(Source: nymag.com)
Drones are a different kind of new technology from what we’re used to. The communications breakthroughs of the past two decades have multiplied the connections within society, but drones offer something else: the conquest of physical space, the extension of society’s compass, the ability to be anywhere and see anything. This physical presence can be creepy when seen from the ground, in ways that echo the imaginings of science fiction. “Flying,” says Illah Nourbakhsh, who ran the robotics program at NASA’s Ames facility, “creates this dynamic where people are no longer on top.” And yet to the drone pilot, maneuvering through the air, it is liberating.
It’s an incredible thing, extreme elevation. It makes you feel both alone and unsurpassable. Send a drone up, equipped with a camera, the control in your hands and your laptop rigged to see what the camera sees, and what you feel is not displacement but extension. Each of these flying robots, more than anything else, changes your perspective. Now anyone with a drone can watch the Earth from a point of view that once implied great power. This summer, the pastor of a prominent Evangelical megachurch in Texas delivered a series of sermons comparing God to a Predator drone.
Lost in the concern that the drone is an authoritarian instrument is the possibility that it might simultaneously be a democratizing tool, enlarging not just the capacities of the state but also the reach of the individual—the private drone operator, the boy in Cupertino—whose view is profoundly altered and whose abilities are enhanced. “The idea I’m trying to work out to simplify this whole thing—surveillance, drones, robots—has to do with superhero ethics,” says Patrick Lin, a technology ethicist at California Polytechnic State University. “It’s about what humans do when they have superpowers. What happens then?”
IN SAN FRANCISCO, it no longer seems out of the ordinary for a drone to get lost in a tree. “Big thanks to the SF Fire Dept,” one drone enthusiast tweeted recently over a photo of a firefighter laboring up a ladder to rescue a robot from a high branch. Drones have been disappearing into the playa at Burning Man. “It is white plastic with red and blue stripe stickers on the propeller arms,” ran the Craigslist post pleading for the machine’s return. In Seattle, a drone saddled up to the 26th floor of an apartment building and peeped through a window, alarming the woman inside. In Los Angeles, a drone wandered high into the sky near LAX and startled the pilot of a Canadian jetliner; another hovered near the tenth floor of the LAPD’s headquarters, drawing curious cops to the window. In Yosemite, the Park Service had to issue a ban to keep drones from spooking nesting peregrine falcons. These machines, in other words, have begun to display punkish, pubescent energies, as if we had entered drone adolescence.
It wasn’t too long ago that to operate an unmanned aircraft meant standing in the middle of a field with a radio controller in your hand and toggling the vehicle through the sky—back and forth, up and down—as if tied to it by a tether. That this now seems ancient is thanks in part to the smartphone revolution, which made many of the components needed for autonomous flight (computer processors, GPS, tiny cameras, and sensors) far smaller, smarter, and cheaper. Within the past five years, these technologies have helped to produce affordable drones that can fly on their own, stabilizing themselves when the winds shift, heading for a point specified on GPS. We are deep enough into the entrepreneurial era that everyone can see a gold rush coming; hobbyists in the obscure world of radio control trade stories about cold-call emails from investors or government agents. “I have these buddies who would drop off into darpa-land for a few years, and you’d never hear from them,” a Texan tinkerer named Gene Robinson says. “And then suddenly they reappear with a Ferrari, and they say, ‘I can’t tell you exactly what I’ve been working on. But it worked.’ ”
Robinson wanted in on the rush too. A decade ago, he was a somewhat burned-out IT guy in his mid-40s, recently divorced, and maybe a bit too garrulous for IT in the first place. He quit his job, worked to perfect his drone—a fixed-wing model that looked like a miniature Stealth Bomber—and tried to figure out how to make money on it. Robinson did the simplest thing he could think of: He stuck a Nikon camera onboard, its lens aimed down, and went searching for people who might pay for the point of view. Farmers, real-estate agents. Prospecting, and having had little luck, Robinson eventually connected with a volunteer group called Texas Equusearch, which scours rural stretches of the country on horses and ATVs looking for missing people and dead bodies. They were interested. They could see how a drone might be useful.
Robinson’s first drone search was for a man named David Lee Pettiet, who had departed the modern grid in an especially barren spot of West Texas. Search parties had failed to find Pettiet for six months, long enough that the sheriff, according to Robinson, became convinced he was still alive and had begun to suspect he might be robbing banks around the county. Pettiet’s sisters were despairing. The drone found him within a day—its aerial camera photographed two slashes of white, a foot apart, in a brambly clutch of downed trees, that turned out to be Pettiet’s tennis shoes. The sheriff’s deputies had passed just a few feet from Pettiet’s body during a mounted horse search weeks earlier. But their perspective was wrong: too low.
Robinson has now flown drone searches in 31 states and several foreign countries, and this higher angle, 400 feet in the sky, has given him a view of a lot of human activities that might otherwise remain secret. Often he is called in after helicopter searches have failed; because his drone is cheaper and can stay in the air longer, it provides a more comprehensive view. It takes 15 minutes for his drone to photograph a square mile, every inch accounted for. “Human beings have left an awful lot of this world empty,” Robinson says. But he has learned how to spot earth that has been churned to dig an impromptu grave, the way grass gets crushed and marked when a body is dragged through it, and the kinds of shelter that people seek when they are lost and alone. Some people he works with will try to press a suspect to confess by telling them campfire stories of what the drone can see. Robinson believes that to locate a dead body is to restore certainty to the family. Your 2-year-old was not kidnapped; here is the spot where he drowned. Here are the physical remains. It is as if he were reattaching stray pieces of society, putting things back in their place. Robinson says he had a devilish, misspent youth. “Now I’m earning my heaven points.”
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Alan is serial entrepreneur, active angel investor, and a drone enthusiast. He co-founded DRONELIFE.com to address the emerging commercial market for drones and drone technology. Prior to DRONELIFE.com, Alan co-founded Where.com, ThinkingScreen Media, and Nurse.com. Recently, Alan has co-founded Crowditz.com, a leader in Equity Crowdfunding Data, Analytics, and Insights. Alan can be reached at alan(at)dronelife.com