The cover story, by Lev Grossman, is here and discusses DIY Drones. The editors of Time also invited me to write a companion piece in the issue, which is below (they wrote the headline, not me!)
Why We Shouldn’t Fear Personal Drones
By Chris Anderson
Drones, like most robots, are designed for jobs that are “dull, dirty or dangerous.” We know what that means in a military context — everything from endless “loitering” over combat zones to remote-controlled warfare with the pilots safely in a trailer in Nevada — but soon civilian drones will be flying commonly overhead here at home. What will they be doing?
The usual assumption is that it will be police surveillance and general snooping. Interestingly, that’s just what people feared when the computer, which had also been introduced as a military technology, started to be used commercially in the 1960s. The worry then was that computers would be used primarily to spy on us, as an arm of Big Brother. Only decades later, once we all had one, did we figure out that they were better at work and entertainment, communicating with each other and generally being welcome additions to our lives. That’s because we could control them and tailor their use to our own needs, which we did amazingly well.
This change is already underway with drones. Personal versions are small, cheap and easy to use. They cost as little as $300 and are GPS-guided fully-autonomous flying robots (my company, 3D Robotics, is one of many making them). They fly themselves, from takeoff to landing, and can even follow the terrain for miles. There are already more in the hands of amateurs than the military, and some of the uses may surprise you. Civilian drones don’t just do the “dull, dirty and dangerous” jobs better; they can also make the expensive ones cheaper. In a world of Google maps, the advantage of aerial views of the world are clear, but satellites and manned aircraft are expensive and the pictures they take are often too far away or too infrequent to be useful. Drones can get better views, more often. And those shots can be of exactly what you want to see — an anytime, anywhere eye in the sky, controlled by you, not The Man.
Take sports videos. If you’re a windsurfer and want a great YouTube video of your exploits, you’re not going to get that from the shore, and hiring a manned helicopter and camera crew to follow you offshore isn’t cheap. But if you’ve got a “FollowMe” box on your belt, you can just press a button and a quadcopter drone with a camera can take off from the shore, position itself 30 feet up and 30 feet away from you and automatically follow you as you skim the waves, camera trained on you the whole way (when its battery gets low, it can return to the shore and land itself). Fast forward a year or so, and that same FollowMe box will become a FollowMe sticker, which you can put on soccer ball. Now that copter can follow the action of your kid’s soccer game, bringing NFL-quality aerial video to PeeWee sports.
One father has already set his personal drone to follow his kid to the school bus stop. Another team configured a drone to be a personal “periscope”; it flies above your head, giving you a video view from ten feet up. Yet another programmed a drone to fly in front of a runner, like a mock rabbit to a greyhound, encouraging them to pick up the pace.
Commercially, the potential is even greater. Farmers are already using drones to monitor their crops; a weekly overhead picture of a field can give them the information they need to use less chemicals and water on the plants, saving money and the environment. Scientists use drones for wildlife conservation, mapping the nests of endangered species without disturbing them. And energy companies use drones to monitor electric pylons and gas pipelines.
What was once military technology can now be used by children and I’m sure a generation growing up with drones — my kids launch them in the park on weekends — will find better uses than I could ever think of. What we, the technologists, know is that they will soon be cheap and easy enough to be commonplace; what we don’t know is what application will emerge as result. Tomorrow you may think nothing of driving by a farm swarming with robot cropdusters. Or see film sets with hovering cameras. Or skiers followed by personal videodroids. Or, more likely, something I can’t imagine at all that’s better than any of those. That’s what happens when you add “personal” to a technology. It evolves into something new, often more powerful in the hands of regular people than it ever was in the hands of the few.
Comments
However, thinking about human behavior, it's only a matter of time until some nut weaponizes a drone and uses it to hurt others. And I expect the backlash against drones to be swift and severe. I wish there were some way to limit drones to positive uses. But at this point I just don't see it.
And with that, I'll hold off on posting on this topic unless addressed directly. Sorry if I laid my worries at your door.
I also think that diydrones could grow into a lot more than just open source APM sort of thing.. there are a lot of companion technologies like the dronemapper could probably be open source.. I think a lot of the dronemapper uses the USGS data which is public domain data...
that is why I think pushing the civil tasks and getting a community behind it would be ideal... there is a lot more to drones then a flight board and the more we can develop and push that the better... otherwise we risk the whole thing being seen as military technology / killing machines.
Mark nails it. I agree whole heartedly! Let us show the civil, useful aspects of drones in regular everyday use. Also it would be good to push more story/articles on DIYDrones around the civil use of drones, good example is the drone mapper recent posts with the state of utah. If we show more of the goodness of drones for civilian use it will go a long way to counter the negative we are seeing in articles and such.
I think that could be said about everything.. any technology in the wrong hands is bound to end up used in the wrong way.. from cell phone cameras in bathrooms, to whatever. With Drones I think we need to change the discussion from war machine to general flying machines.. way to many people only think drone = killing machine.. and it won't be until people see the useful parts of this that the will start to see them differently,
We really need to be pushing the benign purposes.. and other non-military use.. and as a community there has got to be a high profile way of doing it.
I really think 3DR should put on a yearly event that features civil drone technology.. by presenting a series of civil tasks and having teams compete for prize money or something... like Search and Rescue, or medial supply dropping, interior mapping, or spotting a fire.. etc. That way we can push our civil agendas in a very media visible way.. and mabye the prize money would push people to develop better technolgies that everyone else could benefit from. Much like the x-prize and DARPA challanges. Right now it seems we are a lot more passive community.
I hope you're right, that drone technology will be used for benign purposes. But I fear that you're wrong.
Just today, the day you posted the article, this was put up as well on DIY: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/interesting-drone-ad-on-alibaba
Think about the implications. A gun is a tool for putting holes in things at a distance - it doesn't know good from evil. Yet look at how it's used. How long do you think it will be before some crazy (yet relatively smart) person straps an explosive device to an autonomous drone and programs it to fly into a crowd of people and trigger it's payload? The builder could remain anonymous while hurting a lot of people - even better (from a warped perspective) than using a fully automatic weapon!
It's a general problem, and drones aren't to blame. It's technology putting too much power in the hands of the individual. As an extreme case, I bet that somewhere, some mad-scientist is cooking up some sort of terrible highly contagious form of a plague in his basement. If not that, probably in China or at least North Korea, they're thinking up some wild plan to wipe out entire continents (be it the North America or Australia), thinking oceans can limit contagion.
Where this all leads, I don't know. The only solution seems to be a big-brother police-state that limits access to certain sets of forbidden knowledge.
Unfortunately, due to the new approachability of drone technology, being the first consumer-approachable dangerous technology, my guess is that it will bear the brunt of the issues.
It's sad that just as we are on the edge of being able to start using a (somewhat) complete understanding of the universe to create a better world, we will very probably end up turning that knowledge to hurting ourselves, and end up in a worse place. Somehow I think this all is inevitable and will become an inflection point in our evolution.
I like that Chris brought up some of the more benign applications of drones such as crop monitoring, video tapping sports instead of hiring a manned helicopter. I hope the unwarranted fear will wear off one day, but we have to go through the boogey man phase first with visions of Terminator coming to mind for most folks. Unfortunately one bad usage will set progress back unless drones get embedded with the masses. Chris, keep those prices down and let us keep our fingers crossed.
Great article, thank you Chris for so accurately representing our objectives.
Unfortunately with government funding the way it is the military generally get dibs on all the newest and most interesting technology as was clearly the case here.
I say unfortunately, because, of course, the military promptly uses it to scare the bejesus out of everybody and kill people.
After All it's what they do.
Now we are going to have an uphill battle convincing the public and even that same government that funded the military research that we can have civilian UAVs provide a positive influence on our world and our culture.
Thank God for Chris Anderson and others with the vision to see what can be and not just what is and even more so for their determination to make it so.
stupidity larger weapons
I like this line especially-
"That’s what happens when you add “personal” to a technology. It evolves into something new, often more powerful in the hands of regular people than it ever was in the hands of the few."
Favorite quote from the cover story-
"Flying a drone, even just a Parrot, makes you realize what a radically new and deeply strange technology drones are. A drone isn't just a tool; when you use it you see and act through it — you inhabit it. It expands the reach of your body and senses in much the same way that the Internet expands your mind. The Net extends our virtual presence; drones extend our physical presence."
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