Thanks to the plummeting cost of powerful motion sensors like those found in smartphones, the technology to create military-class autopilots is available to all. Over the past five years, the DIY Drones community has created a series of open source unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), from fully-autonomous planes, helicopters, quadcopters, hexacopters, rovers and more, which cost just a few hundred dollars -- less than 1% the cost of equivalent military drones. As a result there are now more than 10,000 of them in use -- more than the US Military. As DIY drones go mainstream, what are the practical applications that will emerge, and the legal, ethical and economic implications? How does open source change the regulatory aspects of drones? And will the rise of "personal drones" have a similar social impact as "personal computers" did?
Chris Anderson is the Editor in Chief of Wired. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price, and the forthcoming Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. He is also founder of 3D Robotics, an open source robotics company.