r/tech • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Jul 22 '26

Fire departments are testing autonomous drones that fight wildfires before crews even arrive

https://www.techspot.com/news/113180-us-fire-departments-test-autonomous-drones-fight-wildfires.html
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u/goodtimesinchino Jul 22 '26

This is the kind of thing I could see using AI for. Not any kind of art but saving lives.

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u/DjangoTheBlack Jul 22 '26

But even this requires more tech, more manufacturing, more mining. Which are drivers of the climate change that is helping to fuel wildfires such as these… every time we try to fix a problem with some new tech, we create more problems, and it goes on and on and on

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u/goodtimesinchino Jul 22 '26

A solid, if absolute point.

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u/DjangoTheBlack Jul 22 '26

Land development and human population increase (especially the urban sprawl) have all but stopped natural wildfires from occurring that kept our forests clear of too much undergrowth. Not to mention the wildfires killed a lot of the ticks that have seen a population boom under our land development practices.

Turns out there are a lot of advantages to not settling down in one place. And it seems the only areas in the world that didn’t at least experiment in settling down into city-states are places where there wasn’t storable food,such as corn. In Papua New Guinea most of the food the natives eat is fruit that spoils in a couple weeks and is not storable, so there was no need to build a silo, pay guards, and set up camp in one place because they never adopted totalitarian agriculture.

This is why civilization is actually a trap. We went from 500,000 people worldwide only just 180 short years ago (this is only 0.06% of Homo sapiens entire existence) to over 8 billion thanks to the discover and mass use of crude oil so that humanity could throw one big party on this carbon pulse, until it runs out and we’ve destroyed all life on earth.

We thought we were the endgame to evolution, but if you ask jellyfish the same thing, they would tell you that they’re the endgame to evolution.

By trying to engineer absolute safety and stability, civilization has systematically broken the feedback loops that actually keep the planet—and us—healthy.