Working on our Unusual Solution: The Ethics of Drone Use

For the last few months, we’ve been working on something very different from the other projects we’ve done so far. We are trying to put together a process for the creation of implementable, inclusive and contextualised ethical guidelines for the use of drones.

Like many new technologies, drones have come into use before the regulations for their use are in place. They have the potential to implement impactful and interesting work but are also capable of being gravely misused. While there are legal regulations in place for the use of drones in India, ethical safeguards have not been considered in these regulations. Drones have already begun to be used without consideration for consent or privacy. Their unethical use can greatly exacerbate existing power imbalances. In our own work, we often face ethical dilemmas when working on projects that involve the use of drones, or the data generated by them. However, considering that some estimates indicate that there are over 6,00,000 civilian drones in India, when we say no to a project, someone else will say yes. A longer-term solution is necessary.

We want to fill this gap. We are currently working on a solution through the Unusual Solvers Grant competition; we’re calling this project EDUCATE (Ethical Drone Use through Community Awareness and Tactical Engagement). Our Theory of Change targets major donors, investors and other funding agencies to convince them of the need to have an ethical framework for any project involving drones. We can use their buy-in as leverage to inculcate ethical frameworks in the various work flows of drone manufacture and use.

We intend to create engagement material to use at various levels of the drone industry that ensure that ethical considerations are incorporated in the processes of drone hardware and software manufacturing, as well as in the implementation of drone projects. This material will be aimed at facilitating an understanding of ethical frameworks, equipping teams with tools to draft best practice guidelines within their specific context. While we will create the process for drafting such a framework, the actual guidelines for implementation will be collaboratively drafted with the communities potentially impacted by the drone project.

To crystallize our Theory of Change, we have been undertaking three kinds of activities. Firstly, we spoke with members of a rural community who have been impacted by drone use. In their area, drones have been deployed without their consultation, and been used to create an atmosphere of fear. They did not feel legal recourse was a realistic option for them and they adapted their behaviour in response to drone deployment in the area. Their experiences helped us understand the ground level realities of the use of drones, validating the need for ethical frameworks. Secondly, we conducted interviews with relevant stakeholders and field experts. Through this process, we attempted to obtain insight into the workings of the drone industry, and made sense of the various points at which we could engage with it. Finally, we’ve conducted an extensive review of relevant literature to better understand the previous work done in this field.

( At the time of writing this blogpost, we were still in the process of conducting our field visits and our interviews. The rest of this post will focus on our review of the literature. -Editor)

Over the course of our literature review, some of the topics we’ve studied are:

• Ethical frameworks for other emergent technologies

• Uses and concerns of using drones in conservation and development projects

• Tools to gauge public perception, especially around new technologies

• Governance Theories around making ethical frameworks effective

• Post-normal Science

• Democratization of science

While the reading material has been varied and dense, this process has been extremely helpful for our project, and has also been personally gratifying.  Looking at the intersecting disciplines and theories that may be applicable to this project has been an exciting process for me.  While we are yet to create our engagement material itself, we have a sense of the shape of the process we wish to create. Many ethical frameworks for emergent technologies already exist. We do not want to create another one.  Instead, we would like to make existing frameworks more implementable by cohesively presenting them in formats that those implementing projects can use in their work.

As a theoretical backbone, we are using Technologies of Humility (Jasanoff, 2005) to help assess and manage emergent technologies with many unknowns. The framework outlined here for the ethical evaluation of new technologies highlights four pillars:

• Framing

• Vulnerability

• Distribution

• Learning

In addition to this, we are also imbibing her recommendation to make work more applicable by moving beyond academic peer review to include inputs from relevant stakeholders.

We’re certain that we want to incorporate reflexivity within the process we’re outlining; i.e. the creation of structured pathways to incorporate checks that allow for adaptation over the course of a project. This is especially important when working with emerging technologies such as drones, both for the community whose understanding and perception of the technology may shift as the project progresses, as well as for those implementing the project, giving them the flexibility required to make their project successful.

A large component of our work will also be to effectively engage communities in the process of drafting and overseeing the implementation of the drone projects they may be impacted by. As per our research, informed consent alone seems inadequate (Van de Poel, 2016) as a tool for making ethical guidelines inclusive. As part of our project, we will evaluate other methodologies of engagement, such as deliberative polling (Ahmad et. Al 2006). We will compare and contrast these, as well as various other methods and tools for community engagement and will be developing communication material accordingly.

Finally, we intend for accountability to be built into the framework and implementation of drone use. Testing the principles of the democratisation of science, we want to establish the pathways by which communities impacted by drones will be able to hold implementers and funders accountable for their actions and investments respectively. One example or possible manifestation of this could be contractual, where the project contract could include a clause stating that the power to renew the contract or permission to implement different phases of a project was with the impacted community.

We’ll be at the WeRobotics Unusual Solutions Pitch event in Nairobi, Kenya, next week where we’ll be competing with the other eight finalists for a grant to make our solution a reality! More on this once the event’s done; for more information, follow us on Twitter/Instagram or reach out to us via the contact form on our website.

Report: The Role of Technology in Conservation in India | SCCS-Bangalore 2019

On the 16th October 2019, Technology for Wildlife (TfW) organised a panel discussion on the ‘Role of Technology in Conservation” at the Student Conference on Conservation Science, Bengaluru. The format of the panel discussion was 15-20 minute presentations by each panelist, followed by a few questions from the audience for that panelist; once all the panelists spoke, there was time for questions at the end.

The panelists were Prithvi from Appiko, Abhi from Wildly, Jose from the Wildlife Trust of India, and Shashank from TfW. Unfortunately, this had to be an all-male panel; though we had invited four women working in this space to participate, none of them were able to make it.

The panel began with Prithvi from Appiko, who walked us through the range of Appiko’s products, with an emphasis on their sensors that allow regular cameras to be used as camera traps. I found their explanation to why they had chosen to build camera traps interesting since there are already off-the-shelf camera traps available. In Prithvi’s opinion, even camera traps used for tiger estimation, which are perhaps one of the most abundantly used technological devices in Indian conservation, were origninally developed to optimize hunting and are not always conducive for wildlife surveys. This is indicative of the current relationship between technology and conservation even for a well-funded issue such as tiger conservation, where there is limited funding for innovation; technological needs are met through ‘jugaad’ of existing technologies meant for other applications. My favourite take-away from Prithvi’s presentation was his outlook on the role of technology in conservation: “Technology is just a tool for conservation, but with the right tool, you can do a lot more.” 

Prithvi from Appiko

Abhi from Wildly

Jose from the Wildlife Trust of India

The next speaker, Abhi from Wildly, was also focused on developing hardware for conservation. Their company is currently building acoustic devices to detect illegal activities in protected areas. Later in the conference, I had a chance to listen to them demonstrate their work during another workshop on Machine and Deep Learning, and it was really interesting to learn what applying these techniques in the current Indian conservation context entails. My most valuable take away from Abhi’s presentations was that their technology was created and developed out of a current conservation need. This, coupled with the fact that they are trying to be open-source and affordable makes them a very interesting organisation, who’s work we will be following.

The third presentation, by Jose from the Wildlife Trust of India, was on his work with Wildlife Crime Prevention. It was a very engaging talk and differed from the others in that he focused on the sustainability of technology more than on sustainable technology. He discussed various technological interventions that have been developed for his work, such as HAWK, and on how his team’s vision and working relationship proved to be more important in ensuring effective technological interventions more than the nature of the technologies themselves.

The final presentation was by Shashank from TfW. Multiple people communicated that they enjoyed his talk and that his enthusiasm was communicated in the presentation. It was the only non-hardware technology business in the group and I think his presentation on our work communicated the varied uses of technology in conservation.

Overall, the panel was interesting and unique. In future iterations of this panel, it may also be useful to invite panelists working in areas related to conservation ecology, such as mainstream ecologists or technologists working outside of conservation. This would help add different perspectives and provide an understanding of the larger picture.

On ghost gear and seaweed stirfry

For the last few months, we’ve been building up towards a project on abandoned, lost and otherwise discarded fishing gear, more commonly known as ghost gear. This began with a conversation with a conservation scientist working on the issue of marine debris in India. He had read an academic paper describing the creation of a map depicting the zones where there was a high probability of turtles getting entangled in ghost gear off the Australian coast. This map could then be used to target areas for ghost gear removal, and thus reduce the threat to the turtles. . Could we do something similar for India? What do we know about ghost gear off the Indian coast? The fact that there does not seem to be enough data about marine debris off the Indian coast to begin answering these questions shaped our discussions, and concluded with us being brought on as researchers to answer one question: given the current state of technology, what is the best method to locate and detect ghost gear in Indian territorial waters?

Abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear.

Once we completed the contractual work with the NGO, we dove head first into the project. We were on a tight schedule, so went looking for some external assistance; we were very lucky to be able to convince Gabriella D’Cruz, a lovely and passionate marine conservationist, to join us for this project. We began by structuring the workflow and assigning tasks to each member of the team. We would be conducting reviews of academic literature, non-academic material and interviews with experts, to ensure we covered the subject comprehensively, and would then be summarising the information, analysing it and submitting our recommendations to our client.

We took a beach-break on of the days and found some ghost gear washed up on the shore.

Once the research itself began, the next few weeks just whizzed past. We spent all our energy looking for and reading through the available information on our subject. The work was very motivating, as the eventual conservation impact was evident, and there was also a steep learning curve; while we were familiar with the technology being considered, its application to ghost gear detection was new to us.

Working together as a team was lovely; we all bonded over discussions of food, Goa and conservation. One particular day was memorable, for Gabriella (who loves sea-weed, to say the very least) brought a few different varieties of seaweed seasoning to work. We ended up cooking stir-fry noodles that day with the sea-weed which was just delicious; but it didn’t stop there. A few hours later, tea-time consisted of black tea with seaweed, accompanied with cashewnuts roasted in butter and seaweed!

Seaweed stirfry.

On another day, we had to take a break because one of us found a video recording of a conference where they’d live-streamed the proceedings over Facebook, but had mistakenly put the cat filter on; we couldn’t see our screens because of our tears of laughter.

Over the first weeks of this project, we collated all the information we could find on this topic, had filtered and summarised it and had begun making our primary assessments. In the last weeks, we brought all of this information together and prepared the report. We spent a few days reading through our information summaries, identifying patterns, concerns and potential recommendations. We spent one long day at our whiteboard, discussing and condensing all the information we had on the topic.

Working things out on the whiteboard.

It was lovely to be able to work through the information, have a structured debate (shout-out to Brooklyn 99 S06e12), construct flow-charts and discover what we agreed to as a team. It was a tiring but particularly rewarding day, because at the end we had identified a clear workflow, specific recommendations for our client and potential areas for innovation in the location and detection of ghost gear. Over the last few days, we completed writing and editing the report before sending it to our clients. We’re now working on our other projects, but know that we’re going to be doing more work on eliminating ghost gear from the oceans soon!