Visit tech startup Skydio's headquarters on the San Francisco peninsula in California and you're likely to find flying robots buzzing on the roof overhead. Docking stations with motorised covers open to allow small drones that resemble the TIE fighters from Star Wars films to take off; when each drone lands back again, they close. The drones can fly completely autonomously and without GPS, taking in data from onboard cameras and using AI to execute programmed missions and avoid obstacles. Skydio, with more than 740m in venture capital funding and a valuation of about 2.5bn, makes drones for the military along with civilian organisations such as police forces and utility companies. The company moved away from the consumer market in 2020 and is now the largest US drone maker.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? There are many definitions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) but none of them effectively captures what AI is capable of. As such, I will not be defining AI, rather, I will be reporting the goal of AI as encapsulated at the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Project on Artificial Intelligence, where the science and technology of AI was properly born. 'To proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it'[i] Although it has hardly been restated, this goal has the been the underlying drive behind every manifestation of AI since then. If it takes human intelligence and learning to get a thing done, then it can be replicated by a machine, once we break down the components of the particular intelligence and learning approach at play.

Google has partnered with the United States Department of Defence to help the agency develop artificial intelligence for analysing drone footage, a move that set off a firestorm among employees of the technology giant when they learned of Google's involvement. Google's pilot project with the Defence Department's Project Maven, an effort to identify objects in drone footage, has not been previously reported, but it was discussed widely within the company last week when information about the project was shared on an internal mailing list, according to sources who asked not to be named because they were not authorised to speak publicly about the project. Some Google employees were outraged that the company would offer resources to the military for surveillance technology involved in drone operations, sources said, while others argued that the project raised important ethical questions about the development and use of machine learning. Google's Eric Schmidt summed up the tech industry's concerns about collaborating with the Pentagon at a talk last spring. "There's a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly," he said.