Age 11 Thai Wins Drone Racing, But Who Will Win Killer Drone Race?

Wanraya Wannapong, age 11, from Thailand competed in the FAI World Drone Racing Championships in Shenzhen, China, which was a major event by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI). The young protege had won the Thai Drone Grand Prix last year, and moved up to the world stage, despite her young age.

 

Technology is leveling the field of competition in many aspects. Younger people have the advantage of being more pliable when it comes to learning new things. We are seeing younger and younger programmers. For example, Tanmay Bakshi, a self-taught coder who developed several apps and source code, and started to learn coding from the age of five.

At the same time, while technology may be an equalizer for age differences, technology is rapidly creating dangerous gaps between nations. There has always been nations that had certain technologies that other nations didn’t, like the atomic bomb, nuclear reactors, spaceships, and etc. But, at the moment, the difference is that the capacity of cutting edge technology is allowing for total domination of a lesser developed country like never before.

In the past, armies could win other armies, but occupying a foreign land proved many times to difficult to sustain. There’s just not enough man power to control everybody, or even to just keep surveillance on the population. There were language and cultural barriers in seeding control of peoples that were foreign to the ways and language of any wannabe conqueror. Every conquest, thus, were temporal or would result in annihilation of civilizations. Now, however, the world superpowers are in the race for the technology to rule them all, militarized autonomous drones.

 

It is a time of Robot-soldiers, stealth jets and drone armies, as Financial Times puts it. The man on man warfare will be a thing of the past. And, countries that are still debating that there is a need for drafting people who don’t want to be soldiers will be swallowed by the nation that had enlisted AI to fight in one single draft.

 

Drones will be at the frontlines, swarms of them, or really big and stealthy ones. Recently, at Airshow China, the CH-7, an UAV, was a display that no one could overlook. The CH-7’s wingspans is about the length of a tennis court at 22-metre. It can fly at more than 800 kilometres per hour and as high as 13 kilometers up in the sky.

Pakistan just bought 48 Wing Loong II aerial drones from China, and is planning to be manufacturing them in the near future. Business Insider reports:

“Officials in the Pakistani air forces have said that the manufacturer of the drones, China’s Chengdu Aircraft Industrial Group will collaborate on the domestic production of the drones with Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, Kamra, a state-backed air force equipment contractor.”

 

Not to downplay on Thailand’s 11 year old drone racer’s achievements, but the country’s progress and enthusiasm in drones is comparatively child’s play.