Drones feel a bit like old news already, don’t they? At least in the Valley, with its hyper-fragmented mayfly attention span. The military has used them for decades. DJI, the undisputed (consumer) polycopter industry leader, was founded in 2006. We tech journalists can’t stop talking about drones, but they’re still mostly playthings, curiosities. One might well ask: what became of all that hype?
It’s a fair question, given our raised expectations — drones replacing FedEx trucks, drones providing emergency relief, drones creepily face-scanning every protester at a demonstration — but I think it evinces an unrealistic expectation of consistent, linear change.
Most profound technological change happens “gradually and then suddenly,” to quote Hemingway on bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises . (Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz wrote a great post about this a couple of years ago.) The question is, how do you know when you’re at the knee of the curve? When does gradually turn into suddenly?
It’s always hard to be anything like confident about this. It’s the kind of thing that generally only becomes apparent in retrospect when you look at the available data. But there is reason to believe, when we look at the accelerating pace of the drone news of the last few months, that 2017 is the year that drones really begin to, well, take off.
Consider:
But consumer drones will remain toys for the foreseeable future.
