Drone Makers Gather to Defend Their Much-Maligned Machines
by Cora Currier
“I have some d-word difficulty,” said Michael Toscano, president and CEO of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a trade group for makers and enthusiasts of robots of air, land and sea.
The d-word, of course, is drones.
“Just when I say that word, ‘drrrrone,’” he intoned, waving his hands, “it has a negative connotation. Drone bees: they’re not smart, they just follow orders, they do things autonomously, and they die. When you think of a drone it’s just that, it does one thing and it blasts things out of the air.”
Toscano and I spoke over lunch at the Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference at New York University last weekend. Why was “drones” in the name? For one, it’s an attention grabber. For another, DARC is a “cool acronym,” said an organizer, even if it doesn’t help dispel the spooky associations that give Toscano a headache.
The conference was one part industry showcase, one part academic gathering, and one part workshop, reflecting the various camps of drone defenders and disparagers. Machines whirred around a stage in a demonstration, and their makers showed off a stream of videos of mountaintops, biking stunts, and cityscapes set to thumping music.
Far beyond their military uses, drones could pollinate crops, help firefighters – even accompany “a family on vacation in Hawaii,” said Colin Guinn, CEO of a company thatmakes drones for photography.
“There’s a reason we make the Phantom white, and not black. It’s not creepy. Look how cute it is!” said Guinn, referring to the small drone hovering at his side, flashing lights to charm its audience. (A researcher from Harvard arguably failed the creepy test, explaining to the audience what to consider “if you want to build a swarm of robotic bees.”)
The tech geeks, though, were almost outnumbered by those of another stripe: philosophers, lawyers, and critics who propose that drones are “a different ontological category,” of “social machines,” as Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, put it.
I asked Patrick Egan, President of the Silicon Valley chapter of Toscano’s group and editor at an industry blog, if drone manufacturers lay awake at night contemplating the ethics of technology, the brave new world that their products represent?
“The hyperbole is out of control,” he said. “It is transformative technology, but not in the way people think.”
http://www.propublica.org/article/drone-makers-gather-to-defend-their-much-maligned-machines
