The baby in the Thanatorium bathwater

Throughout the reviews of Soylent Green, I have been cautious to stick to the movie, to the interface and service design. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to tease apart one of the complex, real-world ethical questions head-on.

The Thanatorium is the singular speculative technology in Soylent Green. The film contrasts the services’ caring facade with its deceptive, exploitative, cannibalist true nature. This Big Twist was played for shock: the film ends right after Thorn, shot and bleeding out, shouts his famous line “Soylent Green is people! We’ve got to stop them somehow!”, so if there is any effect from his murderous investigative journalism, i.e. any change, it is unaddressed. The film only cares about *gasp* its tabloid zinger. (Yes I’m aware of a cut scene in which Soylent and the government issue retractions. That scene was, as mentioned, cut.)

Note that the Thanatorium visuals are also used extradiegetically to get the audience to re-appreciate their own lives and ecology. (I am still searching for a name for this literary device.) We are given 73 minutes of bleak, dirty, sweaty oppression, and breathe a sigh of relief when we are shown images of sunlit tulips and pristine nature, inspiring us after the movie is over to to go outside, hug a fruit tree and a bee, and think, “My gods. We just can’t let Soylent Green happen.” So it wasn’t just shock, but I digress.

As we rightly reject the Thanatorium’s deception, oligarchical exploitation of the working classes, and of course, cannibalism; let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is something in there that is worth considering.

Since I’m not a bioethicist, I’m going to lean on Matthew Burnstein’s essay “The Thanatoria of Soylent Green: On Reconciling the Good Life with the Good Death” in Bioethics at the Movies, ed. Sandra Shapshay (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009): 275-94. In it Burnstein points out that “the good life”—on which much of Western philosophy focuses—depends on what he calls the mastery model. That is, a moral actor must have agency, and use that agency well, before we can call theirs a good life. Burnstein points out that this model operates from our adolescence throughout our lives (up to a point, read on) and even after our life, in that our possessions and remains are handled in the manner we specify. We can specify a good after-death.

But there is a curious carve-out for death itself. It is good to build mastery over your life, we say, so you can lead a good one. It is good to exhibit mastery over one’s things after your life, we say. But the manner of your death? No no no. You must not choose that. Psychologists and physicians are the only ones who can make that call for you, and only in certain circumstances. Burnstein calls this carve-out “moral gerrymandering,” and it’s a pretty illuminating phrase: Why would we not apply the mastery model here?

There are good reasons to take caution with permitting “easy” suicide, putting aside supernatural objections as well as the obvious need to prevent murders that are disguised as suicide.

Suicide is an irreversible decision, and sometimes our perceptions of things in the moment are exaggerated and even wrong. What feels like hopelessness may improve if we just gave it time. It would be tragic if a person gave into the grip of temporary despair with an irreversible decision, and never got a chance to change their story. So, yes, we should put some guidelines around such an act. We should provide universal mental health care and try to ensure that people are in crises have places to turn. But the moral gerrymandering around death means that we most often forbid suicide outright, and when it is permitted, it’s prohibitively constrained.

CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

In my home country of the USA, there are currently 11 states that permit physician-assisted suicide (PAS). (Around the world PAS is legal in a number of countries, but I am less familiar with those laws even in passing.) The rules around PAS are deliberately restrictive. You have to prove you are of sound mind and that your incurable disease will kill you within 6 months. A person with a slow-burn incurable disease—especially one where the mind will go before the body—is mostly doomed to just…suffer through it, at emotional and financial toll to themselves and their loved ones. There are Patient Instructions/Advance Directives that people can use to clearly state directives for medical instructions for different situations, but one cannot issue a directive that breaks the law, like asking for euthanasia, and drawing up legal documents can be financially prohibitive. So for many there are still massive impediments to having death with dignity, or what Burnstein calls “the good death.”

A dear friend of mine is going through this very thing right now with a loved one, and while it’s not my place to tell their story, it is heart-wrenching and inhumane to hear play out.

There are some good real-world models. Dignitas is an association in Switzerland that offers life counseling and death with dignity services according to Swiss law. Travel can be prohibitively costly for anyone who does not already live there, and any person who is present with them at the time of their death may face harsh legal consequences upon returning home. It would be more humane if other jurisdictions would take steps towards enabling their own death with dignity policies, and undoing the moral gerrymandering that says we must only die according to the dictates of chance.

Oh bad news, it looks like Nerve Attenuation Syndrome.
Welp, that will cause suffering and bankrupt your family slowly over a decade, but the dice are what they are.

Even in the misguided Malthusian fiction that is Soylent Green, what is presented as a horror is quite rational. Without the thanatorium, Sol has a Sophie’s Choice between starvation and cannibalism. A gentle, pleasant suicide is a welcome third option. What is wicked in this speculative service is that they use his cadaver without his consent and hide the truth of their product from the population at large, so that oligarchs on “the board” can continue to live out the last days of the earth enjoying showers, exploited sex workers, air conditioning, and food that is not made of humans. In short; It’s the oligarchy, not the suicide services, that is the villain, though the film spends its calories on the shockeroo moment.

Oh nooooo.

When considering this model for the real world, we should take great exception to the no-questions-asked expediency seen in Soylent Green. We would want such a service to be slow, deliberative, and life-affirming, with counseling and assistance programs to help people overcome crises of all sorts and palliative care. (As Dignitas does.) And then, yes, additionally, self-determination suicide services. But not walk-in “suicide booth” stuff.

So as we put the reviews of Soylent Green to rest, let’s not take that shock at face value. The Thanatorium—without the casual expediency, deception, cannibalism, and oligarchy—is a model worth considering.

It’s the (drone) ethics

Today, a post touching on some of the ethical issues at hand with drone technology.

drone-week

Much of the debate today and in science fiction about drone technologies rightly focuses on ethics. To start, it is valuable to remember that drones are merely a technology like any other. While the technology’s roots have been driven by military research and military applications, like, say, the internet, the examples in the prior posts demonstrate that the technology can be so much more. But of course it’s not that simple.

Hang on, it’s going to get nerdy. But that’s why you come to this blog, innit?

Where drones become particularly challenging to assess in an ethical context is in their blurring of the lines of agency and accountability. As such, we must consider the ethics of the relationship between user/creator and the technology/device itself. A gun owner doesn’t worry about the gun…itself…turning on him or her. However, in Oblivion, for instance, Tom Cruise’s character flies and repairs the Predator-esque drones but then has them turn on him when their sensors see him as a threat.

image05

While not obviously not an autonomous strong artificial intelligence, a real-world drone alternates between being operated manually and autonomously. Even a hobbyist with a commercial quadcopter can feel this awkward transition when they switch from flying their drone like an RC plane to preprogramming it to fly a pattern or take photos. This transition in agency has serious implications.

Anonymity

When you see someone standing in park, looking at a handheld control or staring up into the sky at their quadcopter buzzing around, the actions of that device are attributed to them. But seeing a drone flying without a clear operator in sight gives any observer a bit of the creeps. Science fiction’s focus on military drones has meant that the depictions can bypass questions about who owns and operates them—it is always the state or the military. But as consumer drones become increasingly available it will become unclear to whom or what we can attribute the actions of a drone. Just this year there was serious public concern when drones were spotted flying around historical landmarks in Paris because their control was entirely anonymous. Should drones have physical or digital identification to service a “license plate” of sorts that could link any actions of the drone to its owner? Most probably. But the bad guys will just yank them off.

The author (in blue) and Chris Noessel (in black), at InfoCamp.

The author (in blue) and Chris Noessel (in black), at InfoCamp.

Gap between agent and outcome

Many researchers have explored the difference between online behaviour and in-person behavior. (There’s a huge body of research here. Contact me if you want more information.) People have a lot less problem typing a vitriolic tweet when they don’t have to face the actual impact of that tweet on the receiver. Will drones have a similar effect? Unlike a car, where the driver is physically within the device and operating it by hand and foot, a drone might be operated a distance of hundreds of feet (or even thousands of miles, for military drones). Will this physical distance, mediated by a handheld controller, a computer interface, or a smartphone application change how the operator behaves? For instance, research has found that these operators, thousands of miles away from combat and working with a semi autonomous technology, are in fact at risk for PTSD. They still feel connected and in enough control of the drone that its effects have a significant impact on their mental health.

However, as drones become more ubiquitous, their applications become more diverse (and mundane), and their agency increases, will this connection remain as strong? If Amazon has tens of thousands of drones flying from house to house, do the technicians managing their flight paths feel the ethical implications of one crashing through a window the same as if they had accidentally knocked a baseball through? If I own a drone and program it to pick up milk from the store, do I feel fully responsible for its behaviour as part of that flight pattern Or does the physical distance, the intangible interface and the mediating technology (the software and hardware purchased from a drone company) disassociate the agent from the effect of the technology?Just imagine the court cases.

From Breaking Defense: As drone operations increase, the military is researching effective interfaces to support human operators

From Breaking Defense: As drone operations increase, the military is researching effective interfaces to support human operators

What are the ethical consequences of the different levels of agency an operator can provide to the drone? What are the moral consequences of increased anonymity in the use of these drone technologies? The U.S. military designs computer interfaces to help its drone pilots make effective decisions to achieve mission targets. Can science fiction propose designs, interfaces and experiences that help users of drone technologies achieve ethical missions?

Come on, sci-fi. Show the way.

People don’t know what to make of this technology. It’s currently the domain of the military, big technology companies, a few startups, and a hobbyist community generally ignored outside of beautiful, drone-filmed YouTube videos. Science fiction is a valuable (and enjoyable) tool for understanding technology and envisioning implications of new technologies. Science fiction should be pushing the limits of how drone technologies will change our world, not just exaggerating today’s worst applications.

As journalist and robotics researcher P.W. Singer puts it in his TED talk, “As exciting as a drone for search-and-rescue is, or environmental monitoring or filming your kids playing soccer, that’s still doing surveillance. It’s what comes next, using it in ways that no one’s yet imagined, that’s where the boom will be.

Future uses of drones

Chris: Oh my drone it’s DRONE WEEK! Wait…what’s drone week?

Recently I was invited to the InfoCamp unConference at Berkeley where among the awesome and inspiring presentations, I sat in on Peter Swigert’s workshop on drones. Since the blog was deep in Oblivion, Pete and I agreed to coauthor a series of posts on this phenomenon, and also to set the record a little more straight for sci-fi fans and authors on the real-world state of drones.

Today, a post on some cool and totally not evil speculative uses of drones.

drone-week

While drones are being used for positive purposes already, there will undoubtedly be myriad new applications as the technology develops and more people engage with its possibilities and implications. A few options include:

Voting drones

While purely online voting seems a long way off in the United States, drones could provide a physical link to voters but remove the logistical challenges of getting time off to travel to a polling station (a tactic that suppresses voting turnout and wastes time and resources.) Drones could go from house to house, authenticate by taking a photo of an individual’s face, their ID, and even their thumbprint, and a citizen could place their vote directly into the drone.

…much to the suppressors’ night terrors.

…much to the suppressors’ night terrors.

Weather management drones

With climate change likely to cause increasing challenges in weather, drones could be used as safe, effective tools for weather management. For instance, drones could seed clouds to promote rain. Drones equipped with weather sensors searching for the exact right place to release their payload could be more accurate and effective than current rocket based solutions. A cloud of drones with small parabolic lenses could cool an area by reflecting light away or warm one by concentrating it.

Biological replacement drones

Could drones replace certain species in the ecosystem? The collapse of bee communities in many parts of the world has been a major threat for agriculture and, if it needs to be said, most of human life on the planet. Should the worst happen to our bee friends in the future, could micro-drones serve the some pollination function as bees? In places where keystone species have gone extinct or can’t be maintained, could a drone be developed to automatically serve the same function? For instance, elephants knock down trees and create clearings in certain patterns, facilitating the transition from jungle to grassland. A drone could fly continuously, looking for patterns in the landscape or specific trees that an elephant would normally knock down, and either mark the trees for human removal or be constructed to damage the tree itself. Could these patterns and behaviors be used in terraforming new planets as well?

Little Johnny, it’s time you knew about the birds and the drones.

Little Johnny, it’s time you knew about the birds and the drones.

Avalanche prevention drones

Drones could scout avalanche prone areas and use computer vision and snow sampling to identify possible avalanches, and bring their own explosive payload to detonate preventative avalanches. (A practice done—dangerously—by humans today.) Backcountry skiers could rent time on a resort or park management’s drone to get a first person view of the terrain in real time before hitting the slopes.

Amber alert drones

Drones could be trained in facial recognition or even smell tracking (wouldn’t a bloodhound be more effective if it could fly and smell from the air?) to search for missing children. They could also serve as a notification system as they search for the child, broadcasting real time information to both investigators and citizens in the area.

Musical performance drones

Drones could provide on demand musical performances. No bandshell in a park? Just fly in some drones with speakers; the drones could align themselves appropriately to get the best acoustics for the setting.

“Well, mayhaps something a little less…dubsteppy?”

“Well, mayhaps something a little less…dubsteppy?”

While some ideas may seem absurd (and Chris’ comps up there turn that up to 11), science fiction can provide an interesting testing ground for what these systems might look like if implemented. What are the implications of these ideas? What impact would they have on society? On our last Drone Week post tomorrow we’ll discuss some of the ethical considerations underneath all of this.

Actual drones for not-evil

Chris: Day 2 of mighty mighty DRONE WEEK! Wait…what’s drone week?

Recently I was invited to the InfoCamp unConference at Berkeley where among the awesome and inspiring presentations, I sat in on Peter Swigert’s workshop on drones. Since the blog was deep in Oblivion, Pete and I agreed to coauthor a series of posts on this phenomenon, and also to set the record a little more straight for sci-fi fans and authors on the real-world state of drones.

Today Drone Week continues with the not-so-scary world of actual drones.

drone-week

Delivery drones

While capitalism is a neutral force at best, the speculative drones that Amazon and Google are working on stand to make delivery faster and more direct. While these projects are undoubtedly driven by possible profits, Google suggests that rapid delivery by drone will also have significant social benefits. Astro Teller, director at Google X, suggests that on-demand drop off and pick up we of goods will let us need to own less. “It would help move us from an ownership society to an access society. We would have more of a community feel to the things in our lives. And what if we could do that and lower the noise pollution and lower the carbon footprint, while we improve the safety of having these things come to you?”

Parcel delivery by drone is reminiscent of early proposals for mail delivery by parachute, seen here in a 1921 edition of Popular Mechanic.

Parcel delivery by drone is reminiscent of early proposals for mail delivery by parachute, seen here in a 1921 edition of Popular Mechanic.

Agricultural drones

Drones are already being used to help farmers monitor their crops. Companies like PrecisionHawk or senseFly offer aerial imagery capture and analysis of crop growth and health. Drones can cover much larger areas than on the ground monitoring and require minimal upfront costs or investments. With rising population to feed and climate change and soil degradation to combat, drones can be a valuable tool in increasing agricultural yields.

An example of image processing from aerial imagery taken by drone from HoneyComb, one of many companies offering drone services for agriculture

An example of image processing from aerial imagery taken by drone from HoneyComb, one of many companies offering drone services for agriculture

Medical drones

An emergency drone that carries a defibrillator has been developed and is currently in testing. The drone could be dispatched by emergency services and arrive to the site of a cardiac arrest faster than any ambulance, and “includes a webcam and loudspeaker and allows remote doctors to walk people on the scene through the process of attaching the electrodes and preparing the defibrillator.

Similarly, Doctors Without Borders is experimenting with drones to rapidly transport patient samples to fight tuberculosis epidemics in parts of Papua New Guinea where road transport is too slow.

Image from FastCo.Exist.

Image from FastCo.Exist.

Archeological drones

Drones are also being used for a variety of archaeological projects. They are a cheap method of capturing images to build 3D models of ruins. “In remote northwestern New Mexico, archaeologists are using drones outfitted with thermal-imaging cameras to track the walls and passages of a 1,000-year-old Chaco Canyon settlement, now buried beneath the dirt. In the Middle East, researchers have employed them to guard against looting.” And in the Yucatan peninsula, drones provided a cost effective solution to flying over dense, remote jungles, and identified previously undiscovered Mayan ruins.

Peruvian archaeologists command a drone to search for architectural ruins. (New York Times)

Peruvian archaeologists command a drone to search for architectural ruins. (New York Times)

Of course these are all cool and useful models of non-military uses of drones. But it can get cooler. In the next post, we’ll look at some speculative future uses of drones. Hollywood, get out your pens, or whatever it is you write with these days.

Military Drones

Chris: Oh my drone it’s DRONE WEEK! Wait…what’s drone week?

Recently I was invited to the InfoCamp unConference at Berkeley where among the awesome and inspiring presentations, I sat in on Peter Swigert’s workshop on drones. Since the blog was deep in Oblivion, Pete and I agreed to coauthor a series of posts on this phenomenon, and also to set the record a little more straight for sci-fi fans and authors on the real-world state of drones.

Today, a first post on the scary, scary world of sci-fi drones.

drone-week

Unmanned (either manual or automated) aerial vehicles, or drones, have become increasingly common in science fiction, likely a reflection of their increasing role in today’s society. While the future of drone technologies and their role in society are yet to be determined, science fiction has been conservative in its speculation. Most depictions of drones tend to suppose an expansion of the current military usage of drone technologies.

Sci-fi: Drones are scary, m’kay

The 2014 remake of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop has drones that are clearly extensions of modern military drones: wicked Stealth-shaped things with perfect maneuverability for gunning down citizens.

Being welcomed as liberators.

Being welcomed as liberators.

Oblivion takes a similar approach, as drones are fully autonomous, big, scary technospheres used primarily for surveillance, monitoring, and firepower.

Jack facing a drone in bondage.

Jack facing a drone in bondage.

In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the drones are gargantuan floating things, each capable of monitoring thousands of square miles at a time, but the concept is the same: drones are a military technology used for surveillance and violence.

The Falcon, for scale.

The Falcon, for scale.

More recently, Chappie features a very scary military drone who ends up being driven by a psychotic operator against the eponymous, peaceful robot. [Nobody has responded to emails for a screener, so no lovely screen caps for us. -Ed.]

That all you got?

These representations of drones (and many others in the genre) are failures of the creativity of science fiction. While they embody well-founded concerns about drones, they’re monotone, and don’t match the creativity of drone makers right here in the real world.

Hey, I get it. It’s hard to know what drones will mean to future people. Drones combine a whole set of complex technologies that people didn’t know what to do with when they first came out as individual technologies: planes, cameras, GPS, and computers. Sometimes even the military applications aren’t clear. For instance, when the Wright Brothers discussed patenting their approach to the plane in Great Britain and helping the government develop military uses, they were rebuffed, as “Their Lordships are of the opinion that they [airplanes] would not be of any practical use to the Naval Service.”

Additionally, there is an understandable psychological horror at the flying thing that either houses an inhuman machine intelligence or arguably worse, that houses some distant human’s eyes and ears but without their stake in the locale or consequences. Blasted-earth, collateral damage, and horrible mistakes don’t seem to mean as much when the perpetrator can just turn off the monitor and not think about it. So…yes. That military part is pretty scary.

But science fiction films seem particularly confused about how to represent this technology and limited by this military thinking. This was true even before modern military drones were in use; as XKCD notes, The Terminator would have been a much shorter film if it had been developed after Predator drones were around.

From XKCD.com: Our modern military can more effectively abstract the purposes of a drone soldier and design it like a plane, whereas old sci-fi depictions like The Terminator envisioned robotic humans.

From XKCD.com: Our modern military can more effectively abstract the purposes of a drone soldier and design it like a plane, whereas old sci-fi depictions like The Terminator envisioned robotic humans.

But even as science fiction has tackled modern drones, it still builds on military models rather than considering civilian contexts. For instance, the “nanobots” of the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still or 2009’s G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra suggest what might happen as drone technologies become miniaturized. OK, yes, the military is currently working on this. After all, why send a multimillion dollar Predator that can be shot down when thousands of small drones could more effectively infiltrate enemy territory and conduct operations? That said, this technology doesn’t have to be used in a military context. A micro-sized drone that could identify and poison an enemy’s water supply might be adapted to unclog an artery or kill a cancer cell just as easily.

From Gizmag: British soldiers have tested these Black Hornet Nano UAVs [Image: © Crown copyright]

From Gizmag: British soldiers have tested these Black Hornet Nano UAVs [Image: © Crown copyright]

But even as sci-fi catches up to modern military designs, that’s still only one set of effects for which drones have and might be put to use. In the next post we’ll take a pass at painting the rest of the non-military picture.