Ambulance Drone
Kaikōura is underwater again. The Kowhai River has burst its banks, and once more, it’s Takahanga Marae doing the heavy lifting, feeding people, sorting blankets, chasing down medications, all on volunteer power, not algorithms. Same story up in Northland back in January: Ōtetao Reti Marae fed and housed 150 locals, many of them elderly or living with serious health conditions, while the roads stayed cut off for days.
Meanwhile, the big AI money isn’t going anywhere near getting someone’s aunty her insulin through a slip. In the US, the Pentagon actually penalised Anthropic for refusing to let its AI be used for mass domestic surveillance, then handed the work to a competitor instead. The FBI purchased location data from brokers just to track citizens. And Palantir has walked away with hundreds of millions in UK government contracts for tools that human rights groups say enable mass surveillance, with one former employee saying they help “track, detain and… KILL people at scale.” That’s where the ambition and the funding are going. Watching us, not warning us.
It doesn’t have to be this way. NIWA has already built an AI model that produces flood depth forecasts in one to two minutes, instead of the usual 24 hours, and it predicted the 2021 Buller River flood with 95 percent accuracy. That is genuinely useful. But a fast forecast is only the first step. Someone still has to physically retrieve an 80-year-old with limited mobility out of a flooded Coromandel valley where public transport doesn’t reach and the nearest neighbour is a farm track away. The apps we use can’t drive a vehicle during these weather emergencies, at least not yet. No chatbot is carrying anyone down a slip.
That’s the gap nobody is properly funding. Marae are patching it together with solar panels from a government boost they had to beg for and sheer manaakitanga, while surveillance companies post record profits. If a government can find £240 million for a Palantir contract, it can find the money for on-the-ground coordinators, accessible transport, and welfare checks on our elderly, before the warning goes out, not after the marae is already full.
We built the technology to SEE everyone. It’s time it actually REACHED everyone too. I want our future generations to imagine and build a world where self-driving vehicles rescue cut-off whanau, where drones deliver medicine on time, and AI serves care, not control.
