The Ascent of Drones
We’ve probably all seen this image, which purports to show how knuckle-dragging chimpanzees turned inexorably into fully-evolved men who look just like Buff Abraham Lincoln. I suspect that a lot of people assume that the history of all drone (or unmanned aerial vehicle) technology follows the same simple, linear pattern as the “March of Progress” illustration does.
If you drew an analogous picture of drone history, like I’ve done in the middle row above, you’d probably start with the Wright Brother’s wobbly contraption flip-flopping around the beaches of Kitty Hawk, move to a little red biplane piloted by the Red Baron, jump to some sort of badass zippy fighter jet with Tom Hanks in it, drop in a grim grey Predator drone, and finish up with a tiny white camera-carrying quadcopter. You’d end up with something aesthetically pleasing, easy to understand, and also — just like the “March of Progress” — massively, ridiculously oversimplified.
The chimp-to-man progression you see above represents the old-fashioned hypothesis of orthogenesis, which states that all organisms are imbued with an innate tendency to evolve in a certain direction, towards some sort of final complex goal. Today, the orthogenesis hypothesis is…
