come near us.

Um, but it was the first time I recognized that there are existing laws on the books about when drones can and can't fly, that there are like deep considerations about traffic and conflict in the air and like prioritization in the same way there is with sea traffic. But like, if I am a company that's trying to get a license to deliver 10,000 coffees a day, can I just like.

Julia: Do it just your, your mention around the fires. One of the images that's absolutely stayed with me in studying drones is I think from 2021 in Southern [00:20:00] California, and it's an image on a beach of 3000 abandoned eggs. When a rogue drone crashed in a ecological reserve, I think there were turns abandoned nesting, abandoning these 3000 birds.

It's just this site of desertion. And to your point about, well, how do we, who's sort of watching for this? The really scary part of our research has been actually the airspace is this fascinating legal area where you have. A degree of individual. I mean, in the US I still sort of have some hope for people's individual property interests and the fact that you're gun bearing citizens, but the aviation regulator for the nation is only interested in the safety of the drones.

So will they drop out of the sky? They're not interested in what are they doing with those drones? And we found this in Europe now and in Australia, where [00:21:00] commercial drone operators are getting licenses to fly. From seven or eight in the morning until nine at night doing continuous delivery next to takeout stores.

Completely changing the landscape of the places that they're in and changing very much the, the habitat of bird life and other species that, of course depend on the sky, not least humans. There's very little, from a legal perspective, that seems to be kicking in around this because the licensing conditions of those.

Commercial operators are really about can you establish safety? And what they're not about is what are the dimensions around nuisance noise, privacy, all of these other dimensions that, of course, the drone brings into our environment. And especially when it says, we've discussed that the scale of 10,000 drones, I mean, it is an, an absolute transformation of the urban environment or peri-urban where.

At the moment, there isn't solid [00:22:00] rules and regulations that you can point to that speak to a lot of the concerns that we have in urban environments. Like how do we appropriately differentiate residential neighborhoods from commercial ones? How do we appropriately manage the intrusions of noise and other impositions on, on good neighborly life?

It's just absent actually. And that absence is. What these companies are exploiting.  

Alix: But you would think, I mean, 'cause there's something about the sky immediately above property. No. Yes. But then it doesn't extend far enough to be able to. Give Democratic due process to sort of collectively deciding how the sky immediately above your neighborhood is used.

Julia: Yeah. And then the companies sort of think about things like building corridors, essentially rebuilding highway infrastructure. Google Wing has spoken about its operations in these terms of elevated highways in the sky, which would then reduce the degree of [00:23:00] overflight of certain neighborhoods. So then we all live under an overpass.

Yeah, exactly. Gross. Exactly. And curiously, the American aviation and regulator has been the slowest to move on these mainly because of concerns. There's rules, essentially drones break every rule we have for. Aviation safety, they overly homes and people, they involve going what's called bv, LOS, beyond visual line of sight to be able to deliver.

So you're not just standing there looking at the drone, it's, it's flying beyond the human vision. But I think it was expected for right at this time, actually, that the FAA will follow what the Europeans did several years ago and what Australia did years before that, which is to enable for commercial operators.

To be able to. Break those rules. Essentially the reason they're able to break those rules is they can demonstrate safety, they can demonstrate that those drones won't fall out of the sky. But of course, [00:24:00] none of the other features that we think are so essential and actually people expect that someone will be looking out for.

So this was the resistance movement in in Australia, which really articulated, we don't wanna be Guinea pigs to this commercial experiment with our quality of life, our lived environment. The kind of impacts it's had. People have PTSD from the drones constantly flying over their homes. It's a real incursion.

And the fact that you could do it without requiring any degree of community ascent is I think a really startling proposition. But it's happening now in Dallas Fort Worth, it's scaling. And here are a couple of things that I, I think are worrying. The companies are also partnering with major partners like Just Eats or Walmart is partnering with a wing in Dallas-Fort Worth to be able to do those deliveries.

So it's sort of moving the decision making. If you order from Walmart, you don't necessarily have the choice that it might now come by drone.  

Alix: Yeah. I mean, and I can [00:25:00] imagine in a tech. Adult brain that you would be like in the same way that now there's an expectation that you have a digital device. And so we're able to like nominally save costs on physical stuff.

So like cities don't pay to print maps anymore, which is actually really annoying. Um, so in all the ways that like digitization and like personal device use has led to a restructure of how resources are allocated around. Individual experience of the world, they probably in their heads are like, guys, you like your smartphones, you're gonna love these drones.

'cause then you won't need cars. It feels a bit like the Zuckerberg Metaverse mind breakdown, where it's like, I need to have a paradigm shifting idea. So any of my ideas I have to frame as paradigm shifting. And then if they're paradigm shifting, I can basically subvert any rules about them because. [00:26:00] I can then make the case as to why you've just gotta get on board, or it's like on you for not bringing about the future that makes everybody happier.

It feels like they're making the same calculation over and over again at increasing rates of speed about technology that isn't gonna do that, and that it's like they're reaching for the paradigm shift of jobs and like Steve Jobs not employment. And it's kind of  

Julia: sad. It's totally sad and I mean, I felt like.

There was an interview with the former CFO Shannon Nash of Wing that really articulated this for me, where he was describing what a transformation they were making by democratizing this guy. And she particularly spoke to how unsafe it is, Alex, to go and walk down the street on a sidewalk. Wouldn't it be safer if a drone delivered to you?

And it reminds me of that famous EM Foster short story. The machine stops. You know, where we think [00:27:00] 1910, where we're all living in this honeycomb of houses just connected to the machine, and the machine serves every material and intellectual need. We gradually become these translucent blobs, giving lessons to the world through our devices and receiving them and receiving goods.

That's the drone vision that we just are there.  

Eventually they want to break into the high rise market so that you have some landing pad for everyone's drones and you never have to leave your home. You can reduce the shame of having had a delivery driver come and knock on the door with your cold burger.

'cause now it'll be hot and no one will see you. And the what it does to. I think any of our collective spaces is really scarier. Friend's son had a, his 15th birthday to a pizza joint last year and was telling me that they sat for an hour, this group of increasingly rowdy 15 year olds, while the kitchen was just pushing out pizzas over and over, and eventually went up to the owner and said, [00:28:00] we're our pizzas.

And he said, I'm sorry if I don't push the Uber delivery to the top of the queue, they won't pay for it. So. This empty restaurant after an hour hadn't served. Its only in-person clientele because it's serving the sort of machine of externalized delivery. And I think that's, that's what will happen to our coffee shops with this vision because it's cost effective.

You don't have to pay for the cost of premises and baristas and. Front of house charm. You just turn them through a warehouse, put 'em in a drone, fill the sky, walk out to your balcony or your backyard. Welcome to the future.  

Alix: So gross. You know the hub and spoke like the idea of airlines. They're like hub and spoke airlines and direct airlines.

I think Ma basically all of them are hub and spoke. Now where? Fly Delta. You gotta go to Atlanta. Fly. What's the Australian airline? Qantas you gotta go to. Sydney, Melbourne. Yep. Sydney, Melbourne. Yep. Yeah. The dream of these people is that it's a hub and [00:29:00] spoke system where basically we stay, I don't know, like the centralized thing is, like the tiny transaction we wanna have, and it's always a direct line from us to that thing.

But the whole purpose of the thing, and maybe this is like your honeycomb visual, like the idea that like the, the, the way that we should configure the future is so that we're able to access as much of these transactions as we possibly can. Our primary mode, time-wise, at least, is not in the act of consumption, but they're constructing the world in a way that like presumes, it's, it's organized around the moment of transaction rather than like any other value, like community, like, I don't know, being outside, like not buying stuff.

I don't know. And like.  

Julia: I don't wanna transact all day long. And so the way this is spoken of by those in the industry and that gets so you can listen to these guys for an hour, talk about economics and utilization of drones and never once speak to the total [00:30:00] extraction of and violent extraction, I'd say, of what was otherwise.

A place of sanctuary and a habitat and the space. I don't know about you, but this is why people live in my city. They love the big open sky. They love not having the imposition of major buildings overhead, like it is what we seek as humans. And so to fill it, because yeah, you can. Imagine the economics of high utilization because we have impulses and they can be served through these novelty vector that we've all grown up on as part of the vision of the future, where we elevate the problems of the ground to the sky above.

I think it's totally dystopian. And I also think the wonderful bit of doing the research in this is actually, many people think it is dystopian and we have stories of collective resistance and they have been successful. So it's [00:31:00] not all lost,  

Alix: but also, but it kind of, I mean, I don't know. Yes, I think that's great that like probably.

And like kinda like Sidewalk Labs, like there'll probably be a protracted period of time, maybe some pilots where people are like, oh my God, we hate this. But then you kind of look back over a five to 10 year period and how much money and time and policy engagement and research and civil society engagement and all this stuff was wasted on something that is so obviously a terrible idea.

I don't know. I've just been thinking a lot lately about like, how do we. Prevent that cycle of waste and resource allocation to an idea that originated in someone who we don't think is good at coming up with ideas that we should pursue.  

Julia: Yeah. This project has been great in this respect because I absolutely do not want to do the thing that researchers often do, which is to build up the problem that you need resources to be able to study.

For example, in this one, I had anticipated what was happening in the drone [00:32:00] space. As I say, six, seven years ago, I do not wanna talk about it in a way that activates that total consumer drive. I, at the same time want and am worried that those who are making the decisions, which is essentially a closed cabal of policy makers and industry to not have any kind of shakeup.

And so we've. Really been focusing our attention on getting into those spaces to remind them that you are enacting a play into the reasonable societal expectations. That the sky is not for sale and that it is not a place of commerce at scale. But it's tricky. And so they're the balance. And I think part of this challenge is how do you activate the reasonable rejection of.

What is frankly a waste of resources at a time when it's what we can least afford without also bringing in the, oh, well, maybe this is good for jobs and for the [00:33:00] environment and for demand. Because disappointingly, we have embraced the food delivery ecosystem, even if I think it should have completely fizzled out.

We have embraced. On demand consumer services that are totally exploitative of the environment and of labor. So how do we save ourselves from ourselves?  

Alix: I mean, I guess maybe that is the question because it's such a, I don't know, like we're, we've so bought into this idea that someone's gonna come by with some disruptive, great thing in technology and that like.

They give a shit about making the world better. I think we're coming outta that phase where like big tech propositions are given good faith analysis where people are like, oh, that sounds kind of cool. I think now we're like, oh, that sounds kind of cool, but like. You don't actually care about the details of it, which means that you're gonna drop a bunch of shit on us and then we're gonna have to deal with it.

And then it's just [00:34:00] not gonna be as nice as you're making it seem. And the fact that you're not willing to articulate the ways it could be a problem, the ways it could be beneficial, things you don't know about it, you're pitching it as like you're so sure. I feel like people are kind of getting wise to.

This playbook of like, here's this perfect future. And also we don't give a shit when it's not perfect, and also we'll do nothing about it once we get traction and market share. Do you feel like people are figuring this out, or does it feel, I mean, when you say save us from ourselves, like to me that's what we're trying to save ourselves from is this like just hope that we can leapfrog through silly ideas that aren't.

Viable products? Like do you think we're getting better at like sniffing it out?  

Julia: Well, I think we are. And also I don't think it takes many of us. That's the encouraging thing. Yeah. Yeah. Let this group, which I just found so wonderfully inspiring to me, is this group that called themselves Beni Against Drones.

So Beni was this first town where drone delivery commenced in [00:35:00] Australia. And what I loved about how they organized is they really articulated. Resistance to the idea of technological inevitability that just because you can develop these products and just because you can make a market out of it, it does not mean that we need to live with it.

And they organized around ideas of accountability. So this real gap in the legal requirements. But cities and councils have responsibilities to their citizens and they. Articulated what that would require in terms of drones, which of of course is some kind of moderation to the expansion of this intrusion.

It would require testing. What impact do they have on wildlife, which the city had outsourced to the vendor. They said, where is the procurement of these services if they're to be used at C scale? And they organized for a number of years and were able to assemble a, a legislative inquiry, parliamentary inquiry.[00:36:00]  

Do freedom of information request that showed that it was essentially a up between the city and the companies. Google had to move outta town and it really was a core group of eight people who just refused to be Guinea pigs in an experiment into their lived environment and could not see the upside.

They said, sure, drones might have some utility in fire prone regions for shark spotting, uh, for aerial mustering. They do not justify it. Totally transforming the city so that one person among us can get a fast food delivery. It just simply is not where we want to go, and they, they were successful. Now the companies have moved, and this is what I see them doing globally into cities that are much newer.

Cities have less. Community, structures of organization resistance, much lower socioeconomic environments where you have a distribution of, you know, I think a public health crisis already in terms of the [00:37:00] availability of affordable food they're rolling out in those cities at scale, which is why we have places like Logan and Dallas-Fort Worth really trying to scale up food delivery.

Um, so transit cities like Dallas, Fort Worth and, and others where. You have? Yeah, I think less of that community fabric than people who are ex public servants in a place like Canberra. So that's the sort of move that the companies are making is to rapidly enclose from the places where journalists aren't writing about this, researchers aren't writing about this, and there isn't the same level of community organization.

Alix: It also reminds me of what Malika Jay from the digital Asia hub. I remember her giving a talk like. God, it must have been like eight, nine years ago. Um, about low rights environments. And I like think about that all the time of like that experimentation happens in low rights environments and then is quote unquote perfected or built momentum and then is moved to higher rights environments.

And I think there's something about that learning cycle that happens. And what's interesting is what I'm hearing you say is that [00:38:00] like starting in Australia might have been, or in communities like. Bony thumb, I looked Ben Benni, Benni. That like starting there is interesting 'cause then they learn a bunch of stuff.

About the conditions within which they'll succeed and then they find those spaces that don't have the infrastructure that was had. So it's almost like the opposite of her argument, although I think both are are right, but from like different perspectives and I just, it's not inevitable that these technologies will work well, but like there is an inevitability that these companies will push as hard as possible to like find some market that is willing to bear the cost or is incapable of fighting against those costs, which is also really.

Gross. Once the engine of this type of a business model starts, it's kind of hard to see it stopping before it finds a community that can be forced to take it on.  

Julia: And it's fascinating too, connecting this to, to the smart cities and mobility to watch the mutual seduction of cities and these companies where I've been fascinated.

Whether [00:39:00] it's New York or Perth, Western Australia, cities are absolutely. Desperate to be innovators and absolutely fearful that if they don't make it attractive to companies that are developing the next wave of technology, no matter how I think offensive it is to public sensibility, they will go above and beyond to make that possible.

And so we've seen it with. The way that the cities attract these companies and do away with land use requirements, ensure that they have the access to political mobilization to be able to deploy rapidly. It's really remarkable and the only hope is that there is in each of these places a really similar response from people as to, we didn't ask for this, this changes what we.

Like about where we live, we need those who we are expecting to stand for how we live, [00:40:00] to actually step up. It activates, I think the only level of governance that we really can rely on in these times, which is. Building from the local and the local way. We don't let the nuisance of a 24 hour lawnmower go.

We actually do kind of keep in check what the noises of a neighborhood are, whether through social pressure or council regulation. We need that equally with these global operators who are coming into town.  

Alix: It reminds me, I, um, was living in a basement apartment once and the. Guy above was renovating his flat and he was really nice and wasn't living in it while it was being renovated.

I don't think he quite knew what the builders were doing. And on a Sunday morning we had friends over for brunch and they started like. What sounded like taking like a giant mallet and just like, you know, crushing these tiles that they were replacing. And so I went up and was like, Hey, so there's an ordinance that says that you can't do construction work on Sundays.

And they were like, oh, you know, but these things happen. And we got in this really funny standoff where I was like, no, they, they don't, like, there's a, there's [00:41:00] actually a rule that says you can't do construction on Sundays. And they were like, no, no, but these things happen. And I was like, no, they don't. And I was like, if I need to, I, I will just report you and I'll let the person that owns this place know that you're doing this.

And he was like, but these things happen. And then finally he was like, but we'll come back on Monday. And it was like, yes, you will. Um, and like having that leverage in that power and also like even just knowing that that rule was in place was really important. And he knew it was in place too, and it was this.

It was one of those times when I realized that like London, over the centuries has developed rules for exactly this and that. That type of governance is something we need to move quicker with technology, because Google is basically just like, well, you know, these things happen. We don't have a rule that we can say, no, they don't because there's a law in place that makes them so they don't happen, and I feel like.

The race to invest those resources to build that legislative protection from individuals having to negotiate and advocate on their behalf. Like I shouldn't have to complain. It should just [00:42:00] be people should just follow the rules. But right now there are none.  

Julia: You know, I think that we have a bit of the wrong setting around how we think about the rules on.

Public space where we've defaulted to the realm of private law. So essentially the kind of terms and conditions era, but now with, with nowhere where those terms and conditions are visible. So you know, let your scooters suddenly appear on your streets and your sidewalks. They're taking people out, but they're just there.

Or facial recognition is just deployed in the city. I think we should be thinking about them much more through the public law lens. So the private law lens is, you know, you can contract for anything that someone will agree to, even if it's under duress, under the public law realm, activity is prohibited until it's permitted.

You don't get to just put a road wherever you wanna, a road. You don't get to put a road in the sky wherever you wanna put a road. It's prohibited until you can actually make the case for why that is in the public interest. And I think if we thought of our cities. Through that lens that's actually much [00:43:00] more aligned to collective aspiration and expectation of the city environment.

And it's how we, I think, get out of this dilemma of otherwise seeing. Public space is underutilized or as a free for all for technological deployments. It's only if we perceive it through its appropriate frame, which is that it's public. It therefore has just a totally different setting to the consumer realities of the private domain.

Alix: Yeah, that makes loads of sense. Okay, well. What do you think needs to happen? Recognizing that maybe this has reached escape velocity, which also you made so many puns at the beginning of this conversation, which I really restrained myself, not calling them out. Like this drone thing has really taken off.

And then you were like, Uber Eats. It's really driving this whole other like, oh man, I got, I got a whole, I gotta, I gotta hold, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta hold back. You gotta hold, hold. Parallel. Pun. Yeah. Yeah. So if the drones have kind of reached escape velocity, or at least there's enough moneyed [00:44:00] interests, yeah.

What do you think?  

Julia: I think the first opportunity is they're not actually at that level, so. Part of why I feel a little more willing to talk about it now is I actually think we're at the point where they could become much more widely deployed. I think it's really important to see that they have so far only been proven in really distorted markets where the patient capital of Google or of startups, heavily VC-backed startups has.

Shown that people don't mind a novelty for sure, so they'll happily order a can of Coke in a drone if you don't have to pay anything over the top for the privilege. But I think it's a very different proposition to take these trials that have been done in smattering of cities globally and actually turn them into the aerial logistics capability that these companies aspire to.

Google really doesn't see itself as being the deliverer of the future. It sees itself as providing. The platform for deliveries of all types, whether it's package delivery [00:45:00] or fast food delivery. So it, it's very much an infrastructure of the sky that has been developed. What do we do? I think we first remember that actually it's already been resisted.

I think that's so empowering to know that in the first town where these drones came, they got shut down. By a small band of committed people with no history of organizing. For me, that's tremendously encouraging, and the way they got shut down was a resistance of the idea that just because you can't count certain numbers of complaints doesn't mean people want this.

If you cannot demonstrate that an incursion into public space will not disturb. The wildlife around it. There's a wonderful story actually of ravens birds taking on these drones and trying to themselves enact the resistance before the community did. But you have to prove that these technologies actually are delivering some kind of social good, and I just don't think the proposition is made for consumer goods.

Part of the what that rescues, I think is a vision [00:46:00] where drones can be part of our. Technological imagining and future, but for necessary, not indulgence applications. So I'd put in the bucket of necessary applications in remote regions. I do think there's a real case to be made for medical suppliers by drone.

I. Areas like, um, large jurisdictions like my own for areas like remote surveillance, spatial surveillance, it's important, but even then we need to look at the impacts on the wildlife. I've worked with First Nations elders thinking about what are their impositions of geospatial monitoring on emu populations that.

Are distressed and disturbed by the overflight of even several drones. So we absolutely have to look at the calculus of how does it impact the environment. The scary thing for me, and I don't, the part I don't know how to resist, is that the economics of this are so attractive to delivery networks that as a replacement for road based.

Drivers, the delivery drone is, you know, a [00:47:00] fraction of the cost. That, to me, seems like it would enable a consumer future for these drones. And so then the other piece that we have to activate is, well, what are the rules that we expect to be in play if safety is not enough? And there are so many other considerations from the environment to privacy, to just the visual and noise pollution of these objects.

Where do we organize for that to exist? And I think here there's a lot of appetite at the community level for local councils and cities to get involved. I worry how much that's the case in places that have less history in that kind of collective organizing. So I think we've got an obligation to book to our regions and the places where the peri-urban environments where these are taking off.

And really support those communities. I think to articulate what any place that has had drones, has people saying we didn't ask for. This is tremendously annoying. I didn't sign up to be under a highway.  

Alix: And I feel [00:48:00] generally like joined up movements of resistance and clear articulation from communities about what they want, but also like more empowerment of local policy makers to know that if the rules haven't yet been written, that doesn't mean companies get to dictate how they ultimately are.

Um, that like this is a collective ongoing exercise of being able to articulate and manage consultation process to. Use the power of the states and of, you know, communities to actually be in charge essentially, of what is up for sale and what is not. And I think we've let companies be the protagonist in a story that they write rather than being, you know, just like one product offer within a universe of people that we get to decide  

Julia: what we wanna buy and it's in, in the story they write.

I think it's so essential to confront the false equivalents arguments. So there's this argument made, well these are. An environmentally friendly way of doing delivery, but this assumes that delivery is a constant and [00:49:00] increasing demand as opposed to, I think, and hope a blip in our VC-backed fantasies of convenience.

That have really significant collective cost. It only makes sense as an environmentally friendly proposition. If the alternative is that you were driving a coffee in a in a sedan, which is not necessarily the case. It only makes sense if we have already deferred to a reality where our cities are jammed with traffic and we desire a future where we also have traffic.

Above us. Again, I think really once you sit with it, not something that I think you could say with any conviction is the desire of any place I've ever lived. I, I have to add one little piece, which is, yeah, I do. When we engage with the federal government about, I. Its consultation process for rolling out new drone policy, which was to create a nationally harmonized system for drone operators, [00:50:00] you know, on the promise of economic development.

We challenged that they were consulting only between state and federal government and the, the drone in, and they said, but it's not obvious in this particular policy space. Who are the other stakeholders? And it's because everybody is a stakeholder in the sky. So the failure of imagination of, well, we don't have an obvious, you know, there's not the privacy digital rights group here that's obvious, so therefore we'll ignore everybody.

We're so remarkable. And I do think that these are some of these challenges at that collective level. When we are all shareholders, stakeholders of the future of our public space, how do we effectively. Organize and agitate. I mean, I think it's that we, we expect our policy makers are gonna be doing a lot of that for us, and when they're not, we have to remind them of that function.

Alix: Yeah. I feel like policy makers are out of practice and actually Sure. Are doing their jobs. [00:51:00] Yeah. Nothing like well-resourced, uh, lobbying arms that are willing to write policy for you to make you a little bit lazy. Well,  

Julia: and a, and a much more agreeable way of, I mean, I think just the, you don't need to be in those settings very long to realize that the policy makers are much more comfortable with the smooth.

Alix: Oriented. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And  

Julia: how, how lovely it is to just engage with them and, and less of these pesky people demanding that we actually think about what they're selling.  

Alix: Those  

Julia: pesky constituents.  

Alix: Yeah.

Okay. I hope, if anything. That has made it clear to you that you should not use these platforms and order coffee to your house to be delivered in five minutes. Just chill. Just make coffee at your own house. Don't create noise pollution in your neighborhood or participate or give these companies any indication that this is a business model that's viable.

That's my takeaway. Um, but I hope it was interesting and I hope also for those of you that listened to the interview with Heather Allier. [00:52:00] That you're already starting to see some interesting connections and get some brain stimulation about what we can learn when we think about laws of space, what we can learn when we think about laws of the sky, and kind of how this all joins up into an interesting way of thinking about governance around technology more generally.

Thanks to Georgie Vu and Pham Sja for helping structure this conversation as ever. And Sarah Miles, who does the amazing audio things she does to make everything sound good. Even when I do a bad job managing my own immediate surrounds, uh, she seems to make it, I don't know. Sound good? Thank you, Sarah. And with that, we will see you next week.

As a reminder, if there's someone you know and love that works on the sea, we're looking for someone who can help us explore. That terrain. So get in touch. We dropped an email in the show notes and we'll see you next time.

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