Nobody Argued About the Shark Drones
I spent seventeen minutes on Hong Kong radio last Tuesday being genuinely delighted by drones, and then, about two thirds of the way through, said something I hadn’t planned to say. Phil Whelan had floated the idea of pizza arriving by air, which is the version of this story everybody enjoys, and I heard myself answer that I think of them as mechanical mosquitoes, and that I don’t want to live in a world where they’re all over the place.
That’s the tension I’ve been sitting with since. I can list twenty uses for these machines I’d defend in front of anyone. I still don’t want the sky full of them. And going back over the conversation, the thing that has stayed with me isn’t the disagreement inside my own head. It’s that nobody is going to ask me. Australia already has shark drones over its beaches every day of the year, and that decision was made in days, for a reason so good that arguing with it would have been indecent.
You can listen to the full segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew below:
Start with the cockroaches, because everybody does
Phil opened on the one he couldn’t stop thinking about, and I don’t blame him.
In March 2025 a 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit Myanmar and killed more than three thousand people. Singapore sent its Civil Defence Force, about eighty people, into Naypyitaw and Mandalay. They took ten cyborg cockroaches with them.
Not a metaphor. Madagascar hissing cockroaches, about six centimetres long, built into insect and robot hybrids by Singapore’s Home Team Science and Technology Agency with Nanyang Technological University. Each one carrying a small backpack with an infrared camera and sensors. Electrodes running into the nerves and muscles so an operator can steer them, stimulate one side and the animal turns the other way. They went into collapsed buildings, including a hospital, and surveyed spaces no person, no dog and no wheeled robot could enter. It was the first time anywhere that cyborg insects have been used in a real humanitarian operation.
They found nobody.
I said that on air plainly, because it matters. The technology worked. The deployment worked. There were no survivors in the spaces they searched. Ruling out a void is a result, and any search team will tell you so, but it isn’t the result anyone wanted and it should be said out loud rather than smoothed over.
What interests me about the cockroach isn’t the horror-film quality of it, though Phil and I both enjoyed that. It’s that it answers a question most people get wrong. We keep framing this as human or machine. The cockroach is neither. It’s a live animal that evolution already optimised for walking across rubble, steered by a machine, directed by a person who’s standing outside making the judgment about where to look. Three parties, each doing the part it’s actually good at. That’s the shape of most of the useful work coming, and it’s why I keep pushing organisations away from the human-versus-machine question and towards a harder one about which decisions sit where.
It’s also a reminder that this isn’t new thinking. We’ve been strapping equipment to animals for this work for a century, and using rats to find landmines for decades. Nobody asks the dog either.
The thing every good example on the list had in common
Once we got past the cockroaches, Phil started listing. Medical drones, battlefield casualty evacuation, cargo, blood supply, pizza. And every single one of them was the same story wearing different clothes.
None of these machines are interesting because they fly. They’re interesting because they collapse time.
Take the medical one. Duke Health, working with Forsyth County in North Carolina, ran the first United States study putting defibrillators on drones during live triple-nine calls. The drone launches the moment the call comes in, before the dispatcher has finished taking details, and heads for the location of the phone. It cruises at about two hundred feet, drops to a hundred, and winches the device down. Then the dispatcher talks a bystander through using it. Response time fell from an average of six to seven minutes to under four.
Three minutes doesn’t sound like a revolution. It’s one.
Dr Monique Starks, the Duke cardiologist behind the work, puts the stakes cleanly: if a patient can be shocked within two to five minutes, survival could run at fifty to seventy per cent. Actual survival for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest sits at about ten per cent. The gap between those two numbers isn’t a technology gap. It’s a distance gap, and distance is the only thing the drone actually solves.
That’s the reframe I want to leave with you, because it changes what you look for. A defibrillator that arrives in seven minutes is a formality. The same device at three minutes is a life. Nothing about the machine changed. Only the clock did.
I wrote a version of this thought back in 2015, when Phil and I first did a drone segment together and I said here come the drones. Eleven years on, the interesting part isn’t that I was right that they were coming. Everybody said that. It’s that I was looking at the wrong thing. I was watching the aircraft.
Rwanda is ten years ahead of everyone and nobody expected that
Here is the example that shifts the room when I use it with executives, because it breaks the assumption underneath most technology conversations.
The country furthest ahead in the world on medical drone delivery is Rwanda. It started in 2016. A decade later the operation makes a delivery roughly every sixty seconds, has passed two million commercial deliveries and one hundred and thirty-five million autonomous miles, and delivers the majority of the blood supply outside Kigali. The same operator now runs across Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire.
Phil asked whether the things get hijacked, which is a fair question and a very human one. They don’t, and the reason is instructive: there’s no resale market for a bag of somebody else’s blood. The value is entirely in it arriving.
But the part worth carrying into a boardroom is the leapfrog. Rwanda’s roads are poor and fixing them is expensive, slow and takes years. Rather than building the infrastructure everyone assumes must come first, they went over it. Wealthy countries with good roads had less reason to try, so they didn’t, and now they’re the ones behind. Associated research reports substantial improvements in maternal outcomes in both Rwanda and Ghana, and I’d say associated rather than caused, because that research is correlational and the honest version is more useful than the exciting one.
The lesson isn’t about drones. It’s that the constraint you’ve learned to live with is often the one somebody else refuses to accept, and refusing it is what puts them a decade in front.
The Australian ones, including one I keep coming back to
Two from home that almost nobody outside Australia knows.
The first is a joy. In Cloncurry in outback Queensland, a long way past where the map stops being useful, someone built what has been called the Sky Kelpie. A kelpie is our working dog. Australian graziers hold land measured in thousands of square kilometres, so stock work has been done from helicopters for decades. What this operator did was record the dog barking, all of the specific barks it uses to move stock, and play them through a speaker mounted on a drone. The stock respond exactly as they would to the dog, because as far as they’re concerned it’s the dog. Fuel costs collapsed. Nobody had to invent anything. They took a technique that had been running for forty years and put it on a cheaper airframe. I was on ABC talking about what farming would look like by 2025 back in 2017, and the honest reckoning is that the agricultural uses arrived first and arrived quietest, because nobody objects to a drone over a paddock.
The second one I think about more often. On 18 January 2018, at Lennox Head in New South Wales, two swimmers aged fifteen and seventeen were caught in heavy surf about seven hundred metres offshore. A lifeguard supervisor flew a drone down the beach and dropped a flotation pod to them. Both got themselves in under their own power. The entire rescue took seventy seconds, and it was the first surf rescue by drone anywhere in the world.
One drone. One incident. Seventy seconds. Eight years ago.
Hold that image, because the next part of the story is what happens when you scale it.
Then the shark drones, and the part I can’t let go of
For a long time New South Wales protected its beaches with shark nets. Then, for a mix of environmental and political reasons, and there were genuinely good arguments on both sides, the nets came out. The replacement plan was aerial spotting. Drones would find the sharks, beaches would be closed, everyone would be fine.
On paper it worked well.
In practice, on the days people were bitten, the drones weren’t in the air. The program wasn’t funded to fly every day. And in the space of about a week, in water shallow enough that people were standing in it, Australia lost swimmers.
The money came almost immediately, and it bought shark drones: a $120 million shark management program, with $34 million specifically for drones, artificial intelligence and emerging technology. From 1 July 2026, drones fly over New South Wales beaches three hundred and sixty-five days a year, dawn to dusk. Around seventy beaches, every Sydney beach from Palm Beach to Cronulla, and at least one beach in every coastal local government area in the state. The government calls it the largest expansion of aerial shark surveillance in the world, and looking at the numbers, that appears to be right. Surf Life Saving NSW has now flown more than one hundred thousand flights under the program and recorded over two thousand sharks kept away from people.
And here is what I keep turning over.
That’s a stretch of coastline that just became continuously observed. Not monitored during summer. Not watched on weekends. Watched, every day, permanently, from the air. The next stage under trial is artificial intelligence doing the spotting instead of a person looking at a screen, and drones launching automatically from surf club rooftops so nobody has to drive to the beach at all. That’s the step from we send a drone to the beach is simply always being watched.
Nobody argued about it. There was no consultation process, no privacy debate, no opinion pieces. There was a good reason, and the reason was dead teenagers, and no sane person stands up in that week and asks whether we’ve thought carefully about the surveillance implications.
I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a dystopia and I’m not pretending it’s one. Swimmers are genuinely safer. If it were my kids in that water I’d want the drone up. The program is a good program.
But this is how permanent observation actually arrives. Not through a debate we lose. Through a reason nobody is willing to argue with, in a week nobody chose. I made much the same observation a few weeks ago about smart glasses turning up in Kmart at eighty-nine dollars: the decision about ambient recording wasn’t taken in a parliament, it was taken at a checkout. The mechanism is the same. The threshold moves while everyone is looking at something else.
Ten years ago I wrote a piece for Hong Kong radio asking who’s watching the drones. I thought at the time it was a question about regulators. It turns out it was a question about all of us, and the answer is that we weren’t watching, because we were busy and the reason was good.
What was never the hard part
Somewhere in the middle of the segment I said something that I think is the practical core of all of this. Getting a drone into the air is easy. Flying it to a location is easy. Both of those problems were solved years ago.
What’s hard is everything after it arrives. Where does it land. Whose airspace was that. What happens when there are four hundred of them over one suburb. Who’s liable when one comes down on a roof. What happens when the wind picks up and the pizza lands in the neighbour’s pool.
Australia legislated early, which is why Canberra had approved suburban delivery back when I wrote about it in 2019, and why domestic delivery here is further along than in most comparable countries. I’d been asking whether flying mail was the future for Australia Post since 2015, and was still writing about parcels taking off in 2020. And even here, seven years later, it remains more demonstration than service in most places.
Meanwhile the same permissiveness cuts the other way. Phil and I talked about reports in the Australian press only last week of drones being flown near commercial aircraft by people who either didn’t know the rules or enjoyed breaking them. In 2014 I wrote a short piece called watch out, here comes a falling drone, and at the time it read as a novelty worry. It doesn’t now. A bird strike is a tragedy. A drone strike is a decision somebody made.
I’ve been making a version of this argument since 2014, when I wrote a piece asking which comes first, the technology, the crime or the law. Twelve years on, the sequence hasn’t changed. The technology arrives, then the harm, then the rule. The only thing that varies is how long we sit in the middle stage and how much it costs us while we’re there.
What actually changes for the people running things
If you lead an organisation, here is the part that matters, and it isn’t the flying.
First, your capability will be unblocked in a week you didn’t choose. Almost every drone application on the list is technically finished and waiting on permission. That permission doesn’t usually arrive through careful policy work. It arrives after an incident, quickly, with money attached, and with almost no room to think. The New South Wales beach program is the template. If you run a hospital, a utility, a logistics network or an emergency service, there’s a version of this waiting for you, and the question isn’t whether you’ll get the capability. It’s whether you’ll have thought about it before the week that hands it to you, or be designing on the worst day of your organisational life.
Second, and this is the one I’d put in front of a board. If anything can be anywhere within four minutes, what stops being worth building near people?
Sit with that. This is Immediate Futures work, not forecasting. Pharmacies exist partly because medication needs to be close. Depots exist because parts need to be close. Small regional hospitals hold inventory because resupply is slow. Every one of those is a building whose location is justified by a travel time. Change the travel time and you haven’t just improved a service, you’ve removed the reason for a building, a lease, a workforce and a town’s anchor employer.
That’s a Ripple Effect in the exact sense I use the term, a second and third-order consequence that lands somewhere nobody was looking. The blood drone story reads as a health story. It’s actually a property, employment and regional planning story, and the people who will feel it first aren’t in health at all.
Third, the observation follows the good reason. Whatever your organisation eventually puts in the sky or on the ground, it will be justified by safety, and the justification will be sincere and correct. It will also, as a by-product, create a continuous record of a place and the people in it. That record will exist whether or not you decided to create it. Decide now who can access it, how long it’s kept, and what it may never be used for. Write that down while the question is still theoretical, because once there’s a reason nobody wants to argue with, you won’t get a calm conversation about it.
Three Things I Recommend You Do
The first thing to do is find the capability in your organisation that’s technically ready and waiting only on permission. Every organisation has one, and it’s rarely on a strategy document because nothing is blocking it except a rule. Name it. Write the one-page version of what you’d do if the rule changed on a Monday. You aren’t committing to anything. You’re refusing to be caught designing under pressure.
The second thing to do is take one service you deliver and ask what changes if the delivery time drops by two thirds. Not what improves. What becomes unnecessary. Which building, which stockholding, which role exists only because the current travel time is what it is. This is uncomfortable in the right way, and it’s the single most useful hour a leadership team can spend on this subject. Most groups discover their real exposure isn’t the service at all. It’s the property portfolio.
The third thing to do is write your observation policy before you need one. One page. Who can see the footage, who can’t, how long it’s retained, what it’ll never be used for, and who has authority to change those answers. Do it now, while nobody is upset and nothing has happened. The moment there’s a reason good enough to justify permanent watching, the window for writing that policy calmly has already shut.
The argument worth having
The thing I keep coming back to isn’t the cockroach and it isn’t the beer drone. It’s that we’ve stopped arguing about whether these machines fly and started arguing about who’s allowed to depend on them.
That’s a much more interesting fight, and it’s the one that decides whether any of this shows up in your life or stays in a demonstration video. It’s also the fight most organisations aren’t in, because they’re still watching the aircraft.
I said on air that I don’t want a sky full of mechanical mosquitoes, and I meant it. I also want the defibrillator to arrive in three minutes, the blood to reach the roadside, the teenagers off the sandbar in seventy seconds, and somebody watching the water where my family swims. I don’t get to have one without the other, and neither do you. What we get to decide is the terms, and we only get to decide them if we do it before the week that makes the decision for us.
Not prediction. Preparation.
Choose Forward.
If this is landing close to home for your organisation, I work with leadership teams and boards on exactly these kinds of decisions: what the signals mean, what the ripple effects are, and what to do before the moment makes the decision for you. Get in touch.
You can also subscribe to my Immediate Futures briefing, a short weekly read on the signals worth paying attention to, written for leaders who want to stay ahead of what’s already arriving.
#Drones #SharkDrones #DroneDelivery #Surveillance #Leadership #RippleEffects #ImmediateFutures #FutureOfWork #Australia #RTHK #MorningBrew #MorrisMisel #ChooseForward
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the NSW shark drones and how often do they fly?
From 1 July 2026, drones fly over around seventy New South Wales beaches, dawn to dusk, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. That covers every Sydney beach from Palm Beach to Cronulla and at least one beach in every coastal local government area in the state. The New South Wales Government calls it the largest expansion of aerial shark surveillance in the world, and on the numbers that looks right.
Why did New South Wales fund shark drones so quickly?
Because shark nets had been removed and swimmers were killed in shallow water, and on those days the drones weren’t flying since the program wasn’t funded to go up daily. The government committed $120 million to a shark management program within days, with $34 million specifically for drones, artificial intelligence and emerging technology. Nobody argued, and that’s the part I keep coming back to.
Where were cyborg cockroaches actually used in a real rescue operation?
The only documented deployment is Myanmar, in March 2025, after the 7.7 magnitude earthquake. Singapore’s Civil Defence Force took ten insect and robot hybrids built by the Home Team Science and Technology Agency with Nanyang Technological University into collapsed buildings in Naypyitaw and Mandalay. It was a world first. They didn’t find survivors, and that’s worth saying plainly rather than smoothing over.
Do drones actually deliver defibrillators faster than an ambulance?
In the Duke Health study in Forsyth County, North Carolina, response time fell from an average of six to seven minutes to under four. That’s a research study on live emergency calls, not a running service. The number that matters isn’t the speed of the aircraft, it’s the survival difference between a defibrillator arriving at seven minutes and one arriving at three.
Which country is furthest ahead on medical drone delivery?
Rwanda, and it isn’t close. The operation started in 2016 and now makes a delivery roughly every sixty seconds, has passed two million commercial deliveries, and carries the majority of the blood supply outside Kigali. Rwanda leapfrogged the road network rather than waiting to fix it, which is why a country nobody would have picked is a decade in front.
What’s the real obstacle to drone delivery becoming normal?
Not the flying. Getting a drone into the air and to a location was solved years ago. The obstacle is everything after it arrives: airspace, landing, liability, density, and who’s allowed to depend on the service at three in the morning. That’s the difference between a demonstration and a service, and it’s where most drone applications are still sitting.
What should leaders actually do about this now?
Three things. Name the capability in your organisation that’s technically ready and waiting only on permission, and write the one-page version of what you’d do if the rule changed on a Monday. Ask what becomes unnecessary if a delivery time drops by two thirds, because the exposure is usually property rather than service. And write your observation policy while the question is still theoretical, because once there’s a reason nobody wants to argue with, the calm conversation is over.
Full Segment Transcript, RTHK Radio 3, The Brew, 18 August 2026 ▼ Click to expand
Morris Misel speaking with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew. Machine transcribed, lightly unedited.
What you know, what you know That's Benson Boone on Radio 3 Mystical, magical Morisal, how are ya? Yeah, happy Tuesday everyone, were you describing me Phil? Magical, mystical, yes, Morris Mizolowski all the way by magic from somewhere in Melbourne, good to talk to you, I think we need a gadget chat we've done the serious stuff Oh we do, we do So drones, interesting, I wondered if there are any really groovy sort of new ones out that we might not have seen and the best I could come up with was the cockroach one which perhaps you can explain Yeah I love the cockroach one So this is one that apparently happened in Venezuela although there isn't really a verifiable source for it but there is for it happening in other words, the Venezuela story no one's really sure about but its origin story must probably be
true, in fact we know it's to be true So this is kind of a drone, kind of not It's a hybrid, so this happened actually out of Singapore it was a Singapore, it was a Singapore University that put this together Singapore's Home Team Science and Technology Agency ya know, it comes with rolls off the tongue Doesn't it? What doesn't it? So what they came up with was as working with part of the Singapore Civil Defence Force which has about 80 members of it So this is the thing that is put out whenever there are calamities, tragedies in Singapore and around the region as well They are a group of people that go out and basically do all the stuffThe duo and I are so thankful for that I definitely wouldn't run towards but they do okay It's like a super emergency response team. Yeah, it's
like it's like still team or whatever we watch on television Those kind of people with all the gadgets and everything with them So they were in Minamar and there was the earthquake there a couple of years ago Actually a year ago in March of 2025 it killed 3,000 people nothing good to be said about that at all Yeah What what this team did and what the scientists did to me this is kind of like for people of my vintage going back to Maxwell smart, you know the scientists that come up with all those Inventions that they kept giving him to wear and to have around him Yes, I don't know where they took this from but obviously it made sense to them The scientists behind this team looked at Madagascar hissing cockroaches, right? I mean, why wouldn't you everybody does they're about 16 meters long
Cards I've had any personal contact with them, but they're quite long. They're quite horrible and they're quite big Unless of course you love cockroaches in which case they're wonderful warm and cuddly but to me not so much Yeah, what they what they did was on the back of these little cockroaches because we know cockroaches literally and for millions of years Have been able to get in and out of anywhere destructible as well. Yeah, and that that's exactly it That's why they that's why they went to cockroaches. Yeah, and they found the most Indestructible cockroaches of cockroaches. That's what these put that's what these things are So what they did was on the back of these things literally they attached mini cameras and Sensors and then they also stuck them with electrodes in their nerves and muscles. So these are real cockroachesYeah, 100% real. They suit
them up like bomb rats. Yeah, exactly. So they got this really big six centimeter cockroach. This thing that's indestructible. They stuck a camera on the top of it. They stuck sensors into it. And then they went into their nerves. I know this sounds horrible, and their muscles. And they attached electrodes. Now the reason they did that was they could steer them. So they would literally zap them on the right-hand side and they'd move to the left. I know it is science and we can just get past this part. But that's how they worked. And what they did was they put these souped up cockroaches into these places where the earthquake was and they went to look for survivors. Unfortunately, despite all of the wonderful tech around this, they didn't find any. And that's just the sad part of the story. The technology, the cockroaches and
all the rest of them did work. I don't think many of them are still alive cockroaches. That is. I doubt it. No, me either. But that's the story behind those. So they're kind of drones. So it's drone thinking. Yeah, it's drones. It's not drones as in air. So really what this drone is, is a land one. And that's the same as we talk about drones on being used for taxis, being used for food deliveries and those kinds of things. It's the broader category rather than the specific one of flight where most of us go to when we think about it. I mean, this isn't, this is quite an old way of thinking. I mentioned bomb rats. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Using for land mines and things like that. I'm not sure they can see.them but that idea has been around forever hasn't it? Well now
they can. You can imagine somebody who has little magnifying glasses over their eyes as they are working with these six centimeter cockroaches getting them all geared up and ready to go. Anyway, if someone's going to come across what would be the actual tiniest, it's easy to look up tiniest drone ever because you always think in, you mentioned Maxwell Spa in Maxwell Smart in Spa movies. It just has to be. You sort of think of like somebody wants to go in and take someone out and they've got like a mosquito but it's a drone or something like that. It has to be. There just has to be something like that. Absolutely. If not, if not, we'll bring it about. We'll make it happen otherwise. Well I'm wondering, I mean if it does exist, I mean it's not, we're not going to know about it really are
we because it's the other, it's the dark side of things isn't it? But the ones we do know about, I mean the pizza drone was a thing, wasn't it? Is a thing? It is a thing. So delivery drones are actually actually coming around. So we're seeing a lot more of them than we ever did before because we saw zero. In Australia, in Australia, they're actually legislation for it. So in Canberra you're allowed to do it. They still don't sip around everywhere. But the airspace, when I say you're allowed to, the problem with drones flying is that there's commercial airspace up there. So you can't just put a drone up as much as it sounds easy to do. I mean technically you can, but then you are contravening all kinds of laws and bits and pieces. You have to get law of the land. You've got
to think practically as well because there's still telegraphs and wires and all sorts of bits and pieces. So it's not that easy is it? It isn't.I mean the technology putting it up there is easy in flying it to where it has to go. But once it's there, what do you do with it? So that's the big part. And we're getting much, much better at it. The airspace is actually freeing up towards it. Having said that there was a story in the press this week, late last week in Australia, where it said that a lot of commercial flights are actually being buzzed by drones, even though they're not allowed to. There are strict limits for drones being out of that space. But unfortunately some people aren't aware of them or just like the sport of it. That's an increase. And that's a real problem too, of
course. Potentially disastrous. I mean, I'm trying to look at the good side of these things today. But you're absolutely bang on about that. Me too, because again, we've had unfortunately enough, enough terrible things happening when a bird strikes a plane in an engine. Indeed. So with a bird, of course, it's just one of those terrible calamities. But these drones are actually driven by somebody. So there's a big push as there should be for that to stop. And of course the law has been increased and also has the vigilance around it. But there are some really good uses for these things too. There are medical drones, for instance, which are being used. They're being used around the world. But the one that we came up with this morning was from North Carolina. It's from Duke Health. And what they do is they put an AED. An
AED is the device that we put onto somebody when they're having a heart attack to shock their heart back into rhythm. Right. So before we might have done it manually and we still should, you know, the pumps and the breathing and all that kind of stuff. This is the device, literally, that you put over. It actually tells you what to do. So once you put it onto the body.It actually tells you to put it here, do this, touch this button and it shocks it automatically. What this study has done, and I've actually seen this in Australia a few times, I've not seen it but read about it, is that as soon as a call comes in for somebody having a hard attack, this drone launches automatically. So it launches automatically towards where the person is phoning from. The caller is still taking information, the person
is still giving information, but the drone is left. And it's left towards the destination of the mobile phone. It cruises about 40 miles an hour and it goes up to about 200 feet in the air and it drops down to 100 feet. So the call comes in somebody having a hard attack, before all the details are taken, this drone gets sent out, the call is taken, everybody's working it out, the drone arrives and then it drops from 100 feet down to the person and then with that comes all the instructions which are voice instructions. So 40 miles an hour might not sound very fast but if there's absolutely nothing in your way, that's not bad is it? No, it's not bad, it's better than the alternative which is nothing. I mean the alternative is absolutely nothing. And what we know is that somebody's survival rates
are incredibly better when that happens. I think it potentially is about 50 to 70% chance of surviving if you're shocked within two to five minutes. Do you see much of this sort of thing in Australia because obviously you've got so much woodland and bush and all sorts of potential? Not yet, yeah. Not yet, but I've heard this story come across quite a few times. I know quite a few hospitals are working on it and I don't think it'll be too…We see them which is not drones. We see them now on motorbikes. So there are motorbikes, which of course are written by people. But the purpose of the motorbike is, of course, an ambulance has to get through traffic. It's more difficult. A motorbike can zip through quite quickly. So we have those sorts of people with the training and with that on a motorbike. But
it will come and I know it's happening in other places around the world. I mean, it's the obvious thing for the untrained person, you know, the sci-fi fan, kid, whatever, to say, well, surely an ambulance could pick somebody up out of a battlefield or whatever. I mean, that's got to be… Yeah. And that's being done. So there are versions of that. I know that there's one in the Middle East and it's been operating for about five, six years in Israel. It goes into the battlefield, as you said, where there's issue. And of course, you couldn't send people in easily. But they can send the drone in and the opportunity there is, if the person is able to get themselves inside the drone, because, of course, there's nobody there to help them. But if they can do that, then the drone can take off again and
take them back to where they might be able to get assistance. So that's certainly been working for a while. And an offshoot of that is going to be cargo, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. So cargo is another big one, but there are some other ones around that also work around that medical one. Oh, yeah. There are quite a number of drones that work around delivering blood supplies to hospitals and in battlefields and to first responders. So literally where there's a car accident or something as well, not just into hospitals. And this is now, right? This is… Yeah, absolutely. And strangely enough, the best example of this is actually in Rwanda, Africa.where it started exactly 10 years ago, 2016. Oh, yeah. And they have been delivering drone by blood by drone for 10 years, and it now makes a delivery of every 60 seconds. And it's delivered
over 2 million commercial deliveries and flown 135 million autonomous miles. And they don't get hijacked or anything? I mean, in some countries you'd think. No, I mean, unless you're a vampire, I mean, what do you do with the blood? People think there's value in things, don't they? Well, they may well do, but this one is quite incredible. It has a 10-year history and a 10-year charted history of being very useful. And it's become one of the major sources of getting blood from one place to another. Again, Rwanda has difficulty. Its road transport system is not very good. Its roads are not very good. So the fact that they can overcome those, we're happy to fix the roads and send somebody the plasma or the blood they need is quite incredible. Well, let's talk about sort of Springfield, Illinois, or something, Simpsonsland or wherever. People ordering
some food or whatever, and along comes the drone. But I think that's a lot more complicated than it sounds. And you will have people taking a shot at it just for fun. You absolutely will. So some of the pizza companies, as I said, in Australia particularly, in Canberra, but it's more of a gimmick than an everyday activity. But they definitely have the right to do it. And from time to time, there will be a media release that says it's been done and they'll show you it flying in the sky. How's it flying? Where's it flying? So it's a normal drone, as my sisters would think of.a basket type approach inside of it. The pizza is slid into the basket and what happens is when it reaches over the house it drops it down. So the drone actually drops down, not all the way. It remains
in the sky about 50 meters or so and then drops it down and places onto a porch or a landing or somewhere. So it's not the best you can imagine, it's a tailwind, it wouldn't be great in an apartment. There are all sorts of reasons why it doesn't work well yet but the technology is there and it's kind of gimmicky and kind of works. It's not actually the technology that's the problem is if you think no if it became a thing there'd be loads of them flying around. That would be a nightmare waiting to happen. Unfortunately. Yeah, look I always refer to them as mechanical mosquitoes. I don't want to live in a world quite frankly where drones are all over the place exactly. Yeah but wouldn't it be cool to get a pizza delivered? Absolutely. For me I couldn't imagine anything better but for
the whole neighborhood having all these pizza boxes flying in the sky. I mean they're not there inside the ship. People would definitely hijack pizza ones. Well you wouldn't. You've got power lines, you've got all kinds of issues that are around too. There are all sorts of issues but I don't think that will be a problem ongoing. Can I tell you some interesting ones out of Australia? Go on. There's one called the Sky Kelpie. Now Kelpie is a breed of dog here. It's what's used for cattle mustering. Kelpie. So it's called the Sky Kelpie. It actually works in Cloncurry in Queensland which is out the back of nowhere. You know you turn left and you keep going. Yeah. And you keep going and you keep going. So Cloncurry is a long way out. What's some bright person is down there?And there are a lot of drones
actually used in Outback Australia because it makes perfect sense There is people people own Thousands of kilometers own thousands of kilometers that are their land So getting things backwards and forwards from their land to another part of it makes perfect sense and it's cheap for them There's nothing in the way. There's no lines or anything. So what this sky kelpie does it's been working for two years Yeah, normally they would send their dogs out or or you know as a shepherd to get the sheep in What they decided to do was well the dogs work well, they're still on the land But there's sometimes a sheep are just too far away and sometimes the dogs just not ready So what the what this bright spark has done is it's recorded the dog barking with all of the normal dog barking that it does To get
the sheep in and put it on to a speaker which attached to the drum so simple in a way Isn't it? I mean it really is you could you could imagine some kid tying it to the bottom of the drone with a string It's a bit more than that and what happens is that when the when the drone you know needs to bring in the dogs of the sheep It just sends out a signal for the right type of bark to make it happen and the sheep don't know any difference So Aussie is perfect for drones to develop now when you think that's strange It's not because we have been using helicopters to master for decades Literal helicopters mini one so it's not unusual at all. It's happening a lot in Australia again It makes sense putting it into this drone meant that the fuel
cost dropped everything else dropped to so really they've taken technology That's been used for decades like remote control helicopterpretty much. But yeah, so that's that's one of them. The other one that the other one that made a big splash and I'm using the term you know, the big splash in Australia in the last couple of months only was unfortunately we have shark well not of course we have lots of sharks in our ocean. For the last six months or so there has been a lot of sharks coming very close to shore in Sydney and other places as well and we have lost a number of people who've literally just been waiting at the shoreline so I wait and we know in their feet and all the rest of it not very deep not doing anything I'm in particularly untoward and we've had a couple of
people that have lost their lives. Now traditionally yeah it is and we've had a whole big thing here because what would normally happen what's been happening for decades is that we have shark lines which are big lines that are put out there and in the nets and the sharks can't get through. We've stopped doing that which means that for a whole lot of reasons most of them were political and people getting really upset about it so the sharks could come through. What happened was that they kind of said that some drones could take that place and could look for the sharks not stop them but look for the sharks and give people warning well of course on the days that people were out there and got bitten and killed there was no funding so nobody paid for the petrol in the drone so we didn't
have them and unfortunately that's what happened. So what's made the sharks more cheeky is it just that they know this hasn't it hasn't it's just that the nets aren't there to stop them it's the usual time of season so they're coming into shore and that's what happened and the thing that was meant to tell us that they were there which was the you know theoffshoot was we'll tell you when the sharks are there you'll close the beaches it'll be okay the sharks I get caught up in the nets life will be terrific well on paper it worked well unfortunately it cost people lives literally in a week so the government the next morning the government spent a hundred and twenty million dollars committed to it to specifically put drones up in the air 365 days a year from dawn to dusk to monitor the beaches
right across Sydney and also to Queensland if you are the places that's where drones play a really interesting part I think we've got more to talk about on this but we've got to stop for the news and say hi to Jared in a bit I'm really liking the idea of drones helping the animal world one way and another that was interesting the sheepdog thing yeah it does yeah it does and they've got quail rescues and all kinds of things going to where they use thermals to figure out where the qualas are on the tree and then go rescue them all kinds of really interesting things happening with drones really Morris are you about to cook any new articles before we say goodbye anything we there is one is there is one this morning on the future of work it's on the basis can I tell
you with with particular sky I won another award overnight the top 20 top 25 in the future of work globally so very very thrilled with that that was interesting to wake up to let's talk about it next week yeah nice one Morris Mr. Louski is always live from St. Kilda in Melbourne let's check out the weather mainly
This post is based on my segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew, 18 August 2026.
