Drones and Dreams of the Future

958 drones create a 400-foot tall Time cover in lights instead of pixels

First it happened at the Olympics Opening Ceremony in Pyongyang, and then for the cover of TIME magazine. Drones are here, and we haven't even seen anything yet.

Let's take a walk down memory lane. An organization working on behalf of drone manufacturers try to influence all major journalism outfits to use the term "unmanned aerial vehicle" (UAV) instead of "drone" because America was making a bad name for drones by using them to kill civilians by mistake. (Obviously that didn't work.) Then at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth conference we learn how to jam drones to make them think they're flying forward when they're really speeding right into the ground (and then find out Iran has been doing this to US drones for a while already). Don't forget inmates getting contraband flown over the barbed-wire fence in the yard. Fast forward to people in Nordic countries combining snowboarding and kiteboarding to do droneboarding. And then comes the holy grail - synchronized drones.

As if the concept of a drone wasn't enough, you combine that sh** with a centralized brain that knows where every drone is and where it's going, and has a grand plan in its head about what they should all be doing together, and you get this - they can build bridges. They can make a computer monitor in the sky where the pixels are individual drones.

I had a dream a few years ago, you know how at times dreams can have this deep foreboding sense to them, like something ultimately omniscient is happening. I felt like I had really been transported to the future, seeing into a crystal ball. There were drones everywhere, everywhere. The further I looked to the horizon, the more I saw, all sizes, shapes, speeds, all doing different things. And there, just over the edge of my field of vision, like a flock of birds, I saw a scrolling ribbon of text, it was The Government (my dreams trying hard to create "omniscience") and they were talking to me via these drone-ribbon-text-messages-in-the-sky. Today as I write it, it doesn't sound too crazy, but at the time I was speechless, breathless, and scared, a feeling omniscience tends to elicit. I thought I was seeing the distant future. And yet, here we are.

Let's put things in perspective with some caveats from a paraglider photographer [based in NJ] who wrote an article on drones for TIME: "In the U.S., they can’t legally be flown over 400 ft. or out of the pilot’s line of sight, and their batteries are typically only good for about twenty minutes of flight time."

Notes

TIME's Drones Issue: Go Behind the Cover
May 2018, TIME

Drones Are Changing How We See the World
May 2018, Author, Paraglider and Photographer George Steinmetz for TIME