AI, Crypto and The Year of the Drone

It has been over a decade since drone technology became touted as a transformative technology platform for global development and society. Certainly in 2022 their use both in the Ukrainian war and Amazonian commercial delivery became an unavoidable sign of the negative and positive deployment of this promise. Yet potentially the combination with AI technology in the next year will make 2023 The Year of the Drone in more purely positive social terms.
 
India’s agricultural sector has not always kept up with new technology, relying largely on traditional methods due to a lack of capital, farming scale and the resulting credit paradox. But start-ups specialising in drone technology are breaking this inertia by encouraging farmers to use drones to monitor the health of crops and spray them with fertiliser and pesticides. The trend comes amid the government’s ambitious plan to make India a hub for drones by 2030. Importantly the farming data captured can be further modelled with AI to provide tailored advice for the small farms on improving crops. There is further light on the horizon for these farmers, as demonstrated by the CreDA pilot in Brazil, combined this kind of drone information with Satellite imagery and on the ground sensors using AI modelling to give farmers an edge in accessing credit to support these productivity assessments and investments.
 
More importantly by combining this AI data with blockchain the credit oracle can begin to enable crypto tokens that further support this new agricultural economy, pumping money that otherwise could not be accessible, into the hands of small holders and those caught in the position where they are unable to better their financial status. The use of Web3 in this way boosts the use of this drone technology and indeed allows farmers to build a Metaverse around the Brazilian agriculture. The empowerment of drone platforms with this AI Oracle means that 2023 may well be the coming of age of drone technology within a Web3 world.