The Economist has an article about civilian micro air vehicles and how society might react to them. Two interesting technical things I learned from the article was that (1) AeroVironment makes most of the US's micro air vehicles and (2) A company called SARA makes acoustic sensors for micro-air vehicles that block out wind noise and can detect other planes and do collision avoidance.
I want to talk about the article's focus on the societal impact of tiny visual sensors. The advent of such small camera-enabled robots will be the first of many technologies, with serious privacy concerns, that will probably come out in the next 10-20 years. For now, the available micro air vehicles are relatively large (laptop size or smaller). But smart dust and other futuristic visions are closer than you think. Sure, these ideas have been thrown around for the past two decades. But as we get close to the point when science fiction becomes commercial product, the human impact will be substantial and we must prepare for it. Millions of costless micro-cameras will envelope our lives in a 24 hour obtrusive sensor blanket. Combined with face detection, these micro-sensors will be able to identify individuals over a large area quite quickly; frankly, this would mean that end of privacy as we know it. Of course there will be air filters and particle blockers (for some predictions, see the Diamond Age), but the relentlessness of manufacturing processes and the possibility that these small devices will exhibit self-replication would probably overwhelm any stop-gap measure. I'm not sure I have any comments on how to make this situation better, because I'm pretty sure its inevitable.
