I can easily envision self-flying AI which handles 99.99% of flights, but that 0.01% of exceptional situations will be awfully hard to train for.
Some hardware shortcomings will prevent the R1 from becoming some sort of autonomous warehouse inspection bot (short battery life, WiFi connection to a user's phone), but there are still plenty of untapped capabilities for a self-flying drone that has the intelligence to adjust its own flight paths when necessary.
Kerswell reckons consumer drones are still a long way off autonomous flight, so the focus is about making flight "more automatic", although a human eye is still needed to guide the quadcopter (albeit last year another U.K. company, Zano, launched a crowdfunder for a selfie drone designed to fly itself — so startups are certainly attempting to build self-flying drones at this point).
Similar advances will also be required to perfect self-driving cars and self-flying drones.
And when, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, Flight 447 seemed to disappear from the sky, it was tempting to deliver a tidy narrative about the hubris of building a self-flying airplane, Icarus falling from the sky.
America's military-security complex has pioneered self-flying killing machines.
"Cora will combine self-flying software with expert human supervision, so you can enjoy the ride," says the company, which has fitted three independent flight systems, made the rotors operate independently and given Cora a parachute in case things go wrong.
Google ultimately envisages thousands of high altitude "self-flying aircraft" delivering internet access around the world.
Two start-ups leading the race to build the first self-flying taxis are using money from the US military.
Are self-flying planes on the horizon?
The drones are not just self-flying.
