Can it be used as a spying tool? Will you get away with flying it undetected by whomever you're spying on? Even when it's flying 130 feet above your head, you can hear the quadrocopter buzzing back and forth. In 2014, when consumer-level quadrocopters were relatively new, I flew a DJI Phantom 2 over the doomed-for-demolition New York graffiti landmark 5 Pointz. A photographer, who had snuck in for one last glimpse of the inside before the building was flattened, noticed my camera buzzing over his head.

That represents a strategic error. The U.S. can and should sell more drones as a way of complementing its foreign policy objectives. After all, some of the top threats to U.S. national security are the very nonstate actors that countries in the Middle East and Africa are buying drones in order to fight. The question is a quasi-legal one. In accordance with the Missile Technology Control Regime, a voluntary arrangement established in the late 1980s and now followed by 34 countries, the United States subjects the sale of military drones and other Category 1 items to "a strong presumption of denial" when determining whether to export to a particular country.

Cheap consumer drones are really just little computers on wings. It makes sense, then, that all it takes to disable one is another cheap computer, a wi-fi connection, and some technical know-how. Brent Chapman, an Army Cyber Warfare officer, already made a tool that remotely shuts off Parrot drones. Now, at Make, he's made a full tutorial for people to make their own anti-drone kit. To follow Chapman's instructions, a person will need a Parrot AR Quadcopter 2.0, which runs about 200 new and can be found online and used for less.

Last week, the White House released a report chronicling the Obama administration's concerns over Big Data and artificial intelligence. Many prominent thinkers and scientists have come out recently with warnings about the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence. However, the A.I. the White House report refers to is not of the Terminator ilk -- rather, Obama has concerns over algorithmic artificial intelligence operating without human oversight. The report, "Big Data: A Report on Algorithmic Systems, Opportunity, and Civil Rights," catalogs the growing sphere of influence represented by Big Data in society, including employment, higher education, and criminal justice. "As data-driven services become increasingly ubiquitous, and as we come to depend on them more and more, we must address concerns about intentional or implicit biases that may emerge from both the data and the algorithms used as well as the impact they may have on the user and society. Questions of transparency arise when companies, institutions, and organizations use algorithmic systems and automated processes to inform decisions that affect our lives, such as whether or not we qualify for credit or employment opportunities, or which financial, employment and housing advertisements we see." "If feedback loops are not thoughtfully constructed, a predictive algorithmic system built in this manner could perpetuate policing practices that are not sufficiently attuned to community needs and potentially impede efforts to improve community trust and safety. For example, machine learning systems that take into account past arrests could indicate that certain communities require more policing and oversight, when in fact the communities may be changing for the better over time."

The company is continuing its review of the potential to use drones someday in its global package delivery system, teaming with two partners to deliver blood supplies later this year in Rwanda. The company, through its UPS Foundation, has committed 800,000 toward the project with Zipline, a California robotics company; and Gavi, a Swiss-based group that works to bring vaccines to children in poor countries. UPS said that starting later this year, the Rwandan government intends to begin using Zipline drones to delivery blood to 21 transfusing facilities in the western half of the country. The goal is to step up the battle against the deaths of women who hemorrhage after giving birth. The additional blood can allow for life-saving transfusions on a continent known for the world's high rates of maternal death, according to the World Health Organization.

NEW ORLEANS--The problem with robots on the battlefield today, according to Marine Corps Colonel Jim "Jinx" Jenkins, is that they still have to be driven by humans. That's why the Marine Corps and the Department of Defense are researching ways for robots to act more like teammates on the battlefield than just another piece of hardware. Jenkins, who serves as director of science and technology at the Marine Corps' Warfighting Lab at Quantico, Virginia, said in a presentation at the Association for Unmanned Systems International's XPONENTIAL conference that while robots such as those used for explosive ordnance disposal and other roles on the battlefield take soldiers and Marines out of some dangerous situations, they take their operators out of the fight. "A marine is driving, so we haven't improved our manpower situation, and sometimes it costs more manpower," he noted, since operators have to pay such close attention to what they're doing with the robot that they need someone watching their back. "We need to move toward autonomy" for robots and other uncrewed systems, he said.

For all of Amazon's grand plans regarding delivery drones, it still needs to figure out concepts we take for granted with traditional courier methods. Namely, figuring out how to drop off your latest order without destroying anything (including the UAV itself) during transit and landing. That's where advanced computer vision comes in from Jeff Bezos' new team of Austria-based engineers, according to The Verge. The group invented methods for reconstructing geometry from images and contextually recognizing environmental objects, giving the drones the ability to differentiate between, say, a swimming pool and your back patio. Both are flat surfaces, but one won't leave your PlayStation VR headset waterlogged after drop-off.

The White House is going to spend the summer researching how the government should deal with artificial intelligence. When you consider that we've got drones flying everywhere, robots automating jobs out of existence, and self-driving cars right around the corner, it's about time. The administration is pitching its new AI research program as an "interagency working group" that will "learn more about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence," which is a welcome move--researchers in the field have been calling for a "Federal Robotics Commission" for the last couple years, and this at least looks like a small step toward that future. With companies like Google, Uber, and Tesla getting close to wanting to put self-driving cars on the road, drone companies hoping to begin to automate the devices, and AI-driven software taking jobs left and right, it's clear AI is going to have a significant impact on our society. AI is going to continue to make everything a lot more seamless, which is great, but we're also probably going to have to start thinking about things like a basic income for people whose jobs are automated away.

While consumer drones are becoming increasingly popular, many people still envision a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator when they hear the word drone. They assume that the camera-carrying quadrotors you can buy on Amazon or in pricy airport stores are simply smaller, less-sophisticated variants on military technology. Common sense as the military connection to consumer drones seems, it's not actually accurate: While Predators and DJI Phantom 3s are both unmanned aerial vehicles with some autonomous capabilities, they have very different origins and exceedingly different capabilities. To use an analogy, a Predator is like an aircraft carrier and a DJI Phantom 3 is like a rowboat: They're both technically boats, but you wouldn't assume they're capable of the same things--or used for the same purposes.

In flight, the wings pivot 90 degrees, and the drone flies like a plane. This first draft of history is messy. We accept now that the Wright Brothers were the first to achieve powered, human flight, and that they did so on December 17th, 1903. They were hardly the first to experiment with flight, though, and at the time the brother's work was viewed skeptically by many rivals. In the new age of drone flight, video and the internet make success easier to prove, but it's the exact definition of success that's hard to pin down.