I wonder how the situation with quadcopters will evolve. Look, everything is progressing towards batteries lasting for days, and the operator can be at any distance from the drone. Essentially, it all comes down to the batteries. In five or fifteen years, there will be plenty of them.
This means that from that moment on, privacy in the open air will cease to exist. You step into your kitchen, and there’s a camera hanging outside the window watching you. There are no real means to counter this: it’s not like you can shoot at them with a pistol. And even if you knock it down, the data has already been sent to the network, and the owner has lost a hundred bucks.
Legally banning them is also pointless: it’s impossible to identify the owner with powerful batteries in place. Overall, with a sufficiently smart payload, a drone can easily escape if it is small, can move in any direction, and can do so swiftly and unpredictably.
What do you think, will this change people’s lives? Option #1: everyone ignores the lack of privacy and just lives honestly and openly (I doubt it). Option #2: People will start hiding what’s interesting to capture better. Option #3: Some form of countermeasures will be developed. Example: combat automaton drones that launch when an “intruder” approaches. We would then observe occasional drone fights 🙂
However, there is also a fourth option. Only a small group of people who already do not need drones will be able to afford them. And the rest will quietly plant rice and solve completely different problems.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 