Age of the Drone World Picture

Presentation forAutonomy and Automation Feb 2014

patrick croganwww.dcrc.org.uk

James Bridle, Drone Shadows Project, from 2011http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/portfolio/project/drone-shadows/

S.A.G.E.(1950s – 1960s)

Re-mapping the world

(around the U.S.A)

Flight simulation

‘Pilot and Payload’ team, Creech Airforce Base, Nevada

Work to do for media/technoculture studies:

AIRoboticsAutomated/predictive systems/agents/’bots’ etc etc

‘Elective naivety’

Cf. Jutta Weber et. al. on robotics development/futures amongst university researchers in the EU…

http://ethicbots.na.infn.it/restricted/doc/D5.pdf.

Military and Security R&D

• Major lead for AI/Robotics development (from Bush Jnr Administration onwards: U.S. DoD Directive that at least half of all research budget to be spent in these fields)

Chamayou (Théorie du drone 2013)

• Use (and projected uses) of drones is transforming• Military strategy and culture, • geo-politics • domestic politics • everyday life in ‘faraway’ places, and (soon) globally

Autonomy and Automation

• Drones focus/exemplify some key issues/ questions, eg:

• How is the dynamic relationship between autonomy and automation, so intrinsic to human culture, society, and history changing?

• And how to find a ‘good’ way to compose these two?

‘Human’ being = becoming ‘auto’ (self) via the heteronomic (techniques, tools,

technologies) • In default of an ‘essence’ (Stiegler)• In default (‘factory settings’) mode

• We are (re)made in internalising the possibilities (= ‘autonomy’) of the exterior ‘automatic’ tools, techniques, structures, systems that the earlier ‘we’s’ have already made and left for us.

Adopting the automatic

• So, not: Human: ‘I am. So, what to do with this tool?’

• But: ‘What to become in adopting its field of actions, milieu of programmed behaviors –and in reinventing them?’

(Post) industrial automation• Major shift in capacities/behaviours

‘exteriorised’• From gestures to analysis, ‘reasoning’,

predicting, hypothesising, ‘problem solving’, deciding: new

human-technical combinations sensing, reflecting, and then acting

Samsung SGR - 1

On a soldier’s refusal to shoot an enemy caught with his pants down….

• “If he does it, he knows he will have to live with this act. It is this which he refuses: to become someone who has done that. It’s not a question of duty (devoir) but of becoming (devenir). The pertinent and decisive question is not ‘what should I do?’ but ‘what will I become?’” (Chamayou 275)

• Who we are is not a ‘philosophical’ question but an historical, ethico-political, technological one