[BROOKLYN, NEW YORK]

Hey, it's Brian with Motherboard.

[BRIAN A. ANDERSON MOTHERBOARD] I've got one word for you: drones.

Now, you've probably heard a little bit about drones in the news lately.

These things fly all throughout the Middle East and the horn of Africa.

When they're not spying on suspected terrorists,

they're probably killing them with hellfire missiles.

But here's the thing, drones are coming to the States.

And they're actually already here.

They're being used to keep an eye on things, so they're not gonna kill you.

At least not yet.

Motherboard has been fascinated with drones for a while now.

But it seems there are some misconceptions about the age of unmanned aerial vehicles.

To try and clear the air just a little bit,

we're gonna head out and talk to some people who are building drones,

who are selling drones all over the world.

With any luck, we hope to fly some drones as well.

We have absolutely no idea what we're getting into.

[DRONE ON]

New York City.

Captured by a Swiss drone hobbyist.

As you're probably thinking,

yes, this is illegal as all hell.

And I'll be the first to say that doing this sort of thing

over the sight of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil?

Probably not the best idea.

The drone view that you've seen probably looks a bit more like this.

Or more accurately, this.

The grainy, pixelated birds eye views that unmanned aerial vehicles,

or UAVs, offer, have become wildly popular on the internet.

Maybe you've heard of the grim footage under it's nome de YouTube:

drone porn.

How did we arrive at the Robo Wars?

And where are they taking us?

To get an idea, we left our Brooklyn offices for Washington, D.C.,

to meet up with P.W. Singer,

one of the world's foremost experts on military robotics.

We are

[P.W. SINGER AUTHOR, "WIRED FOR WAR"] wrestling with what it means to

live, work and even fight through a robotics revolution.

The technology that we're using with things like the Predator or the PackBot,

you know, those are Model T4, those are Wright Brothers equivalents.

But even with that first generation,

we're seeing impact on questions like,

how do we catch up our laws

in war?

But also how do we start to catch up our laws domestically

as we start to see that technology move over to the domestic side?

We're seeing an evolution that is following many other technologies.

The story of the airplane is, I think, a good illustration

of where we're at and the impact of war

on an industry that becomes a game changer.

The flying machine was once thought,

is mere science fiction.

Then, the Wright Brothers make it real.

Within a couple years, it's utilized in war.

In World War I at the start, they're not armed.

They're just used for observation.

Then they jury-rig arm there.

Then they start to specially design them to be armed.

And then by the end of World War I, you see all these other roles

being visualized for planes

that soon move over to the commercial sector.

Passenger, postal delivery, medical evacuation, you name it.

Same exact thing is happening with robotics.

You know um, first, science fiction.

Then, becomes real.

The Predator was originally unarmed,

just used for observation.

Then they jury-rig arm it.

Then they specially designed them to be armed.

Now, we're seeing all sorts of other roles.

One of the latest developments in militarized drones is autonomy.

Being able to tell your drone where to go,

and then basically setting the thing on cruise control until it gets there

is a game changer.

At the same time,

drone technology is doing what most any other killer ad does as it proliferates.

It's becoming smaller.

We actually noticed this evolution last year when VICE was in Amman, Jordan,

home to SOFEX,

the world's largest military weapons expo.

You know when you were a kid you used to have those

[SHANE SMITH VICE] little model airplanes and then be like...

You know, somebody's dad would be a real nerd and have the model airplane.

Now like, it's all model airplane-style drones

that can take pictures or drop bombs.

We want to check out some of these micro drones and size up their market.

So we decided to go back.

[SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES EXPOSITION 2012 AMMAN, JORDAN]

Drones are becoming hot commodities for armed forces around the world.

Some 600 companies from well over 50 countries are dabbling with drone tech

for both spying and killing.

And nowhere is this more evident than among the trade booths at SOFEX,

where we first meet this guy,

a rep for a Turkish drone company.

My name is Fatih Senkul,

[FATIH SENKUL ATLANTIS UVS] I'm working for Atlantis Unmanned Vehicle Solutions

developing unmanned vehicles like "Aeroseeker."

Some photographers want to use it for surveillance purposes,

military issues, and maybe some go track-and-seek missions.

Some of the militaries, even the Turkish Army [said], "What's the payload?"

They asked, we said "500 grams"

"So let's put a very little camera,

and just put 500 grams of bomb

and they will do a suicide attack."

That's one of the issues they offered that we hadn't thought of.

This is something that the military is thinking.

If that sounds crazy, well,

then there's this.

I am a fan of Terminator

and I love these movies.

I really would like to see some of them in the future,

like 2030 maybe?

So,

I'm trying to do my best to see them.

Unlike Fatih,

I'm in no rush to hasten the rise of the machines.

The next guy we meet at SOFEX maybe isn't either.

Then, he says something almost as crazy.

To me, drone means you've got something that's operational on its own,

[CHRIS BARTER DATRON] it's kind of doing its own thing, like a HAL out of a

'2001: Space Odyssey.'

Here's hoping his robot, The Scout,

has no intentions of becoming self-aware like HAL

and refusing to open the pod-bay doors.

[COST $60,000 USD]

Now, to be clear,

The Scout is built by Aeryon Labs,

a Canadian drone firm.

Datron, its reps like Chris,

work with Aeryon on the supply side of the chain.

Chris Barter's a drone dealer.

The Scout is the flagship UAV in Datron's suite of tactical robotics.

Take one look at its size, and it's pretty clear

that The Scout is nothing more than a surveillance system.

It can fly at speeds up to 30 miles per hour.

It's fully operational from -22 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

And it can withstand wind gusts up to 50 miles per hour.

It's a compact, capable machine

and has been sought after by the likes of NOA,

the US Coast Guard and FEMA.

Is there anything that,

you know, that you can give me,

like a brochure or something like that?

And hopefully we will be contacting you very very soon.

Sounds like a plan.

After Chris closes the deal,

he invites us back to Datron's headquarters,

just outside of San Diego.

In addition to drones, he promises

there's going to be some pretty decent surfing.

I'm a pretty Buddhist guy.

There's not much that makes me tick out there.

Um, outside of bad driving and bad surfing.

Would you ever use a Scout to shoot some pretty gnarly,

big wave surfing footage?

Oh absolutely, man.

That's actually one of my dreams is to take it out to Pipeline or Waimea.

So even though Chris exudes the calculating precision

of a drone capitalist,

he's a surfer dude at heart.

And maybe even a drone hobbyist.

And he isn't the only one who views drones as being

a whole lot more than killers and spies.

This is Justin Wellender.

Notice those goggles he's putting on.

Those allow for what's known as first person viewing.

So suddenly,

what the drone's camera sees, transmits back to Justin's goggles.

In effect, allowing him to fly.

But, we'll get back to the hobbyist later.

[DRONE VALLEY VISTA, CALIFORNIA]

Southern California has long been a hub of aerospace R and D.

And today, drone firms like Datron are popping up all over the region.

You can call it Drone Valley.

Or even the Drone Zone.

Datron's campus is in one of these cookie cutter industrial parks.

But soon enough, we find the place,

and we're greeted by Chris and two of his colleagues.

We get down to the brass tax.

Who buys a Scout?

I will not go into specific customers by name,

but I can address customer bases that we will go after.

[DATRON PROMO VIDEO] The Scout is man-packable and offers fast setup,

ease of use and hot, swappable payload capabilities.

The snap together assembly requires no tools

and total assembly to take-off time could be measured in seconds.

We're targeting the guy, be it the law enforcement officer,

be it the squad guy who's out in a combat theater,

who doesn't want to rely on some guy flying a system in Las Vegas

that's being launched out of an airport that's, you know, 7,000 miles away.

Unlike the Scout, most so-called "hunter-killer drones"

are flown out of airforce bases throughout the American West.

Many people lose sleep over the thought of these hulking drones.

But many others accept the new bug-splat warfare.

I have no qualms when I read the news about a drone strike in Pakistan.

What troubles me is that

people have a tendency to kind of lump in a lot of these unmanned systems

one with another.

So a Scout, which is unarmed and will probably always be unarmed,

is meant specifically for surveillance.

Will never be harming any individual.

For the most part, unless you know, any kind of accident.

The unit really and truly flies itself.

It just waits first to tell it when to take off, how high to go,

[PAUL WILSON DATRON] how fast to fly, where we want it to go and what to look at.

All of our status says we're okay, we've got a GPS accuracy of 2.6 meters.

So we're ready to take off.

It spins up,

it says I've done all my check so now I'm ready to take off.

So I hit take off.

The vehicle is very good at flying itself

and it just listens to the directions of how high we want it to go,

where we want it to go to and what we want it to look at.

We've had a lot of interest in special use cases

like in Nome, Alaska, where they actually had an oil tanker trended,

ship oil into Nome.

Unfortunately, the harbor froze really early in the year.

What they actually did with the Scout was they took it off

and they took photographs of the ice surrounding this harbor.

And in a post-processing, um...

Using post-processing software, they were able to actually

map out the sea ice thickness.

So they could navigate this tanker in accordingly.

So it's a pretty diverse system.

It takes some convincing,

but eventually Chris and his team let us take this diverse system of theirs

for a spin.

So I'm gazing up at this airborne robot.

Only to see it looking back down at me.

I begin to feel the sting of my own privacy potentially being compromised.

And I can't help but wonder if Chris and Datron feel the same.