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. (...)
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?” (...)
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.’ ” (...)
The privilege of seeing this way, and this much—it exists simply because he has a drone. Should it? Clarifying where drones are allowed to fly and under what circumstances has proved challenging. There are no consistent laws about whether police need a warrant to fly a drone over your property, searching for drugs or evidence. (A few state legislatures have passed laws requiring police to secure warrants, others have decided that cops do not need to, and most have set no guidelines at all.) It is even less clear how private operators, hobbyists, or governments should operate. The airspace above 500 feet is reserved for planes and other aircraft, but below that line the rules are “irregular and inconsistent,” says Troy Rule, a law professor at Arizona State—there is little clarity, for instance, about whether a property owner can prevent her teenage neighbor from flying a drone over her house. Congress has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to regulate the commercial use of drones by next September, but an agency audit has signaled it will likely miss its deadline. One mark of exactly how conflicted the government is about drones is that Robinson is at once a frequent collaborator with state agencies and a recipient of cease-and-desist letters from the FAA. (...)
There is a four minute shot that opens Pretty Sweet, a short skateboarding film from 2012 co-directed by Spike Jonze, shot entirely from a drone. The lens starts tight on a skateboarder’s face—a gnarly and meaty face, the kind an Italian butcher might grab, cure, and slice. Then the camera begins to move, past him and across the street, tracking four new skaters as they jump out of a pickup truck and scale a fence, then following one skater razoring down a flight of stairs, then soaring past them and down to a bug’s-eye view, another skater leaping, a girl tumbling, each figure quickly exchanged for the next but the movement continuous, as if the camera were working in cursive, until it lifts higher and disappears into a cloud of confetti. Money shot. “Even now I watch that and I get chills,” says Randy Slavin, a commercial director who recently founded the first drone film festival. “There is literally no other way to get that shot. You can put a camera literally anywhere in three-dimensional space. You can design any shot.”
by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Spike Jonze
