Trevor_Blake comments on New Year's Prediction Thread (2013) - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Thomas 01 January 2013 02:03PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 03 January 2013 12:08:49AM 0 points [-]

By average observer, I exclude people actively looking for drones (or other things) in the sky, and I exclude people with training (police? military? spies?) on drone-spotting.

I have been very wrong before! See you (and some drones) in a year!

Comment author: tgb 04 January 2013 03:10:54PM 1 point [-]

I just realized that I was assuming "drone" to mean "aerial drone". But it's quite plausible that ground-based drones will take off by 2017, which would almost certainly be more visible than UAVs. Self-driving cars alone could plausibly account for this, if we stretch the use of 'drone' (wikipedia explicitly includes semi-autonomy in its drone page). I'll give my estimates for your predictions at 15% for the 2013 prediction and 20% for the 2017 but note that it will be hard to either confirm or deny either of these predictions unless drones are truly prolific or unused.

As a side note, I work on a drone and don't see one every day.