A drone used to be a noise that went on and on in the background; somebody mowing a lawn on Sunday morning when people wanted a lie in. Some people will relate a drone to what happens in business meetings, or in a boring monologue by some unreconstructed teacher in days of old.

However, in recent times drones have become very versatile high tech tools that are immensely useful, in the right hands, in fighting crime and other anti-social disorder.

Close Circuit Television Cameras are everywhere, there is approximately one CCTV camera for every fourteen people in Britain making ours the most protected Country in the world in terms of surveillance. For the queasy folks out there, the use of CCTV cameras is very highly controlled in Law and any citizen has the right to see footage that is recorded about them. However, Police using airborne remotely controlled devices has many benefits and the positives generally outweigh the negatives in making our towns and cities more safe.

Digital technology is quite amazing.

Without chips there would be no digital technology, remember when chips were 3D a bag with salt and vinegar and scraps?

Our children are able to write machine code at school, languages used to mean French, German and Cantonese, to name but a few. Presently, children in Primary Schools are being taught Computer Studies and it is a truism that for ‘older folks’ wanting to use a smart phone, for example, they should ask a school child – it used to be a teenager but times have changed – as most ten years old children can operate high specification electronics that have more power than is needed to send a man to the moon. One wonders what their children will be capable of in their contemporary generation; inter planetary travel, instantaneous voice operated computing, world peace? We live in hope.

Technology is amazing in liberating society, one only has to use a smart phone to know how far we have come, being able to not only speak to family on the far side of the planet but being to see them in real time is cool.

In all of this one thing prevails, on a sombre morning, the supreme quality of the human spirit. Technology is only a tool, a facilitator. What really counts is the spirit that drives everything that we do. That spirit will prevail and in doing so the technological gifts are a force for good.

Now, I need a ten years old to turn the TV on for me…



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