The Ethics of Drone Design – Field Notes from a Drone Engineer
Will drone technology make the world a better place? If so, how do we build ethically-informed drones? And if not, how do we ensure that problematic technologies don’t make it out into society? For the past several years, Dylan Cawthorne, associate professor and drone engineer at the University of Southern Denmark, has been attempting to address these and related ethical questions by designing drones using the value-sensitive design methodology. In this applied ethics talk, Cawthorne will talk about how things look from the engineering front lines, and how his new book The Ethics of Drone Design: How Value Sensitive Design Can Create Better Technologies – and the drones developed within – negotiate this space through four design case-studies: the healthcare drone, the search and rescue drone, the educational drone, and the spiritual drone.