Bull market for drones

Drones are out front today, probably energized by an in-depth article “The Drone Wars” by Michael Hastings, in the current Rolling Stone (subscribers only , for now) and a Washington Post article  “CIA seeks new authority to expand Yemen drone campaign. (link)

In the Rolling Stone article, Pakistani teenager, clearly not a terrorist, describes living in fear as the drones are a constant, buzzing presence in the night.  Nobody’s perfect, not even the CIA, and sometimes these drones kill innocents. While these mistakes may fall within our government’s margins of acceptable error, for those terrified in the night, listening to the drones above, those margins are obscene.  

Our future (and everyone’s) could look a lot like the present lives of teenaged Pakistanis. Soon, we may all live with the constant buzz of drones and  the anxious fear of operator errors. 

Drone wars will be the ultimate video game, with enemy drones being hijacked and turned against their owners and innocents being regularly targeted. (We still don’t know what brought down the drone in Iran.)  It could also be hard to resist and keep in check the lure of sanitary, digitized, remote murder of real and imagined enemies.