The lethal potency of drones was perhaps best demonstrated a few years back when Yemeni Houthi rebels used cheaply made variants of Iranian drones to attack the world’s largest crude oil stabilization and processing plant in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia.
With the ongoing Ukraine conflict, the role of Turkish Baraktyar and American Switchblade drones gained prominence due to the high intensity asymmetric damage caused by them to Russian battle tanks.
Age of drone warfare is not new, but the Ukraine conflict has perhaps seen its massive deployment for the first time as standard defense armor.
Thousands of miles away from the conflict zone in Ukraine, the use of non-lethal drones for enhancing civilian security and deterring attacks became a contentious issue in the wake of what transpired in the Lone Star state.
The harrowing Uvalde school shootout where some of the kids had to pose dead to save their lives and cops were indecisive till the last minute, reignited the fraught American debate on the constitutional citizen right to bear firearms vs imposing strict legal strictures on owning rifles.
School shootouts are a peculiar American malady and even strange among countries with high crime and incarceration rates. So far the conventional policing approach has failed to either preempt or avert these shootings, and social media has ensured that the spectacle of the deranged is broadcasted for a sadistic affirmation. A nightmare of narcissism, bloodshed fetishism, social atrophy, and unhinged psychopathy breaks into these tragic massacres by teenagers.
It’s clear by now that when conventional methods fail and when consensus over legislative measures is all the more elusive due to political polarization and social fragmentation running so deep that USA resembles a country fractured into ‘four parts’, as per the writer George Packer, the only respite could perhaps be through ingenious technological solutions, which nonetheless risk being contentious as well.
Axon, the Arizona-based company that makes technology solutions for defense and law enforcement announced the development of a remote-controlled TASER drone that can prevent mass shootings. The drone is equipped to provide real-time situational awareness and boost first responded action through VR training. It can incapacitate a shooter in less than a minute, says the company statement.
In the defense of the TASER drone Axon CEO Rick Smith said, “Today, the only viable response to a mass shooter is another person with a gun.” The statement echoes what the staunch advocate of Fourth Amendment right to guns, the NRA (National Rifle Association), has been saying for decades. Some of the more preposterous pronunciations, including by American politicians and public figures, call for school teachers and staffs being armed to thwart any attacks. The parody of swift counter-attack weaponization logic is circuitous and endless.
“In the aftermath of these events, we get stuck in fruitless debates. We need new and better solutions. For this reason, we have elected to publicly engage communities and stakeholders, and develop a remotely operated, non-lethal drone system that we believe will be a more effective, immediate, humane, and ethical option to protect innocent people”, added Rick.
As per the company statement, Axon recently forged a partnership with Fusus, which allows schools, businesses or other enterprises to easily connect and share security camera feeds with local public safety and other security partners. The integration of Axon body cameras, fleet dashboard cameras, and Axon Air-powered drones with the Fusus network will provide real-time access to a wide network of sensors during critical situations.
Axon outlined its three-part strategy for first-responder action using non-lethal drones that included camera sensor integration with real-time communication, enhancing response effectiveness through VR, and immediate threat incapacitation through TASER. However, even before a pilot project could be run or its efficacy tested, Axon’s drone project fell afoul of its own AI ethic committee 9 out of 12 members of the committee resigned over the potential misuse of Axon drones.
“The Taser-equipped drone also has no realistic chance of solving the mass shooting problem Axon now is prescribing it for only distracting society from real solutions to a tragic problem. We all feel the desperate need to do something to address our epidemic of mass shootings. But Axon’s proposal to elevate a tech-and-policing response when there are far less harmful alternatives, is not the solution,” reads the joint resignation statement of the AI ethic committee members.
Axon has indefinitely paused the TASER drone development until futher engagement with stakeholders and constituents, as CEO Rick Smith said to Reuters.
Can there be a totally non-lethal, less conspicuous solution to preempt shootings that doesn’t involve TASERS or any contraptions that may scare off onlookers? Perhaps.
“Companies sitting with behavioral data of billions, can surely do little more than suspending a user’s account for violating internal policies,” writes Anusuya Datta, Geosaptial World North America Editor. She further adds that the technology is extant and what’s actually required is political will and better coordination among various government agencies and private technology providers.
Concerted data-sharing and aggregation may intensify the already raging cauldron of user privacy, overreach by government agencies, and deepening of surveillance capitalism. But as Covid-19 pandemic response with governments on war-footing and mass vaccination drives showed, the Hegelian ‘right of necessity’ sometimes takes precedence. Not all precedents are embraced, but long-standing unique problems do call for a trade-off and a conscious awareness of it.
At a time when privacy is the cornerstone of the information economy and a societal covenant, but paradoxically complete self-disclosure has become its dominant ethos, maybe it’s time to reimagine privacy.
What Italian philosopher Umberto Eco wrote about the Catch-22 of privacy seems to have only widened over the years.
“In the so-called liquid society, where people suffer from lack of identity and values, and have no points of reference, the only means for obtaining social recognition is through being seen at all costs”.
Whether or not a widely acceptable technology solution is devised to address not just school shootings in America but lone-wolf massacres anywhere, remains to be seen. For now, coming to the relationship between lax gun controls in America and the delinquent tendency to be trigger happy, I am reminded of the title of a humorous 1934 short story by William Saroyan ‘Aspirin is the Member of the NRA’.
If shootouts and other violent flare-ups are a socio-political headache, then the need for metaphorical palliatives at disposal only increases, and the rigmarole continues until the next tragedy.
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