Abstract
The chapter presents the initial definitions of drones and unmanned aerial systems by examining the various areas in which they have been deployed. The range of uses of drones inevitably triggers contradictory reactions, and drone development often comes with an emotional charge as drones tackle important human values. The chapter situates drones in the cultural, socio-economic and existing legal framework. It points to several legal and social developments at work in contemporary “all-sensing societies” that determine the development, understanding, deployment and regulation of drones, such as the “Internet of Things”, “pervasive” and “ubiquitous” computing, the “big data” paradigm, the “spatial Web 3.0” creating a geolocation services market and autonomous artificial intelligence developments, which raise important new normative questions related to responsibility and liability. It shows how these trends reflect the contemporary obsession with data, which bears strong moral consequences by implicating how to (or not to) act and behave as the “numbers do not lie”. They abolish narrative and subjectivity. The chapter concludes by presenting the structure of the book and offering some insights regarding the remaining chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
The author of algorithm for predicting which of the 50,000 parolees would commit a serious crime within 2 years claims: “I use tens of thousands of cases to build the system, [as well as] asymmetric costs of false positives and false negatives, real tests of forecasting accuracy, the discovery of new forecasting relationships, and yes, machine learning” (Labi 2014).
- 2.
Drone operations and Reality Television Production exploit multiple streams of motion imagery in near-real time; both of them operate 24/7 for extended periods, and both of them dynamically re-task and cross-cue sensors.
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to express his thanks to Ajda Gorjanc (www.helivideo.si) and Dr. Danijel Skočaj (Computer Vision Laboratory, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana) for technological insights, and Laura Matjašec and Sara Železnik who assisted with research. Special thanks are due to Dean J. DeVos, an English language editor, for his patience and diligence during our collaboration.
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Završnik, A. (2016). Introduction: Situating Drones in Surveillance Societies. In: Završnik, A. (eds) Drones and Unmanned Aerial Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23760-2_1
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