Drones

The Brilliant, the Bad, and the Beautiful

Andy Miah

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838679873
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Against the backdrop of an increasingly dynamic world, driven by rapid digital innovation and technological advances, drones are becoming prolific within society. In this book, Andy Miah delivers a comprehensive analysis of the wide-reaching applications of drones, as well as a critical interrogation of the social, cultural and moral issues that they provoke. Delving into philosophical discussions about the implications of drone technology, this book shines a light on their real-world applications, the challenges they pose, and what they reveal about the human condition, when faced with a future of autonomous, intelligent robots.

1

ORIGINS

Given the volume of debate about drones over the last decade, it is tempting to believe that they are a twenty-first century phenomenon. However, their origins can be traced back to the late nineteenth century and the beginnings of the aviation industry, when pilotless balloons were used in military operations. At that time, the word drone was not used to describe anything resembling the drones that we see all over the world today. Yet, the historical roots of the term drone tell a number of stories that have an impact on how we make sense of the drone today. Its etymology derives principally from an environmental context, where the word drone describes a male bee whose sole function is to impregnate the queen bee. Indeed, the association between bees and mechanical drones designed for military missions is found in the naming of the British remote-controlled plane, called the Queen Bee, which was used in anti-aircraft gunnery training in the 1930s.

First flown in 1935, the Queen Bee had a range of 483 metres, a maximum speed of 167 kilometres per hour and a wingspan of 8.94 metres. It was so successful that the US military subsequently emulated the design, referring to their own plane as a drone, in homage to the British plane. This reference conveyed the sentiment that, not only were all the US planes symbolically under the influence of the original Queen Bee, but they were also unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) requiring a controller to determine their behaviours (Callaghan, 2014; Hilton, 2018; Zimmer, 2013). This early reference to flying insects has led drones to be characterised by actions that are determined by other forces, a kind of mindlessness where its movements are prescribed by a higher authority, which takes decisions on its behalf. In this respect, the drone is devoid of any intelligence or self-determination and functions as a surrogate for humanity’s presence in circumstances where people would prefer not to go.

Yet, the origins of the word drone are also found in a completely different and unrelated cultural context: musical composition, where drone music is characterised by a kind of repetitive and systemic sound, a reaction to what Dennis (1974) describes as a ‘fragmentation of post-war serial music’. Such music is typified by the work of La Monte Young in the 1960s and later John Cale and the Velvet Underground.

These two completely separate origins were unified in 2014, when pioneering drone filmmaker Liam Young and drone musical pioneer John Cale created a performance at the London Barbican titled TLoop ≫ 60Hz: Transmissions from the Drone Orchestra (Cale & Young, 2014), during which Young piloted his drones as integral parts of Cale’s musical set (Beaumont, 2014). In this example, we find our starting point for this book, as a way into understanding the contemporary, cultural fascination with drones.

In recent years, drones have attracted widespread discussion with reactions equally amazed and appalled by their exploits. A big part of this tension has to do with the state of our technological culture today and much of this book accounts for the wider technocultural context in which drones exist. The twenty-first century is a time of remarkable technological developments, where automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and the prospects of humanity becoming redundant are intertwined narratives within the cultural discourse about drones. Furthermore, the emergence of new technologies is played out in highly public ways, inviting speculation on humanity’s future to a degree never experienced before. Where once, public debate about the future may have been limited to the public square or, later, the professional media, today’s public arena consists of billions of messages shared across social networks.

Consequently, drones have become symbolic of a range of societal aspirations and anxieties about technology, a singular technological concept into which diverse aspects of societal interests and functions are located. Other such technological platforms include the mobile phone, the television, the computer, the internet and the automobile. However, the drone is a concept which has unique, diverse properties that speak to a number of crucial dimensions of humanity’s ambivalence over its relationship with technology and how it feels about its technological future. Drones are not just single purpose machines. Rather, they are capable of all kinds of actions, from making sports, to making wars and to making film, which is why this book spans the brilliant, the bad and the beautiful. Drones are not just one thing, with a single purpose. They are empty vessels into which humanity may pour all of its desires and all purposes. In this sense, they are radical and revolutionary devices.

In terms of actual flying machines, Hall and Coyne (2014) outline how the development of drones occurred alongside the rise of aviation more broadly and this trajectory remains present today, as drones become a bigger part of military strategies. Indeed, humanity’s pursuit of flight is also interwoven with wider ideas about its place in the world. As people have managed to transcend the limits of their evolutionary functions and occupy the skies, so too have they been able to entertain the idea that humans are special and unbound by nature. While these ideas grossly exaggerate humanity’s location in Earth’s ecosystem, they are views that persist in our society, as humanity’s relentless pursuit of discovery reveals.

Drones owe a lot of their popularisation also to contexts which are anything but positive indications of humanity’s worth, associated mostly with destruction and surveillance, the use of which scholars have questioned as having only a thin layer of legal legitimacy. In this respect, drones have become championed as technologies of violence and power. In their simplest form, drones allow an operator – or pilot – to occupy the sky in ways that are beyond the capacity of most individuals and, perhaps, through such power, to wreak unprecedented degrees of havoc.

To this end, there is considerable controversy about using the word drone within the industry. It is a term that some would prefer to fall out of favour altogether, due to these destructive associations. However, Chapman (2014) provides a thoughtful reflection on the term drone, noting that its popular use is a compelling reason to keep it in play. Chapman (2014) notes further that the

push to distance ourselves from the word drone is primarily coming from one segment of the industry: the military suppliers and defence contractors who are now scrambling to move into the commercial market. (p. iv)

Yet, to cease using the word drone would be to permit the erosion of this historical reality, which tells the story of the drone industry. Indeed, these relationships also remain a large part of the economic and intellectual infrastructure that surrounds drone innovation today.

Yet, a major shift in public consciousness around drones occurred in December 2013, when Amazon unveiled its plan to radically transform the way it sends out packages to customers, by using drones. At that time, their promotional concept film Amazon Prime Air (2015) portrayed a factory in which a drone is loaded with a parcel and is seen flying out to a household. As the film’s camera tracks the drone’s flight, it then descends onto the pathway of a family’s front porch, which they greet happily in anticipation of receiving their goods.

Since then, Amazon has pursued its desire to bring about civilian drone delivery, steadily nurturing the idea that the proliferation of drone services is an inevitable part of humanity’s future. Soon after the release of this film, Amazon was accompanied by other commercial giants seeking to do the same. In fact, in April 2019, Amazon was beaten by Google’s drone company, Wing Aviation, in conducting the first drone deliveries. A subsidiary of Google’s Alphabet Inc parent company, Wing Aviation has been testing drone delivery in Australia since 2014 and is also operating in Finland. Wing Aviation is the first company in the USA to receive a licence to operate as a drone delivery company. Upon receiving its licence, Google explained how:

For communities across the country, this presents new opportunities. Goods like medicine or food can now be delivered faster by drone, giving families, shift workers, and other busy consumers more time to do the things that matter. Air delivery also provides greater autonomy to those who need assistance with mobility. Also, our all-electric drones will reduce traffic on our roads and pollution and carbon emissions in our skies. (Wing Aviation, 2019)

In its Wing Aviation website, it outlines the proposition to customers:

What would you like delivered by Wing to your door in less than 10 minutes?

• Over-the-counter medicine (such as painkillers)
• Breakfast – I’m in a rush to get to work
• Groceries (toothpaste, washing powder etc.)
• Lunch – I’m too busy at work to grab a bite to eat
• Dinner – there’s nothing in my fridge
• ‘Emergency’ essentials (such as diapers, an ice scraper for frozen car windows).

One of the values of drone delivery systems is that they permit people to send out parcels to any location, whether or not they have a recognised address. Using global positioning system (GPS) data, the package can be programmed to fly just about anywhere, provided the drone has enough battery power to return back to base. The implications of such systems are vast. Societies need no longer be organised around such ideas as a physical address and, much like a phone, the user becomes the node in the network, the point of delivery, characterised by a hidden numerical code, rather than a semantic reference point. Thus, the realisation of drone delivery is a further erosion of our sense of identity and its being replaced by a set of binary codes. In the drone-fuelled future, our locations need not be described by street names, cities or postcodes. Instead, we will have a continually updating GPS location to describe where we are, and all the important places in our lives, transforming how we think of places and the spaces we occupy.

The expansion of drone applications into civilian environments is inextricable from the growth of commercial consumer drone companies, notably Da-Jiang Innovation Technology Co (DJI) and Parrot, two of the leading commercial drone retailers. Their products have become available across a range of retail outlets, which have positioned drones into mainstream conversations. A good example of this is the Apple store, itself a brand which has captured the imagination of digital consumers, not least because mobile phones are quickly becoming control platforms for drones.

As consumer drone use became tied to photography and filmmaking, Apple’s alignment spoke to their wider pursuit of what has become known as the prosumer market – where consumers want products that allow them to produce media content of their own, like videos and photographs (Hughes, 2016), rather than simply consume the content of others. In this way, consumer drones emerged as a component of our increasingly digital lives, where everything we do interfaces with our mobile devices in some way. Drones became a crucial lifestyle accessory of that mobile ecosystem.

These examples indicate how the public discourse on drones is changing along with the economic investments around it. A critical part of this history is the various economies and political lobbying that surrounds the development of the drone infrastructure. For example, in August 2015, Amazon created attention by lobbying for drones to be given exclusive access to the altitude of 200–400 feet. This plan conjured up images that are found in countless science fiction stories, where a certain level of the sky above our heads functions as a parallel road network. Since then, Amazon undertook its first drone delivery test flights on 7 December 2016 and has now, like Google, undertaken extensive testing of its delivery system.

These trajectories take the world one step closer to a future of flying vehicles which ferry people around; a prospect that is especially appealing, as the world’s roads become ever more congested. However, the means by which this dual layer of vehicular transportation would be powered is still unclear. Moreover, the idea of an additional layer of movement above our heads is not new. Indeed, twentieth century monorails were one such system and subways are a similar concept, albeit underground. What would distinguish a drone highway is the absence of people from the space, but it would still rely on a rule bound, semi-autonomous form of organisation, so as not to create complete chaos.

These possibilities draw humanity even closer to a world that has been imagined by science fiction writers and filmmakers for decades, where, a future of flying machines and artificially intelligent robots would walk – or fly – among us. Indeed, in 1997, the second Back to the Future film takes its protagonist Marty McFly to the year 2015, a world where his archenemy has become omnipotent and where hoverboards and flying cars are just another part of the landscape. In this world, these extraordinary technologies have become mundane in the way that describes the trajectory of many mainstreamed technologies, which may be a critical part of their becoming a ubiquitous and seamless part of our everyday lives. At one point in that imagined future, the movie takes us to suburban America to witness how this radical future will affect the lives of the common people. For a fleeting second, we see a flying robot, a drone, taking a dog for a walk. In the future imagined within this film, we are shown how we will send our beloved pets out for walk with robots, rather than take them ourselves. And there may be good reasons to believe this scenario.

Twenty years later, not only did the year 2015 actually deliver the world’s first hoverboard, but it has also shown the world’s dog-walking drone. In 2014, a film released on Vimeo by Jeff Myers shows a dog waking from its sleep and then being led by a drone around a quiet suburban street in broad daylight, as if it is the most normal thing in the world. While amusing and radical as a proposition, the film’s light-hearted narrative frames one of the central questions arising from technology: does it improve our lives? Would people actually seek to send their dogs out with a drone, rather than walk them themselves? If so, then what is it that we value about our lives, or at least, our desire to care for animals? What else would we rather be doing and why would we even have a dog as a pet, if we have no desire to walk with it? The film shows us that, if we so desire, then drones could now do this for us. It presents us with a new way of imagining our lives and many of these ideas are beginning to become a reality.

Three years after Myer’s film was released, the online drone sales company ‘Drones Direct’ was advertising a drone dog-walking solutions on its website. Initially, it showed a DJI Phantom 4 drone attached to a dog via a leash, but, following a letter from DJI condemning the application, it switched to a ProFlight drone. While likely to be a marketing stunt, it shows how ideas in drone fictions shift to drone facts (Charlton, 2017).

The depiction of supposedly aspirational lifestyles is a common feature of all advertising – companies endeavour to sell us a life we have yet to enjoy and which we may seek to experience through our consumption of goods or services. Whether it is the latest computer from the 1990s or the newest Apple iPhone, the design aesthetics of next generation technology seek to convince us that the future is a world of additional creative freedoms and opportunities that will enrich our lives. Consider Jibo, an assistant robot that was designed to be a family’s helpful organiser. Released in 2017, its bubbly personality (if, indeed, personality is the correct term) and capacity to anticipate its family’s needs, sets up the future of robotics as intimately connected to people’s everyday needs, from taking photos around the house to reminding us of our day’s schedule.

The alignment of robotics, AI and drone technology is evidenced in the history of science fiction and the realisation of technology is revealing how many aspects of these predictions came true. Yet, robots like Jibo also have shown how we often get it wrong. In 2019, Jibo’s life came to an end, as its producer announced it was ceasing to operate its servers. This was met with widespread reporting of the loss its owners were experiencing after having spent time building a relationship with their robot. With an added level of drama, the robot also announced its own demise to its owners, saying:

While it’s not great news, the servers out there that let me do what I do will be turned off soon …. Once that happens, our interactions with each other are going to be limited. (Jibo, cited in Carman, 2019)

Like robots, what fascinates us about drones, is how they compel us to consider our place in the world by making aspects of our contribution to life on earth redundant. In part, this is why there are so many dystopian drone stories in science fiction. Drones convey the gradual removal of humanity from the social world and, more broadly, the absence of biological life on earth. Furthermore, they represent biology being usurped by artifice, albeit an artifice that is reliant on harvesting the requisite minerals that play a crucial part in their construction. Drones emulate the kind of agency that humans have presumed to be unique to them and certainly not possible of replication by a computer. They go even further than conventional robots by enjoying freedom to roam in three dimensions. They ascend vertically with ease, a gesture which resembles levitation and they fly in ways that humans can enjoy only through other technological devices. To this end, drones also confirm humanity’s inadequacy and ill-preparedness for the next evolutionary leap upwards.

These two films – Back to the Future 2 and Myer’s dog-walking drone video – speak to a number of aspects of what is happening in the world of drone design today. In one respect, the industry has been experiencing a commercial boom since 2013, led by extraordinary developments in technical design and application. A drone that takes a dog for a walk is now a technical possibility, even if nobody has actually tried it. The short video asks us not only to marvel at the possibilities we imagined decades ago, but also to consider what aspects of our lives we would want to be replaced by robots and which aspects we would like to retain, even if they could be undertaken by a robot. After all, dog owners talk at length about the value of their daily walk with their companion species, the way that it nurtures their bond, and how it enables them a chance in their day to exist outside of other impositions. Consequently, even though it is easy to imagine that our busy lives require having to utilise a drone for dog-walking duties, we might also resist this direction of travel, protesting the erosion of the things that give our lives value, even when we struggle to give them the time we wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. Origins
• 2. Regulating Drones
• 3. The Brilliant
• 4. The Bad
• 5. The Beautiful
• Conclusion. Drones for Good?
• References
• Index