Dr. Marjory Da Costa-Abreu joins important project on the use of drones and its societal implications

Dr. Da Costa-Abreu (Ethical artificial intelligence academic ) is one of the Co-I’s in the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Project titled, “Droned Life: Data, Narrative, and the Aesthetics of Worldmaking”.

This project is focusing on studying the ethics and politics of drone proliferation in the areas of art, war, humanitarianism, and ecology. Like many technologies, drones have military origins, and well-documented controversies surround their use in remote warfare.

Drones have now entered different realms of civilian life, from the geopolitical to the domestic, and questions surrounding what constitutes ethical or appropriate drone use persist; if anything, they’ve gotten messier. From ‘How do we safeguard data?’ and ‘What should the thresholds for human input be?’ to ‘How do we navigate the asymmetrical aspects of drone technology?’.

She is working with PI Dr. Beryl Pong (University of Cambridge), Co-I Dr. Richard Carter (University of York) and Co-I Dr. Joanna Tidy (University of Sheffield) as well as three main industry collaborators: the Imperial War Museum, the NGO Drone Wars UK, and the creative agency Human Studio.

Addressing the implications of drone innovation means addressing the big challenges of our time. Not only do drones represent a future in which our everyday lifestyles will be shaped by robotics, but, like the ‘signature strikes’ of military drones which use algorithmic data analysis to target suspect behaviour rather than known identities, civilian drones are also increasingly automating response and decision-making based on Big Data (Andrejevic).

The debate over autonomous weaponry is revealing itself to be part of a much larger concern about machine ethics and predictive analytics—about robots that are meant to ‘outperform and outthink a human operator’.
Dr. Marjory Da Costa Abreu PhD, MPhil, BSc, SFHEA

Building on work done through a British Academy Rising Star Award, Droned Life focuses on the imaginative and ethical terms of the futures that drones make possible.