“Progress is real but so are its consequences,” wrote Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants, and he isn’t the first or last to say so. When it comes to tools, the most-pressing short-term concerns are environmental damage, skill fade and technological unemployment. 

On the latter topic, Mary Clare Jalonick of the Associated Press reports on agricultural drones, which are to farms as robots are to warehouses. They’re an amazing example of progress, far more precise and friendlier to the environment, though the consequence, once the slow-moving FAA works out the rules, is likely fewer jobs. The opening:

CORDOVA, Md. (AP) — Mike Geske wants a drone.

Watching a flying demonstration on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the Missouri farmer envisions using an unmanned aerial vehicle to monitor the irrigation pipes on his farm — a job he now pays three men to do.

“The savings on labor and fuel would just be phenomenal,” Geske says, watching as a small white drone hovers over a nearby corn field and transmits detailed pictures of the growing stalks to an iPad.

Nearby, farmer Chip Bowling tries his hand at flying one of the drones. Bowling, president of the National Corn Growers Association, says he would like to buy one for his Maryland farm to help him scout out which individual fields need extra spraying.

Another farmer, Bobby Hutchison, says he is hoping the man he hires weekly to walk his fields and observe his crops gets a drone, to make the process more efficient and accurate.

“I see it very similar to how I saw the computer when it first started,” says Hutchison, 64. “It was a no-brainer.”•