Culture
'Ubiquitous As Pigeons': Imagining Life in the City of Drones
An online installation asks us to accept an all-but-certain future of drones in cities, and to rethink our relationship to them.
What can a video of a cat riding a Roomba teach us about the future of drones in cities? For architect, artist, and futurist think-tank leader Liam Young, it's a lesson about how technology becomes not only democratized, but accepted.
“When Roomba first hit the market, people didn’t know what to make of them,” Young says. “All of that money for some weird vacuum? It wasn’t until someone put their cat on one and stuck it on the Internet that people started to relate. It was, 'Oh, look at everything I can do with this little robot.'”