ICT4Peace welcomes the new OCHA Report “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Applied to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and its Impact on Humanitarian Action” by Camille Oren and Andrej Verity.
“Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as remotely piloted aircraft or “drones” are small aircraft that fly by remote control or autonomously. This report focuses on the usage of unarmed civilian drones and UAVs. In 2014, OCHA highlighted in its Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Humanitarian Response policy paper the different uses of drones in humanitarian action demonstrating the increasing use of this technology. This report will shed some light on how AI powered drones are improving and modifying these uses.”
Regina Surber and Sanjana Hattotuwa of ICT4Peace are quoted in and contributed to this important report. The summary of the Interview by Camille Oren with Regina Surber can be found here.
The point Surber makes about the use of UAV generated, AI augmented content in operational theatres outside of humanitarian domains is very important – nothing new, for this is what the Foundation’s been saying since the time we have published on this topic. However, the world is now far more porous. The democratisation of UAV / drone operations has eclipsed in a way the focus on military level drone operations. The separation of these domains is very important. The greater / greatest risk to privacy and downstream (ab)use of UAV content now comes from the collation, collection and subsequent (AI based) analysis of data at a scale not possible a few years ago. We see this increasingly around the government led data collection and analysis of the Black Lives Matter marches. Socio-technological domains have widened and deepened to, through the democratisation of technology, make user generated content more widely used and thus, inadvertently it in the dragnets of intelligence and repressive State authorities. This includes content from consumer level UAVs which are now, often, in 4K resolution for video and a very high pixel density for photos.
Surber says the content must “never” be used in this way. The Foundation encourages further conversation around how to best ensure this – sunset technologies built into data streams or hardware that delete content after some time, digital signatures that have embedded licenses, regulation around the use of content, end user awareness, SD card security, drone hardware encryption, incorporation of ethics into UAV pilot training manuals and operational guidance, UN guidance and best practices including from OCHA in this regard – there’s a lot more than can be studied and done around this one, critical, issue.
In 2015 ICT4Peace published the following paper: Peacekeepers in the Sky: The Use of Unmanned Unarmed Aerial Vehicles for Peacekeeping by Helena Puig Larrauri and Patrick Meier.
An overview of the work by ICT4Peace in the field UAVs can be found here.
Photo courtesy UNICEF.