Consumer drones are coming, and they will change everything | Hacker News Reader

Consumer drones are coming, and they will change everything

gigaom.com

31 pointsWardPlunet43 comments

So much more they could have said but did not. When do we see the first set of drones that fly into AT&T Park and land on a ledge somewhere letting someone outside the park watch the game? When do we have a drone at 399' run out of charge and fall down doing property damage or injuring someone and the owner never claims their drone back? When do we get Papparazi chasing celebrity weddings with drones? (I believe I read a report of this already, at least on the property of a celebrity). Fly it up to the roof of your target at night and then just settle in for a day's worth of filming? And of course when will we have a bad actor use a drone to assassinate a world leader or opposition leader, flying up to them and detonating a small directional charge.

Yes, they are going to change everything and it will be equal parts good and bad. I expect them to end up being illegal for non law enforcement to own.

There is a mechanism in place in almost any country to regulate aviation based on location, craft capabilities, and operator certification based on supervised experience.

DIY drone makers could care less if they really want to do some damage. Buy some junk on eBay, have half a brain and you get yourself a flight worthy drone.

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen paint a pretty scary picture for drones in their book The New Digital Age. They predict a similarity between how terrorists and guerrilla warriors use cheap consumer technology now, such as cell phones in IEDs, and how they might use drones in the future as their prices continue to drop. "Imagine [a drone] that is fitted with a homemade bomb on its undercarriage, producing a whole new level of domestic terror that is just around the corner."

It would be rather easy to attach a proper gun to the drone, with a targeting system and auto firing mechanism (already put in real world use in civilian hands: http://tracking-point.com/ ; http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/17000-linux-powered-r...). Sure, the tech needs to be smaller, but that' won't be a problem soon.

Now that's a scary assassination tool, and if properly camouflaged you can't stop it until it's too late (or drone flight is completely banned).

How about insect-sized assassination drones? http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/wha...

Excerpt:

"Not bee drones, rather drone drones, with military and terrorist capabilities. There is already a (foiled) terror plot using model airplanes. How easy would it be to stop a mechanical “bee” which injects a human target with rapidly-acting poison?"

Well you can fantasize of course :-) Actual small flyers with both useful range and telemetry are still science fiction. The number to watch is the energy density / energy consumption ratio. Dragonfly like devices can currently get airborne and fly a few 10s of meters, but that is without any cargo capacity at all.

Not that someday it won't happen, rather that today you could carry a 12 ga shotgun shell around with a camera that lets you see where you are. All of that tech is 'off the shelf' today. Hence the more immediacy of the change.

The article is shallow, but the title is right! I have a DJI Phantom (1) with a GoPro attached to it, and it's fantastic. What's fantastic also is that since the arrival of the Phantom 2, the price of model 1 has dropped by about 40%.

It's a really cool machine because it flies high and far away (unlike the Parrot which is just a toy).

If you think cheap drones for consumers won't be abused, note there are many thousands of incidents of people purposely pointing green lasers at aircraft in the USA each year.

Why is pointing a laser pointer at a plane a big deal?

It can blind the pilots.

Huh, I always assumed that was just more security hysteria, but it looks like you are right.

http://www.laserpointersafety.com/page52/laser-hazard_diagra...

The beams is meters wide at that height.

It is a federal crime and hundreds of people are arrested each year and growing but idiots keep doing it - they even light up the police helicopters that come to look for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasers_and_aviation_safety

Apparently it's because a large number of people don't think it's a big deal ...

I can't wait for the drone delivery businesses to pop up.

Food from across town, delivered hot in 15 minutes. EBay now: now only $.75 per delivery thanks to near zero human delivery labor.

Couple a drone quad copter with a google self driving car and we've got the makings of an excellent robot slave industry.

I've always fancied the idea of drone-waiters. There won't be any need of truck/cab drivers soon too.

A lot of jobs will be lost in the future, because of automation. I don't know if that's good or not, however.

Every time human labor is replaced by machines this question gets asked. So far, over many centuries, the answer has unequivocally been: over the long run, replacing humans with machines is incredibly good. The bad is short lived but real - people have to switch jobs, often for lower work because they are too old to amortize new skills training.

Short of skynet, I celebrate humans being supplanted.

Yeah, I know it's basically like what happened after the industrial revolution. However, I wonder what the consequences would be, considering the constantly rising population.

It only works until 51% of the population is unemployed and in the streets cold and hungry.

The pitchfork business is going to boom at that point.

Over the past 150 years or so we went from ~90% of the labor force working in agriculture to between 1 and 10% working in agriculture.

That's a shift of about 80% over two generations.

We were also able to find jobs for those who no longer worked in ag. It appears there is concern (quite a bit, actually) that we may no longer be able to find jobs for those displaced by software and robotics (automation).

If you continue to automate jobs, there will eventually be very few jobs left. How the result of this is handled will be interesting to say the least.

The concern is not new. It's been around for centuries.

Sure, but there is reason to believe it is different this time around. We are close to automating away all blue collar jobs outside of the service sector. We are also making inroads in white collar jobs too like law and medicine. At some point, minus an apocalypse, we will be able to automate away most meaningful work for everyone. This was not the case 150 years ago.

Now if politicians could be replaced, that would be revolutionary! :-)

It's starting already:

Sushi drone restaurant: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2013/jun/1...

Domino's testing drone delivery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on4DRTUvst0

TacoCopter seemed like a joke not all that long ago. No longer.

"It's illegal to use drones to make money." Any specific reasoning behind this?

Probably for similar reasons why you need a commercial pilot license. If you're going to be doing it for money, you should have more training than someone just going to wal-mart and picking up a drone. However, as such a training regimen has not been defined yet, the FAA has decided that it's safer just to say it's off limits for now.

Personally, I'd love to see more effort into setting up such a commercial program, as there are a lot of dangerous jobs that could be made safer through drones. For example, there are dozens of crop duster accidents each year where someone's injured or killed. Pulling someone out of the pilot seat, and onto the ground can make that job a lot safer and more accurate. But, we can't get there until we do the studies to figure out how to do such safely.

It's odd that you can fly them around the city and bump into buildings freely, but when the money aspect is implemented it somehow changes everything. A sandwich or other small food delivery service seems innocent enough.

Beginning airline pilots are paid dogfood wages, approved to fly commercially, and have about half the week off. Could they fly drones for profit?

It's legacy.

The FAA has a distinction between commercial and recreational flying. When the laws were written, commercial meant that you were carrying passengers in a full-sized aircraft. And it makes sense to have more rigid rules in place for passenger aircraft.

Times have changed and using commercial vs recreational doesn't make sense anymore. The FAA is trying to apply existing laws to new technology. So, we're left with the case that it's perfectly legal to put a camera on a toy RC aircraft and take pictures for fun. But if you sell those pictures now you've crossed into commercial territory and your flight was no longer legal.

edit The good news is that the FAA is working on new rules. They're just miserably slow about it.

Just a few weeks ago the FAA released its roadmap for new UAV regulation where they discuss some of their plans for regulating commercial activity: http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/media/uas_roadmap_2...

Lots of people have been waiting years for this, and are still waiting for more detail, from drone startups (check AngelList to see how many have started in the past year) to guys wanting to sell aerial photography services.

On a related topic check out the following libraries to program your 'drones':

http://www.artoo.io

http://www.cylon.js

http://gobot.io/

https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone (powers my in-browser air traffic drone augmented reality app: http://lemondronor.com/blog/indexphp/2013/5/augmented-realit...)

If one of those things, for whatever reason, blacks-out and kills someone they will be permanently banned.

A way around this would be to permit them to fly above specific areas, via predetermined, controlled routes, that pedestrians should avoid to minimize the risk of accidents.

But the technology for the police (or any authority) to ID those vehicles and control what they are transporting (or state of transporting) it's already here, someone needs to put the pieces together and it's ready to go.

Um, as long as government gives permission, one death will be only statistics and won't make a change.

Only this thanksgiving there was a little girl (civilian) killed by mistake in Afganistan by US drone (I cannot find news on it somehow).

This is a good read as well:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-afghan-civilians-killed-by-...

Oh, but that was a brown person somewhere far away. Everybody knows those aren't real people.

The idea of legislation concerning civilian 'drone' use concerns me for one reason: if there was such legislation, where would the line be drawn between a 'drone' and a recreational RC aircraft? Could this effectively outlaw an entire hobby?

I'd be upset to see drones banned from our airspace before we get to realize their full potential for good.

If this happens I think in-home drone solutions could still provide very cool solutions. I'm sitting here on my couch and I could sure use a drink :P

I think they're already mostly banned - RC copters have been around for a while.

I struggle to see what they can be used for right now - maybe in the future, with a robotic hand attached to it, it can clean my roof :-), but right now it's just an expensive toy.

Clicked link, searched for airworthiness, came back to comment.

This is really no more of a change then telephoto lenses.

Cool as hell, but a flying security camera is hardly revolutionary.

These days everything changes everything. It's a dreadful phrase that should be retired.

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