Drones Unleashed

Drones are gimmicky now, but once they get AI, they’ll rule the world

THREE YEARS AGO, Jeff Bezos announced that drones are eventually going to deliver Amazon orders. In the past year, he brought out Amazon’s Alexa artificial intelligence service, which understands speech well enough that you can say, “Alexa, I really need a waffle cone maker,” and she’ll put one in your Amazon online shopping cart, even though nobody needs a waffle cone maker.

Both of these technologies—drones and cloud Ai—are exciting today, yet still wobbly works in progress. But in the coming years, Amazon or some other company is going to put them together. And that, finally, will evolve into a technology that could become as significant to humans as domesticated dogs.

Right now, drones are more overhyped than a Kanye West fashion collection. At the end of August, the Federal Aviation Administration enacted rules so companies clearly know how to operate drones within the law. The FAA’S pro-innovation stance set off waves of drone exuberance, including predictions that 600,000 commercial drones would be operating in the U.S. within a year, creating 100,000 jobs and no doubt inspiring millions of PowerPoint slides proposing drone businesses.

We’re already seeing drones that shoot real estate video, pull advertising banners past crowds and scan crops for farmers. Sales of drones have doubled in the past year. Investment in drone startups has hit $1 billion.

Yet drones remain a fringe technology. They are tools for the specialist or toys for the manchild who wants to buzz the beach taking video of women in bikinis. Most of us rarely encounter a drone or have any practical idea of what we’d do with one. “There are still a lot of challenges