The WIRED Guide to Drones

These tiny flyers are going to fill the skies, transforming entire industries for the better—and worse.

Author: David Pierce BY David Pierce

You might be using your drone (or thinking about getting a drone) for epic vacation shots and ultra-romantic wedding videos, but you should be thinking bigger. What if, instead of taking pictures of you, your drone could help you monitor hundreds of acres of crops? What if it could photograph a building’s flaws? And what if it could fix those flaws or water those crops as soon as it spotted them?

Just as self-driving cars could fundamentally rearchitect the way cities work, drones have a disruptive potential that’s hard to overstate. They could change the way people and goods are transported (where we’re going, we don’t need roads!), eliminate some jobs and create others, and upend the way we think about distance. Drones could bring the internet to people who don’t have it, deliver food and medicine to people who need it, and cast a watchful eye over anyone and everyone. Drones are even inspiring new sports! The nascent industry also provides a helpful reminder that regulators and inventors need to work together to make tech actually function, because there are some seriously scary downsides to a world where drones fill the sky…