“When I started working in this field, the word ‘drone’ wasn’t used at all!” Sergei Lupashin says a little plaintively. “We called them UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, and they were clearly flying robots. Nowadays it’s all a bit more mixed up; you have to take extra steps to convince people that what you’re doing is […]
Andreas Raptopoulos and his colleagues at Matternet are attempting to create a network of drones that operate like the internet, only for tangible objects. This company — which sprung out of an idea surfaced at Singularity University in 2011 — aims to deliver items wherever they are needed, even if no usable roads go there. […]
Marc Goodman is the founder of the Future Crimes Institute and chair for Policy, Law and Ethics at Singularity University. At TEDGlobal in Edinburgh in 2012, Goodman shared a sobering look at the dark side of technology in his talk, “A vision of crimes in the future.” The TED Blog asked him to share his latest thinking on […]
In 1998, aircraft designer Paul MacCready gave a live demo of his two-ounce unmanned surveillance drone on the TED stage in Monterey. “You see what it sees. Imagine you’re a fly,” he told the assembled audience, who watched the drone’s footage projected onto the screen in front of them. (The moment is captured in the […]
PW Singer studies the future of warfare. A political scientist specializing in international relations, he’s the author of the bestselling Wired for War, which explores the evolution of robotics in armed conflict; Children at War, about the spreading use of child soldiers; and the forthcoming Cyber Security and Cyber War: What Everyone Needs to Know. He is a senior fellow […]
Unmanned aerial vehicles — that is, drones — have a lot of people (and entire countries) hot under the collar. Every few days it seems a new report comes out about the death of another group of “faceless” people, whether it’s suspected terrorist leaders or civilians. With little transparency from the governments launching drone strikes, […]
Earth has been around for over 4.5 billion years, and modern humans have inhabited it for the past 200,000. Yet in all that time, we’ve learned surprisingly little about the planet’s landscape and the animals that live on it. This is especially true of remote areas such as the Amazon’s dense jungles, the ocean’s vast […]
“Kill Decision is a fantastic techno-thriller,” wrote Alexander Rose, executive director of The Long Now Foundation. “As someone who has designed combat robots myself, I found the technology depicted both accurate and chilling.” Former Wired magazine editor-in-chief (and drone enthusiast) Chris Anderson added, “Suarez’s fiction is closer to reality than most people think.” Here, an exclusive excerpt from Kill […]
Science-fiction author Daniel Suarez spoke about drones this summer at TEDGlobal 2013. In his talk “The kill decision shouldn’t belong to a robot,” he talked about the rise of drones, automated weapons and AI-powered intelligence-gathering tools. Here, he goes further, describing no less than a coming “automation revolution.” Drones are in the news these days. […]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILHIYi8aeHc&w=640&h=360] This week, we’ll be taking a deep dive into a provocative topic: drones. For all the rhetoric, you might think think that this is a zero sum game: Drones will either destroy the world, or they’ll save it. The truth, of course, is that, well, they’re set to do both. Sophisticated developments see extraordinary […]
Technology thriller author, most recently of the book Kill Decision, Daniel Suarez has been thinking about drones for some time. But as he says, as he stands onstage at TEDGlobal 2013, he’s not here to talk fiction. “I’m here to talk about very real autonomous combat drones,” he says, adding that he doesn’t mean remotely piloted […]
If you’re here from MetaFilter, hi! We’re planning to post this talk in November. –eds Andreas Raptopoulos wants to serve the 1 billion people on Earth with no access to all-season roads — the one-seventh of the world’s population that is too often cut off from critical medicines, supplies and goods. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, […]
At TEDGlobal 2013 environmental systems researcher Lian Pin Koh presents a new and unexpectedly benign use for drones: nature conservation. Nepal has natural landscapes that are beautiful — and in danger. But wildlife conservation is costly, and time- and labor-consuming. Behold: Conservation drones, a new tool being used in Nepal to combat wildlife crime. These […]
“Athletic” is a term we use to describe human beings. But could it also be used to describe a machine? In a demo recorded yesterday in his robot lab at TEDGlobal 2013, systems engineer Raffaello D’Andrea shows us that the answer is yes. He demonstrates with quadcopters, mechanically simple flying robots with four propellers. Their […]
Daniel Suarez is a former systems consultant turned novelist who will speak in session two at TEDGlobal 2013. Officially subtitled “Those Flying Things,” this is unofficially known as the drone session, and it will feature various speakers tackling the topic of unmanned aerial vehicles. For his part, Suarez will expound on some of the themes he […]
Everything is a remix, Kirby Ferguson told us at TEDGlobal 2012, explaining that the essence of creativity is the welding together of others’ ideas to form something new. We couldn’t help but think of this when we saw an article on TheVerge.com about researchers at Zhejiang Univeristy’s CCNT lab who have combined brainwave technology and airborne robotics […]