The Ethics of Drone Design

This book presents a holistic approach to the design and use of drones. It argues that this powerful technology requires high levels of ethical analysis and responsibility—our moral progress must keep pace with our technological progress.

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This book presents a holistic approach to the design and use of drones. It argues that this powerful technology requires high levels of ethical analysis and responsibility – our moral progress must keep pace with our technological progress.

Drone technologies support and diminish the flourishing of certain human values, impact power relations between individuals and groups, and add an additional element to the complex network of humans and objects in modern society. The book begins by introducing four prototype drones designed and built by the author: the healthcare drone, the search and rescue drone, the educational drone, and the spiritual drone. These drones have been developed using a value-sensitive design approach – with values such as human welfare, privacy, trust, environmental sustainability, and justice at the forefront. Ethical analyses and social impacts are taken as design inputs, leading to the creation of better, more responsible drone designs. The book then showcases additional methods used to develop the prototype drones from the fields of engineering, ethics, and art, including ethical frameworks, ethics standards, capability caution, and speculative design. The holistic approach reveals a more subtle and nuanced view of drones than the currently polarized characterization of "the good drone" or "the killer drone". The book concludes with recommendations for drone engineers, companies, lawmakers, and citizens on how to support ethics in drone design.

The Ethics of Drone Design is an essential resource for scholars, advanced students, engineers, and designers interested in the ethics of technology.