Like the firefighting idea. Might as well throw policing in there as well. An army of sufficiently smart drones should be enough to drastically reduced the size of those labor pools.
Please, no. If we have learned anything from all this police violence, it's that police are not interacting with their communities enough, and seeing their fellow humans as even less human.
Making policing even less personal gets us further from that goal. We need MORE community engagement, more handshakes, more of all that.
Drone coverage isn't that hard of an idea to think about. I think autonomous logistics of this is much better though. A drone that can navigate itself to refuel at autonomous fueling facilities, and a system that manages and dispatches a drone fleet's coverage depending on the conditions:
- less coverage in the wetter seasons
- more coverage during dry seasons and droughts
- biases for coverage areas that experts think might be more at risk, informed by an expert
- biases for coverage when fire-prone weather patterns are expected, informed by NOAA weather data
However, with SpaceX costs going down, small satellites might be more beneficial or cost-effective, and might have a different regulatory route than drones with the FAA. The satellite detects areas of cloud cover and helps coordinate the fleet to fly underneath the clouds for fire coverage.
But navigating regulations is the biggest piece of lock-in value, and it's the FAA with drones and NASA with satellites. Otherwise you'd have to buy satellite time.
Making policing even less personal gets us further from that goal. We need MORE community engagement, more handshakes, more of all that.