5G: The Potential and the Risks
It was one of those perfect spring days. The sun was out, at long last, following the cold cloudiness that marked the first several weeks of the new season. Birdsong filled the air, and chipmunks, squirrels, and rabbits scurried here and there, animated by warmth of the sun. Standing in the door of his machine shed, a farmer looked out on his vast acreage. Greeting his gaze was a vast vista of newly sprouted corn, all growing in perfectly manicured rows. But there was something new, too, in the scene. Above, joining the birds newly exuberant with the arrival of spring, was a small fleet of autonomous drones, each equipped with optical and infrared cameras and wirelessly connected to the Internet, their collected imagery and sensor data transmitted in real time to a data center a thousand miles away. There, the data and imagery was overlaid with more real-time imagery and data captured by cubesats (miniature satellites) in low-Earth orbit, along with meteorological data collected locally at the farm itself and regionally.
All of this was immediately available to the farmer, who was alerted to changing conditions in his fields, also in real time, as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) that constantly monitored the data collected reacted to trigger conditions. With a bleep and pip, the farmer’s mobile phone popped an alert: Soil moisture in field 7 was too low. This was followed by another pop-up alert: invasive weeds detected growing across fields 3-6. The farmer tapped his phone in response and to his left and right large, automated tractors stirred to life. Equipped with their own sensors tied to the same network and guided by advanced GPS tracking accurate to within 1.2 inches or less, the behemoth machines lumbered out to the fields where they began to apply just the right amount of herbicide to the emergent weeds they encountered. Meanwhile, in field 7, irrigation equipment sprang to life applying only the amount of water needed.
The farmer looked up from his phone and smiled. It was going to be a good day.
JBS Member or ShopJBS.org Customer?
Sign in with your ShopJBS.org account username and password or use that login to subscribe.
Subscribe Now
- 24 Issues Per Year
- Digital Edition Access
- Exclusive Subscriber Content
- Audio provided for all articles
- Unlimited access to past issues
- Cancel anytime.
- Renews automatically
Subscribe Now
- 24 Issues Per Year
- Print edition delivery (USA)
*Available Outside USA - Digital Edition Access
- Exclusive Subscriber Content
- Audio provided for all articles
- Unlimited access to past issues
- Cancel anytime.
- Renews automatically