The meeting with Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, took place during a breakfast meeting with the foreign press I’d helped set up in the Hotel Okura in Tokyo. I was just getting started as a full-time tech writer and was putting out a weekly column called Computer Corner for the Japan Times. This must have been in the late 1980s.

​Sales of drones—or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as people in the industry like to call them—are soaring.

Forecasts by market annalists vary, but all are bullish. A 2015 estimate by the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia, has the value of global UAV production rising from $4 billion annually to $14 billion in 2025. Kick in R&D, procurement and software development and you are looking at a business ballooning towards $100 billion in accumulated revenues over the next decade.