But it’s not just the large clear picture of your flight path the iPhone or iPod Touch can provide. Instead of struggling with a complicated remote control unit, you fly the AR Drone merely by tilting your handheld device in the direction you want to go. There are a few basic touchscreen controls like rise, down and rotate, but the accelerometers inside do the rest.

Forget space shuttles, nanobots and large hadron colliders, the yardstick for human technological development may just be the Star Trek tricorder. Convention geek jokes aside, a good deal of 20th century sci-fi reveals an innate desire for a platform- and information-agnostic device we can point at anything to learn all about it (for when we visit alien worlds).

The term crowdsourcing wasn’t coined until the web age, undoubtedly because it enabled the collecting, aggregating and processing power we need to let crowdsourcing take full flight. Today it’s used for everything from judging the most attractive female posterior to gathering the funds to make movies.