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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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.)

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

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...

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.

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

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...

America was built by makers -- curious, enthusiastic amateur inventors whose tinkering habit sparked whole new industries. At TED@MotorCity, MAKE magazine publisher Dale Dougherty says we're all makers at heart, and shows cool new tools to tinker with, like Arduinos, affordable 3D printers, even DIY satellites.

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.

In 1998, aircraft designer Paul MacCready looks at a planet on which humans have utterly dominated nature, and talks about what we all can do to preserve nature's balance. His contribution: solar planes, superefficient gliders and the electric car.

When you hear the word "drone," you probably think of something either very useful or very scary. But could they have aesthetic value? Autonomous systems expert Raffaello D'Andrea develops flying machines, and his latest projects are pushing the boundaries of autonomous flight -- from a flying wing that can hover and recover from disturbance to ...

"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" asks Regina Dugan, then director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In this breathtaking talk she describes some of the extraordinary projects -- a robotic hummingbird, a prosthetic arm controlled by thought, and, well, the internet -- that her agency has create...

In this powerful talk, P.W. Singer shows how the widespread use of robots in war is changing the realities of combat. He shows us scenarios straight out of science fiction -- that now may not be so fictitious.

David Lang is the cofounder and CEO of OpenROV, designing and manufacturing underwater drones.