The big question around drones is what problems we want them to solve

Off it flew, adding to the drone chorus. The evening of swirling blue power-light dots, chasing all those pesky bugs and birds away, with their whirring and whining.

Damn, forgot those red bonnet chillies too. Alexa…?

Or at least, that’s the hyper-consumerist reality that Amazon, Google and other drone delivery services want you to get used to.

READ MORE: Scottish Tories in chaos as leader hopefuls unite against Douglas Ross

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced a series of pilot trials this week – one of them at Orkney’s airport – on the way to finalising regulations for the use and licensing of civilian drones in UK airspace.

What’s interesting is how long this is all taking. I first wrote about home delivery drones in late 2015. Then, US tech giants were promising that “the 15-minute delivery to all” was imminent.

However, other than a few test neighbourhoods around the world, we seem (so far) to have been spared the everyday commercial drone.

I’m wondering why.

The resistance is probably on many levels. There are reports that, in areas where delivery drones have been prototyped, local resistance has been militant.

The veteran tech commentator John Naughton brought news the other week of an important Australian study. This observed the residents of Bonython, in Canberra, tilting against the mighty Google and its Wing delivery service.

Picked as a test area in 2018, the complaints were immediate. “Many residents were annoyed and distressed by drones suddenly appearing from nowhere”, writes Naughton.

“They were outraged by the impact of the aircraft on the community, local wildlife and the environment. They resented unplanned landings, dropped payloads, drones flying close to car traffic, and birds attacking and forcing down the devices.”

The Bonythons organised themselves, finding they had an aviation lawyer in their midst. They pummelled away at what the paper calls the “inevitability myth”.

This is a narrative jointly composed by government and corporates. What it tries to instil is a passive acceptance of oncoming technologies. They hustle communities along, shushing their anxieties in the name of “progress” and “innovation”.

But Bonython wouldn’t have it. Their campaigning and FOI requests effectively halted the development of the Wing system.

This activism also generated a new set of Australian government regulations – ones much more stringent about the actual utility, and community acceptance, of everyday delivery drones.

Will we need some of that civic vigour here? Almost certainly. I detect the inevitability myth operating in this round of UK trialling.

“Our goal is to make drone operations beyond visual line of sight a safe and everyday reality, contributing to the modernisation of UK airspace and the incorporation of new technology into our skies,” said Sophie O’Sullivan, director of future of flight at the CAA.

Ah, the dread term “modernisation” – beloved of Tony Blair and quite a few of the current Starmerites. (It comes out of the same hat that contains phrases like “resisting globalisation is like resisting the weather”.) Who could be against the modernisation of anything (though “incorporation” sounds reasonably sinister)?

One of my favourite ever encounters was interviewing the technology critic Neil Postman, for Radio Scotland in the 90s. We met in his musky, mid-20th-century academic office, at the State University of New York.

Wreathed unabashedly in clouds of silky cigar smoke, Postman would drawl: “Here’s the fundamental question we have to address. What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?” Apply this test to delivery drones, and the answer comes back: it depends on what they’re delivering. Adding another on-demand service to houses that are already isolated cocoons of consumption hardly seems like a step into the future, either socially or environmentally.

READ MORE: Meghan Gallacher resigns as deputy leader of Scottish Tories

However, delivering time-sensitive medicines to rural homes with poor transport infrastructure, whether those be in Africa or Orkney,

would indeed seem to answer the Postman question.

Other uses explored in the CAA’s trials are the inspection of offshore windfarms. That seems obviously useful: cameras and propellers used to maximise the safety and efficiency of human engineers. The police also want to have more of a free hand with surveillant drones; certainly a danger there of solutions looking for problems.

And that brings me to the obvious ick-factor for civilian drone use. Which is our feeling, driven by the war times in which we live, that they represent the further militarisation of our everyday lives.

Anyone transfixed by the Ukraine-Russia and Gaza-Israel conflicts – and that’s the majority of us – knows how operative, and destructive, drones are in theatres of war. In the Ukraine theatre, many thousands of cheap lethal drones have been essential to even up military powers against the Russian army. (Rebel forces in Myanmar also report the same effect from their bomb-dropping drones, damaging the ruling junta’s territory. “Drones are our air force,” said one rebel commander a few months ago).

Yet in Gaza, drones are a key element in the AI-driven lethality of the Israeli Defence Forces. They have also been a component of their long-term techno-apartheid over the Strip for a decade.

The immoral horror comes on our nightly news, with drones as regular players in the carnage. So it’s no wonder we twitch, and even reel, from the same kind of technology blotting our safe, suburban skies.

At least for us the buzzing means a convenient consumer good – not a harbinger of death.

It’s important to remember that drones aren’t weaponry, per se.

What they can wield is the power of vision – and what can be seen is potentially controllable, as well as comprehensible.

As with AI, or gene-editing, we often handle our god-like technology (in this case, Mercury meets Icarus?) without matching levels of wisdom and mindfulness.

Is the 10-year delay in delivery drones, caused by an all-too-evident pushback from the communities that would have to endure them, a small sign of hope? Maybe we are actually developing wise processes that can better shape, or even just impede, what are presented to us as irresistible futures?

And there is some saving quirkiness out there, in our use of drones.

I recently saw a clip of a man flying a drone that bore a tray of meat, bringing it to feral cats in blasted urban settings. His camera caught them tentatively approaching, then gulping speedily down. Pointless, but super cute.

Another story this week reports how a hovering drone, apparently unnoticed, discovered an as-yet-unreported Amazonian tribe, walking through the forest. You marvel at the acuity of the tech – but you grieve somewhat for the tribe. What an achievement to go undetected for so long, in this over-observed, over-instrumented world!

One last failure of prediction from my 2015 article: that drones might be whizzing around building sites, replacing the humble brickie and joiner. No sign of that in all the construction I see around me.

Never say never, of course. But even for this committed technophile, it’s gratifying to see what chunky, lumpy humans like us can still uniquely do.