drones | Platypus

The MQ-9 Reaper Amid Environmental Crisis: Weapon of War or Humanitarian Tool?

 Georgia Butcher  November 5, 2024

On Saturday of Labor Day Weekend 2020, a situation was rapidly deteriorating north of Fresno, California. Sometime around 6pm on September 5, the Creek Fire started, gained momentum, and burned north (Gabbert 2020a). The fast-moving fire blocked the road from campgrounds in the area, stranding hundreds of campers visiting Mammoth Pool Reservoir. Quietly circling overhead was an MQ-9 Reaper, observing the apocalyptic looking situation. The sensors attached to the bottom of the MQ-9 Reaper could see through the billowing clouds of smoke. The California Air National Guard crew flying the MQ-9 was looking for something: a landing spot for evacuations (Solman 2020). (read more...)

Algorithmic Imaginations in Agriculture: Automation?

 Ziya Kaya  November 28, 2023

 Listen to a reading of this post.

In 2022, I was conducting my doctoral dissertation research on data-driven, automated digital farming technologies (drones, autosteering, sensors, GIS, smartphones, Big Data) in Turkey. Amidst the global hype for digital agriculture, often referred to as “smart” farming or precision agriculture, new agritech companies and startups in and beyond Turkey have been emerging alongside agribusiness corporations. These companies invest in and prioritize data-driven and algorithmic technologies over human involvement in agriculture with the assumption of the former’s objectivity and precision (Bronson 2022). For instance, the market in Turkey provides farmers with access to drones for precise chemical spraying, including fertilizers and pesticides. These drones operate autonomously, enabling farmers to target specific sub-fields rather than resorting to mass spraying. Farmers can also access various smartphone applications that, for instance, claim to offer real-time data on soil conditions at the sub-field level collected through sensors and algorithmic recommendations ensuring precise irrigation. Additionally, the companies imagine generating valuable insights into the agricultural sector for agricultural corporations, financial and biotechnology firms, and public institutions through these data-driven technologies. While not all of these technologies are extensively used by farmers in Turkey, the companies continue developing, marketing, and showcasing them and many others to automate and gather data for a wide range of agricultural operations with the claim of improving food security and ecological and socioeconomic welfare. (read more...)

On Drones and Ectoplasms: Breath of Gaia

 Angeliki Malakasioti  August 19, 2021

(Editor’s Note: This blog post is part of the Thematic Series Data Swarms Revisited) How do concepts such as the human condition, human mind, or collectivity transform in a technologically enmeshed world? And how is our understanding of relationality and agency changed in the context of hybrid tech and built infrastructures, networked systems of control? This ongoing project constitutes an artistic performative reflection on the entanglement between human agency and technological advances. In this project, the artist focuses on aerial multicopter technological systems—also known as drones—emphasizing the idea of interdependency and control within human-nonhuman systems, which are capable of informing the sustainable and collective futures of our world. (read more...)

Killer Robots: Algorithmic Warfare and Techno-Ethics

 John Emery  March 7, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth post in our Law in Computation series. War is an experiment in catastrophe; yet, policymakers today believe chance can be tamed and ‘ethical war’ waged by simply increasing battlefield technology, systematically removing human error/bias. How does an increasingly artificially intelligent battlefield reshape our capacity to think ethically in warfare (Schwartz, 2016)? Traditional ethics of war bases the justness of how one fights in war on the two principles of jus in bello (justice in fighting war) ethics: discrimination and proportionality, weighted against military necessity. Although how these categories apply in various wars has always been contested, the core assumption is that these categories are designed to be an ethics of practical judgment (see Brown, 2010) for decision-makers to weigh potentially grave consequences of civilian casualties against overall war aims. However, the algorithmic construction of terrorists has radically shifted the idea of who qualifies as a combatant in warfare. What then are the ethical implications for researchers and practitioners for a computational ethics of war? (read more...)

Popular (Mis)Conceptions & the Perpetual Rise of the Machines

 Madeleine Clare Elish  March 12, 2013

In the opening scene of the recent NOVA documentary, Rise of the Drones, the narrator ominously tells us that a revolution is underway. “Are we” he leads, “approaching a time when movies like The Terminator become our reality?” A clip from the Terminator III, with two humans cowering in fear whispering, fades in and out, “Oh God. It’s the machines. They’re starting to take over…” The narrator continues, “a time when machines fly, think, and even kill on their own?” My dissertation research is focused on how technologies used in remote warfare are changing conceptions of warfare and experiences of agency within human-computer systems. These technologies include what the Air Force prefers to call RPAs, Remotely Piloted Aircraft, also known as UAVs, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and more commonly known as drones. While my fieldwork looks at individual experiences and institutional narratives within military communities, a larger backdrop of my research (read more...)

Anthropological investigations of MIME-NET

 Lucy Suchman  November 7, 2012

As a new year’s resolution for 2012, I started a wordpress blog titled Robot Futures (see http://robotfutures.wordpress.com/about-this-blog/). The idea was to do some writing that could be more timely and critical than journal publications allow (though the deadlines of the latter and the rest of academic life have limited my posts!) about developments in robotics and artificial intelligence, particularly in the area of remotely-controlled war fighting. Increasingly distressed by the use of armed drones (see Medea Benjamin’s brilliant new book Drone Warfare: Killing by remote control, 2012, OR Books) and the arming of robots (including the 710 Warrior by Boston-based iRobot, makers of the Roomba vacuum cleaner), I’ve begun to focus my research on what James der Derian (Virtuous War, 2009) has identified as the military-industrial-media-entertainment network (MIME-NET), particularly as it has emerged over the past twenty years within the United States and Britain. As someone who has made a (read more...)