Just a longer selfie stick

I’ve just finished reading William Gibson’s new novel The Peripheral and it’s very good. One of the main ideas in the book is the ability to be somewhere (and actually sometime) else through technology either through inhabiting a kind of android body — the ‘peripherals’ of the title — or more mundanely through drones.

I think it was Chris Anderson (ex Wired, now 3D Robotics) who described drones as ‘a longer selfie stick’ and predicted that people would use them to film themselves — maybe doing exciting things like windsurfing but in the future, maybe just walking along the street. Perhaps it could be narcissism that drives the uptake and development of the technology. Personally I’m more interested in this kind of thing:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/6zDDsX5xYcA