Drones - walk the talk
@Matthias yeah I am tired of hearing what good drones could do but never seem to get around to actually doing. For example Nepal is not terribly far away from Pakistan where we know there is lots of drones loitering around. Many of them could have hopped over to Nepal with at max one stop-over for refueling in no time flat. I may have missed some (thanks for the link @alberto ), but so far I haven’t seen many of the unambiguously beneficial uses exploited a whole lot. And some of them have been blindingly obvious in the last couple of weeks, and really not difficult to get at least working on.
I don’t want to belittle the fact that there are many small initiatives all over the place, and in most cases there is a LOT more work going on inside than meets the eye. One of the problems I have though is that if large sums of government money are to be spent on such a technology - that obviously has a significant and very complex societal impact - we don’t seem to bother to discuss it in an effective manner. Such an attempt would include the people that make the tech, the people that operate it, and - very important - the ones affected by it. Before we produce all the facts. With drones we are looking at a very wide range of outcomes we could end up with, some of them very difficult or impossible reverse. Also we should be aware of a problem’s roots, even when we feel compelled to fight the symptoms. We need to keep track of the externalities of a technology, and stay realistic.
At the moment all money pretty much goes exclusively to the usual suspects. How can civil society, at least parts of the “global south”, or women’s voices be heard and considered in such a process? When would this be done if not in the early stages of making the concepts? Are the current practices established in industry conducive to such a process (large mil ind complex organizations elbowing for money)? How is their track record of managing such programs, that need to stay flexible and permeable to tackle a field full of unknown unknowns (and un-unknow some knowns in the process) - to say it with the words of Rumsfeld and Žižek, respectively.
Of course it won’t be simple and it won’t be without friction, but if I weigh this against the societal cost of opportunity, and ER’s chance to help connect and guide many center actors through a very dynamic edge - the problem has our name written all over it. I would love to hear other people’s perception on this before I publish the next steps I could envision this taking. I am not only looking at @Marc @francesco210173 @Baptiste_Labat but expressly into the social/gender direction (@noemi , @SamarAli , others - it is not super urgent but perhaps you know someone you can nudge when you are a little less busy than you must be now?)