The duo relished their success, they were able to raise over 3 million US dollars for Terra’s treatment over the period of 4 months since launch. Both remained in touch this point forward and Dr Watson aka Mr Wilson promised to come back with Terra this time, and before parting the two pledged to attempt to find a solution this time, once and for all for Terra. Mr Wilson was now back at home with Terra and was now able to get some quality-of-life medicines for Terra that helped her improve the day to day life for her. It had been more than 5 months since he had come back from Adelaide, yet one thing stuck around in his head. If he deserved a break and a vacation away from home, so did Terra. She had been overprotected and put in her cocoon for a nasty long time. Mrs. Wilson was not thrilled about exposing Terra to so many pathogens but she didn’t disagree that a change of scenario might help improve her spirits and rejuvenate her for the fight. Terra, a smart young teenager was consulted on the matter who instantly sprung out of the bed and agreed to a change of scenery, her first thought was the most obvious one. She wanted to badly visit the place she visited on her AR headset most often, the place where she spent an initial decade of her life, yes her home the streets of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa.
Mrs. Wilson teary eyed seeing the excitement Terra shows, agrees and the trio start planning a trip which almost feels like one from another lifetime for Terra.
On their way in the flight, Terra feels so excited to be going back to her homeland, she feels someone is talking about her because of her hiccups. Upon reaching Durban, she calms down almost instantaneously and looks very peaceful with her eyes closed feeling the surrounding. She first wishes to visit her favourite spot, the roof of her orphanage from where the view was equivalent to a premium five star hotel. They head out of Durban into the country a little further away from population because Terra’s immune system is still not that awesome.
They booked an Airbnb with a pool by the side and took long walks across the beautiful landscapes and terrain. Terra was the happiest she had been and her mom was happy seeing her happy. Mrs Wilson is also constantly worried because of the amount of diseases that can spread due to mosquito bites. Terra starts to feel itchy and Mrs. Wilson at once sentences her to a room arrest to keep her safe from mosquitoes. The next day she is fully wrapped like a present with no point of failure for the mosquito, this time she feels itchy due to being overclad in a humid climate. They head out into a forested region and decide to spend rest of the trip exploring in the car itself. This is when something weird happens Terra experiences sudden nausea, which normally a parent can dismiss as car sickness but in case of Terra that cannot even ignore the tiniest symptom because of her situation. They start recanting all her medical history since they arrived and couldn’t notice anything weird with her. They instantaneously took out their satellite phone and dialed Terra’s doctor. They couldn’t connect with him because of the time difference so decided to drive and find a medical center nearby. Terra was overtaken with sudden sunken heart feeling with her stomach flying out with the butterflies. The last time she went to a hospital in South Africa was when her family had alienated her and she couldn’t go through that again, not with the advanced memory and memories she has with the Wilsons. As they reach closer to the health centre Terra dreads time passing so quickly and tries to muster up the courage to say something, as she starts saying mom and dad her speech becomes slurry and she faints. Wilsons fear for their daughter’s life and drive over 150 Km/h to race against time. Coincidentally, Terra’s doctor calls back and Mr. Wilson puts him on with the doctor at the health center. They quickly exchange professional opinions and unanimously diagnose Terra with acute liver failure caused due to hepatitis. It all suddenly makes sense to Mr. Wilson the itching, the hiccups and the nausea. He is overcome with sadness and is scared that he messed up in recognizing Terra’s symptoms. Terra needs an instant shot IV shot of acetylcysteine which wasn’t available at the medical centre and the nearest centre which might have it was 5 hours away. The doctors instantaneously thought of something brilliant. A company known as Zipline had just started trials for blood delivery using drones, they had an elaborate facility where blood was stored and sent via recoverable drones at the instant a request is made. This system was already helping saving a lot of blood that would go to waste in storage of hospitals. The doctor instantly called the local centre of Zipline who very sympathetically talked to a hospital who quickly delivered the vial necessary to help Terra. Within 10 minutes of calling, the drone was already on its way to Terra. It delivered the medicine using a parachute and Terra was instantly put on the medicine. Terra started regaining consciousness when they were on their way to the hospital to get her checked out and ready for the flight back. After 2 hours, she is given the thumbs up for a flight back home and the way back home, there was only one thing on this poor girl’s mind that she wasn’t left back at the hospital. Her parents didn’t give up on her and did all things to make sure she came back home safe. This meant the world to Terra and this day on she had complete faith in her parents.
Zipline is a real company really doing amazing work with the next generation logistics systems. But what are the cons of this technology.
Advancing logistics is an amazing feat for humans. Earlier we would have had to wait 6 months for something to be imported now it can be delivered in as little as 24 hours if the need be. The pillar stone of the logistics that we have today roots from the discovery of the wheel. Today’s advanced logistics don’t even require wheels. They don’t even need human intervention. These things are not necessarily harmless. In an increasingly technologized landscape we are more prone to redundancy. By introducing advanced technologies into our logistics and supply chains which are managed centrally and by one authority we are increase redundancies in the system which can prove to be disastrous. This is known as a single point of failure. By creating autonomous technologies we are helping the world become more prone to failure from a single stress point.
For instance, consider the case study of the Mumbai dabbawalas. For those of you unaware, in Mumbai majority of employees get hot lunch for themselves through the dabbawalla service who deliver food from employee’s homes to the office by using just cycles and trains. 4500-5000 dabbawalas deliver about 200,000 tiffins a day with high accuracy. These services are always on time and the rate of mistakes is 1.9 wrong deliveries per billion operations certified through Forbes. Imagine if this system were to be replaced by a system of drones flying around, firstly the volume would require us to have a very precise navigation to prevent mid-air collisions. In case of rough weather, which Mumbai is no stranger to the UAVs won’t work and about 200,000 people will go hungry.
The dabbawalla service provides employment to as many as 5000 people who are unskilled and won’t have any other avenues of employment, their median educational level is grade 8th. Moreover, dabbawalas are a trusted organisation that has been delivering since the past 120 years with more accuracy than any high tech organisation that exists today. If you dig deeper, the major reason why these people are so on time and rarely commit mistakes is because their schedules and routes align with the schedule of the Mumbai local train which is also known to have an impeccable timing. Each tiffin changes hands around 4 times mostly in the local trains and that’s what makes it so accurate. If we do want to make an improvement to this system for the sake of it, replacing the dabbawallas is not the way to go rather improving the local trains to make them better is the way.
An increasing amount of unmanned aerial vehicles poses a threat to privacy, these machines rely on cameras to detect their surroundings. An increasing amount of such can pose critical threat to one’s privacy as everything will be recorded and can be monitored as such.
Such aerial vehicles are also potential targets of cyber attacks and can be weaponised as such. These vehicles themselves can act as weapons and attack a single person or a group of people. An electromagnetic pulse event can pose a threat to the control of vehicles, in a society where there is increasing usage of these vehicles for deliveries and such, EMPs can destroy the controllability and cause them to fall onto Earth, sort of like the Pandora’s box and satellite situation in XXX: Return of Xander Cage. Such an event is incredibly rare that electronic systems be knocked out naturally but a possibility that cannot be ignored and should be thought of carefully.
Advancing logistics brings an incredible amount of dehumanisation which can be beneficial in the long run to make things better but in the short run it can cause a loss of employment for a lot of people. This system might lead to consolidation of power among few hands yet again due to the monopoly on advanced logistics as opposed to traditional logistics which are quite decentralised.
Moreover, technological development is like an exponential graph, it starts slow but speeds up very fast moving forward. Technological development has no ends with a continually increasing rate of development. This fast pace can lead to infrastructure and the whole system as wide as this being changed very often not giving appropriate return on investment.
Our evolution in logistics slowly started with the wheel, moving onto mechanical vehicles, animal driven carts, trains, planes, autonomous cars etc. If you map out the trajectory, for the initial part of human civilisation the rate was slow but today we are progressing very rapidly and extremely frequent changes to this system can introduce heavy amount of stress and costs in this process.
Advanced logistics is a technology with less potential for damage though it should be welcomed with a plan and caution.
Policy Recommendations:
In order to make sure that rapid development doesn’t cost us too much or doesn’t need frequent upgrades, we should follow a more modular approach to this technology. In the sense that all vehicles that may be produced with a visible scope of development should be modular that an upgraded part can be changed rather than changing the whole vehicle or system.
In order to make logistical technology safer and less prone to cyber attacks and points of failure we should introduce distributed ledger computing. This way we remove a single point of failure and this also allows us to ensure that our systems are operating with lesser power antennas as the distributed mechanism doesn’t warrant a need for long range communication antennas.
Additionally, we need to revolutionise our understanding of the weather and make better predictions to avoid weather damage and potential effects of that on automated logistics.
Finally, we make it mandatory for such drones to singularly utilise 3 dimensional point cloud mapping rather than camera scanning to navigate because its two birds with a single stone this way. 3D scanning is possible today through a LiDAR which is quite expensive. Firstly, the LiDAR ensures privacy and secondly the cost of a LiDAR ensures that the development of this is slow and it ensures that people employed in logistics aren’t instantaneously out of work.
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