Don’t ban the pizza drone: Northglenn is regulating a future that hasn’t arrived

By Wayne Laugesen | Commentary, Wayne’s Word

With proposed anti-drone regulations, Northglenn is writing rules for a future that hasn’t landed yet. It’s the same instinct that once feared electricity, elevators, and the pocket calculator.

Just say no to technophobia. It’s fashionable, contagious, and a fast track to a second-world economy.

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We live in an age of selfish indulgence. Build near a military base, then gripe about jet noise. Buy in a mixed commercial zone, then throw a fit when a few thousand people gather for a concert. Me, me, me!

So far, no delivery drone has dropped a package on a Colorado lawn. The suburbs are panicking anyway.

Northglenn, a city just north of Denver, is racing to become the first Colorado municipality with a drone-delivery ordinance. Expect this effort to proliferate in cities throughout Colorado. Not in my backyard!

Walmart wants to fly orders from its Neighborhood Market on North Washington Street using Wing, an Alphabet-owned service already operating in Texas, Georgia, and elsewhere. For the homebound, the elderly, and parents of sick kids, that means faster, cheaper delivery to the front door.

^{Drone delivery is on its way. As usual, NIMBYs are prepping to fight this progress.}

The Northglenn City Council plans a first reading Oct. 12 and a public hearing Oct. 26.¹Expect pitchforks. Remember the Tri-Lakes Buc-ee’s, which will pull millions of dollars off I-25 into Monument, Palmer Lake, and Woodmoor? NIMBYs warn of freeway pileups and, somehow, human trafficking. It’s a convenience store and gas station, but you’d think they were planning a nuclear waste dump.

With drones, here’s the loophole: The Federal Aviation Administration owns the air. Northglenn can regulate a launch pad in a parking lot. It can’t stop a drone that takes off in the next town and sets groceries down on a porch in Northglenn.²

Parker and Castle Rock have already imposed temporary moratoriums on drones.³ It’s the same impulse now aimed at data centers: first, freeze them, then invent a process, and ultimately brag about “getting out in front of it.”

Getting out in front of a machine that hasn’t arrived isn’t prudence. It’s the oldest American panic.

Every useful machine was going to kill us

Socrates feared writing would ruin memory. Luddites smashed frames that let fewer workers make more cloth. England made early cars crawl behind a man waving a red flag.⁴ When a lineman died in the wires above a New York City street in 1889, people warned electricity could come through the front door and kill the family.⁵

Radio would rot kids’ minds. Television would kill conversation. Calculators would raise a generation that couldn’t do arithmetic. Of course, that generation ended up building the personal computer.

Elevator operators once stood in cars all day announcing floors. After a 1945 strike in New York City, building owners embraced the push button. Economist James Bessen found that of hundreds of occupations tracked since 1950, elevator operator is the rare one automation erased.⁶ The operators simply found other work.

I once worked at a newspaper with a dozen phone operators. Automated routing arrived and within six months they were gone. The paper kept publishing. The work that remained — reporting, editing, and selling ads — required judgment.

From 1948 to 2019, U.S. farm labor fell about 74 percent while output rose about 175 percent.⁷ In 1880, more than 40 percent of American workers farmed. Today, fewer than 2 percent do.⁸ We didn’t starve. We fed ourselves and sent everyone else into factories, offices, hospitals, and trades that didn’t exist when the plow was high tech.

ATMs were supposed to kill bank tellers. Instead, cheaper branches meant more branches, and tellers moved from counting cash to selling mortgages and spotting fraud.⁹

Living standards keep rising. Unemployment follows recessions, not inventions, and nonfarm employment is several times what it was when commercial computers arrived.¹⁰ If robots took all the jobs, we’d be a nation of idle elevator operators staring at dark switchboards.

Displaced workers move toward what machines can’t do: judgment, care, persuasion, art, craft, and invention. That’s not a slogan. It’s the last two centuries.

When it isn’t progress, the market kills it

Real progress improves lives. When a new thing doesn’t, the market rejects it.

New Coke lasted 77 days in 1985. The Segway, meant to redesign cities, became a toy for mall cops. The Concorde couldn’t pay its bills. Google Glass turned wearers into walking cameras, and the public said no.¹¹ No city council had to “get out in front” of any of them. Customers did the regulating.

Drones and AI face the same test. If a drone is loud, sloppy, or creepy, people won’t order from it. If an AI diagnostic tool is worse than a doctor, hospitals won’t use it. What matters isn’t a public hearing. It’s whether the thing works, costs less, and leaves people better off.

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Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.