Quite soon, it will be impossible to ignore the fact that a revolution is taking place. You’ll look up one day and the skies will be full of flying robots: pilotless drones or UAVS (Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles) — all programmed to carry out different tasks. There’ll be security drones circling shops, streaming video back to base, Royal Mail drones flying parcels to and fro. Even the birds and bees may not be what they seem. The tiniest drones on the market right now are called MAVs (Micro Air Vehicles) and their designs are inspired by nature. There are robot flies with camera eyes — perfect for corporate espionage; mosquito drones that can inject a payload of poison; hummingbird drones that perch and listen on windowsills. Some drones have bee-like hair which can collect and detect chemical and nuclear weapons.
The drone explosion is in part a product of the rapid development of mobile phones — which has meant cameras and chips small enough and light enough to fly about. They’re cheap too, which means everyone can design a drone, not just arms manufacturers.
The market for flying cameras is unimaginably vast. Remember the Google Street View row? Just imagine Google had access to a fleet of flying cameras. There are already paparazzi drones — now imagine them programmed with celebrity face-recognition. We live in a world drooling for data, which drones are designed to collect.
No one’s hungrier for drones than governments. We all know about Obama’s love affair with armed drones remote-controlled from the Homeland: he’s in hot water right now for using them to target and blow up men on his ‘kill list’ in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen without due process. But he’s not the only one — nearly every western government is ordering more drones and you can see why.
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