There are some inter­est­ing tech­nolo­gies com­ing into the spot­light as of late, and when observed indi­vid­u­ally, they are quite impres­sive. But when you take a step back and see where all of this is headed, the out­look for human­ity can appear breath­tak­ing. Yet, it only take a cou­ple mouse clicks to have that techno-optimism destroyed. A good exam­ple is the com­ing drone revolution.

Drones are essen­tially fly­ing robots, and they have been get­ting alot of neg­a­tive press lately, what with all the acci­den­tal killing of civil­ians and fears of a total­i­tar­ian police-state being able to spy on every­one and every­thing 24/7. Take this Drag­on­fly Drone some­one spot­ted at a fam­ily barbecue:

The tooth­paste is out of the tube: it is now pos­si­ble for some­one to see every­thing you do. But wait! There’s more! Some­one decided to use the sim­ple for­mula “Drone + Gun = Great Idea” and build an autonomous, Ipad-controlled fly­ing machine gun that lit­er­ally self-destructs if it gets shot down.

Wel­come to hell, right? How does one defend them­selves against some­thing like that? A per­sonal laser defense sys­tem? Imag­ine 100, or even 10,000 of those fly­ing into your city.

How­ever, there is some good news. Farm­ers have started using drones to view crops, sav­ing money on expen­sive sur­veil­lance ser­vices nor­mally con­ducted by plane. But imag­ine how much more effi­cient an army of farm­ing drones would be. You could plant crops in places you can’t get to, sched­ule water­ing and main­te­nance, har­vest food autonomously, and even have it deliv­ered to a customer’s doorstep. Super­mar­kets will be a thing of the past. Also, think about construction.

Drones will allow for the con­struc­tion and demo­li­tion of a build­ing within days, if not hours. Com­bine this with the ben­e­fits 3D print­ing will pro­vide, and it is easy to imag­ine an entire city migrat­ing to fol­low resources.

Here’s where I’m going with all this: We are going to need to com­pletely over­haul the eco­nomic sys­tem. What is going to hap­pen when China begins to use robots because it is eco­nom­i­cally fea­si­ble to do so? Can our econ­omy sup­port ONE BILLION unem­ployed peo­ple? What hap­pens to the con­struc­tion work­ers, farm­ers, truck dri­vers, and other assorted ser­vice peo­ple who will be sud­denly unem­ployed? We are head­ing towards a post-scarcity soci­ety with a scarcity-driven economy.

There is a solu­tion, how­ever. Eco­nomic mod­els like the Resource Based Econ­omy Prin­ci­ple dic­tate a world cen­tered around a vast resource man­age­ment sys­tem, a liv­ing wage, using the high­est lev­els of tech­nol­ogy avail­able to elim­i­nate cor­rupt profit mod­els. God for­bid any of us be judged by how good we are as human beings and what we con­tribute to society.

These tech­nolo­gies need to hap­pen like, yes­ter­day. Why? Because there’s a great big Brother eye­ing the kill­switch; who is quickly real­iz­ing he will soon be obso­lete, and I don’t think he’s going quietly.