Depending on who you listen to, drones will either save the world -- or usher in our techno-driven doom. Here, take a look at the light and dark side of drones. See exclusive articles on the TED blog.

Leading a swarm of small, buzzing flying machines, techno-magician Marco Tempest orchestrates a "cyber illusion" that will have you asking yourself: Was that science or magic?

Ecologist Lian Pin Koh makes a persuasive case for using drones to protect the world's forests and wildlife. These lightweight autonomous flying vehicles can track animals in their natural habitat, monitor the health of rainforests, even combat crime by detecting poachers via thermal imaging. Added bonus? They're also entirely affordable.

In a robot lab at TEDGlobal, Raffaello D'Andrea demos his flying quadcopters: robots that think like athletes, solving physical problems with algorithms that help them learn. In a series of nifty demos, D'Andrea show drones that play catch, balance and make decisions together -- and watch out for an I-want-this-now demo of Kinect-controlled quads.

Andreas Raptopoulos and his colleagues are building the flying internet of things, using drones to carry essential goods to otherwise inaccessible areas.

As a novelist, Daniel Suarez spins dystopian tales of the future. But on the TEDGlobal stage, he talks us through a real-life scenario we all need to know more about: the rise of autonomous robotic weapons of war. Advanced drones, automated weapons and AI-powered intelligence-gathering tools, he suggests, could take the decision to make war out ...

A billion people in the world lack access to all-season roads. Could the structure of the internet provide a model for how to reach them? Andreas Raptopoulos of Matternet thinks so. He introduces a new type of transportation system that uses electric autonomous flying machines to deliver medicine, food, goods and supplies wherever they are needed.

Keller Rinaudo wants everyone on earth to have access to basic health care, no matter how hard it is to reach them. With his start-up Zipline, he has created the world's first drone delivery system to operate at national scale, transporting blood and plasma to remote clinics in East Africa with a fleet of electric autonomous aircraft. Find out h...

Master storyteller Malcolm Gladwell tells the tale of the Norden bombsight, a groundbreaking piece of World War II technology with a deeply unexpected result.

Lian Pin Koh expands conservation efforts by championing the use of low-cost autonomous aerial vehicles.

Let's admit it: aerial photo drones and UAVs are a little creepy, and they come with big regulatory and safety problems. But aerial photos can be a powerful way of telling the truth about the world: the size of a protest, the spread of an oil spill, the wildlife hidden in a delta. Sergei Lupashin demos Fotokite, a nifty new way to see the world ...

Our oceans are unexplored and undersampled -- today, we still know more about other planets than our own. How can we get to a better understanding of this vast, important ecosystem? Explorer Sebastien de Halleux shares how a new fleet of wind- and solar-powered drones is collecting data at sea in unprecedented detail, revealing insights into thi...

Greg Asner’s mapping technology produces detailed, complex pictures of how humans’ activities affect our ecosystems.

Sergei Lupashin imagines new uses for flying robots. He's a 2014 TED Fellow.

Keller Rinaudo is CEO and co-founder of Zipline, building drone delivery for global public health customers. (He's also co-founder of Romotive, makers of the tiny robot, Romo.)

What do you get when you give a design tool a digital nervous system? Computers that improve our ability to think and imagine, and robotic systems that come up with (and build) radical new designs for bridges, cars, drones and much more -- all by themselves. Take a tour of the Augmented Age with futurist Maurice Conti and preview a time when rob...

UPS's Julio Gil thinks that technology is flipping the equation on future cities, and that rural may soon become the new urban.

In war we often see only the frontline stories of soldiers and combat. AT TEDGlobal 2010, Zainab Salbi tells powerful "backline" stories of women who keep everyday life going during conflicts, and calls for women to have a place at the negotiating table once fighting is over.

In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams -- for construction, surveying disasters and far more.

Maurice Conti explores new partnerships between technology, nature and humanity.

Massimo Banzi helped invent the Arduino, a tiny, easy-to-use open-source microcontroller that's inspired thousands of people around the world to make the coolest things they can imagine -- from toys to satellite gear. Because, as he says, "You don't need anyone's permission to make something great."

Bhu Srinivasan researches the intersection of capitalism and technological progress. Instead of thinking about capitalism as a firm, unchanging ideology, he suggests that we should think of it as an operating system -- one that needs upgrades to keep up with innovation, like the impending take-off of drone delivery services. Learn more about the...

In his TED Talk, The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot, Daniel Suarez described the rise of drones, automated weapons and AI-powered intelligence-gathering tools. Here, he goes further, describing no less than a coming “automation revolution.” Drones are in the news these days. More than any other technology, they capture the zeitgeis...

Jiabao Li augments human sensation with her wearables and interactive installations, raising questions about technology's influence on perception, identity and emotion.

Daniel Suarez concocts thrilling reads from terrifying (and not-so-farfetched) near-future scenarios.

Andreas Raptopoulos and his colleagues at Matternet are attempting to create a network of drones that operate like the internet, only for tangible objects. This company -- which sprung out of an idea surfaced at Singularity University in 2011 -- aims to deliver items wherever they are needed, even if no usable roads go there. In his TED T...

  Here's a deep dive into a provocative topic: drones. For all the rhetoric, you might think think that this is a zero sum game: Drones will either destroy the world, or they'll save it. The truth, of course, is that, well, they're set to do both. Sophisticated developments see extraordinary advances on the part of the military, while...

Unmanned aerial vehicles -- that is, drones -- have a lot of people (and entire countries) hot under the collar. Every few days it seems a new report comes out about the death of another group of "faceless" people, whether it's suspected terrorist leaders or civilians. With little transparency from the governments launching drone strikes, th...

Drones are the sexy, mysterious tech craze that are often a butt of a joke, a vague solution or an ominous threat. But no matter how flashy, good technology should still solve concrete problems. Amid the hype of getting packages and pizzas delivered in half the time, what if drones could revolutionize transportation networks, connecting peop...

Marc Goodman of the Future Crimes Institute and Singularity University shares his thinking on the promise -- and threat -- of drones. For most people, drones are flying robots irrevocably associated with killing, warfare or even war crimes over the skies of Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet what started out as a purely military technology is rapidly m...