Western governments are full of drones, but not the good ones. Not the ones you might expect or want. You think you’re getting one kind of Predator, when in actual fact you’re getting quite another. You expect to receive something small, nimble, a bit rough around the edges, but something you can make your own and use to complete useful tasks. You expect to receive something that will, after a bit of effort is applied, work. That’s what you hope it will do, anyway. But these parallels aren’t fun. They’re banal. We ought to do better than that. We can do better than that. New technology means better jokes, faster punchlines. A million punchlines where one would have done. It’s the future.
Like drones, civil servants need careful management. In theory and in practice, autonomy is essential. They both need to become more antonymous if they are to be useful at all. antonymous operations are the future, they have to be the future. But like drones, civil servants do still experience some problems with autonomy, every so often. Sometimes someone is made antonymous who really should not be. The consequences for a drone going wild with its own autonomy are somewhat comparable. How ought we to deal with the technology of the future? If you are British, European, and your job title includes the world ‘strategy’, you want to run as far away from it as possible. Throw it down a mineshaft. Blow the whole thing up from orbit, just to be sure. Nuke it from orbit, just to be certain. You can’t do too much.
Except the Europeans don’t have a space-launching capability. But don’t fret. You might be able to ban this new technology. You and all your similarly educated friends — all went to the right schools, all dress alike, the harbinger of excellent bureaucracy — agree. It is the technology that is the problem. If the drones are regulated out of existence, or if they are made so obsolete by a gold-plated project from state procurement, they will be blown out the water. Ordinary people cannot compete with the state in this way. You know it; your school or college or work friend knows it. But do the people know it? The people who do their best to learn drone controls for reasons that are not unclear at this moment. The people who build faster drones with high payloads, the kind of drones that are more survivable than the cheapo plastic rubbish you can buy in immense quantities on AliExpress. Immense quantities right now.
There is no reason to fear a single thing done by those people. Of course the state will triumph. It has all the best minds, all from the best university. And they all believe that although drones show some promise, it’s the wild ideas by people without the wit to rein themselves in who will cause all the trouble in the world. Drones smaking into everything, our own people not fully trained on how to use them. Cats and dogs, living together. Mass hysteria. Real wrath of god type stuff. It’s all as the nice fella said.
Why is a civil servant like a drone? They have a short effective lifespan, although they can be pressed into grim service for longer, bits falling off them, their original specs a long ago dream, hanging on and sent again and again into action until the lucky day when they blow up or otherwise sit on the sidelines doing nothing but watching, nothing but noting those things done by others, those things done by others who count.
That’s right. There is no parallel at all.