From killing to healing: A tool called "Drone"
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:21
My name is Samira Hayat. You got the introduction. A few years back, after I started working as a researcher in University of Frankfurt, this is a very small university in Austria, I was visiting my parents in Pakistan. My father is a doctor, and he always
00:42
believes that all his seven kids become completely unhealthy when they are not staying with him at home. So he scheduled a set of doctor's appointments for me. At the dentist, he, as a ritual, started talking me up, you know, trying to prove how cool his daughter was.
01:03
I was a bit embarrassed, of course. I was sitting there being talked about in third person. I could play no part in that conversation because my mouth was wide open with all kinds of instruments being poked inside. Then my father said, you know, she works with drones.
01:23
The dentist gave a surprise smile and was like, I hope she works for humanity and not with killer drones. And you know, then the worst part came. You know, what my father said, he was like, yeah, well. You know, as if to say, when have drones ever
01:40
helped humanity? In that moment, I didn't just feel embarrassed. To tell you the truth, I felt quite guilty. I felt guilty because I really wanted to defend my work, but in the meantime, could also see that the people around me had genuine and justified hatred associated with the word drones.
02:05
I felt guilty because I could remember kids like Nabila and Zubair. They got injured in a drone strike on October 2012. Their grandmother was killed in that drone strike while working in the garden.
02:21
You know, such a small thing. She was just working in the garden. For these kids, it started as a usual sunny, bright day, but changed life and all its basic concepts for them. We all love sunny days. Many of my friends here say that they feel depressed
02:42
when the skies are gray. They say that the sun is their source of energy. 13-year-old Zubair said, and I quote, I no longer love the blue skies. In fact, I prefer gray skies. Drones do not fly when the skies are gray.
03:01
When the skies brighten, drones return, and we live in fear. I remember boys like Fahim Qureshi. He was a survivor of one of the first drone strikes on January 23, 2009, in northern Waziristan in Pakistan.
03:20
He described that day as one of those mundane days. You know, he was a bit annoyed that day, he says, because he had to stay at home to do chores, and actually he wanted to go out with his friends in the playground and play. Reporter Daniel Klaidman states in his book, Kill or Capture, that the drone strike of January 2009
03:41
had gone terribly wrong, because there were no targeted militants present at the premises. Instead, nine civilians died in that drone strike, according to a government of Pakistan league document. Nine is a one-digit number, maybe a very small number, yeah, but not when it comes to deaths,
04:02
especially deaths as collateral damage. Nine people, many from the family of Fahim Qureshi, were murdered that day. Boys as young as 21 years old, having hopes and dreams for their life, left this world and left a big hole full of pain in the hearts of the survivors.
04:22
Fahim himself was a bright student of 14 years at that time, very interested in chemistry. Though he himself was lucky enough to survive that strike, the life that he's living now is not one he would ever have chosen. He lost an eye, suffered burns to the left side of his body, and has been living a displaced life
04:44
for the past many years. A career in chemistry is really a lost dream. In this moment, left is the eldest male survivor in the house. His main concern is to earn bread for his family
05:03
in their displaced state until they can return back to Waziristan. He says that the people in Waziristan think that this is exactly what the country's carrying out drone strikes want, to disrupt lives, to uproot people,
05:21
to target them without reason. You know, without reason, it's a very big meaning term because these incidences that they feel are without reason have very far-reaching, painful effects. You remember that attack on German train in Wurzburg,
05:45
I think it was last year. I came across that article that contained the video made by the 17-year-old Afghan attacker before the incident. I come from the north of Pakistan, I really feel the pain because north of Pakistan is affected by Taliban
06:00
and by the drones. I come from the north and I could understand what he said in Pashto and that gives me goosebumps, the hatred that he had in his speech. He said, he was addressing the Western nations and he was saying, you know, you came to our country and killed without reason, now we do the same to you.
06:23
Seems like the technology that has a way of belittling human lives, like the drone technology, it doesn't just lead to innocent lives lost but innocence lost and as a result, many times more innocent lives lost.
06:41
It seems like a sad vicious circle. In my opinion, nothing justifies taking a single innocent person's life, not even fighting big monsters. But this is not all what drones are notorious for. You know, when I started working with drones,
07:02
commercial drones, I'm not working with military drones, when I started working with commercial drones, I would get really excited when I would come across the word a drone in a non-military context in the news and I cannot tell you how many times I have face-palmed myself reading such news.
07:22
The first bit of news that I came across was about a delivery drone and mind you, this is a couple of years before Amazon tested their first delivery drones. The carcass of a drone was discovered outside the premises of a high-security prison in the US,
07:41
trying to deliver drugs inside. Then there was this horrifying story of an 18-month-old boy called Oscar Webb in England. He lost an eye in an accident involving a drone. His neighbor was flying a drone and in the process of landing the drone, the drone lost control.
08:00
The little boy's eye was sliced with the propeller of the drone. Then recently, you might have come across many news that are talking about near misses involving planes and drones. I think in February or March, there was this news that an Airbus plane was about to land at Heathrow Airport
08:22
and the pilots noticed a custom-made drone 20 meters away from the plane. And this is really dangerous because experts claim that collision would definitely have led to the plane crash.
08:41
With such news, people are skeptical of a world with commercial drones as well, you know? They imagine dark skies with these buzzing and hovering and flying, insect-like machines all around with them. They are afraid that they are going to be hit in the head with one such object falling out of thin air.
09:02
They are scared that the delivery drones are going to steal their jobs and invade their privacy. People feel that the negative ethical implications of this technology far outweigh any positive impact
09:20
that this technology might have. And so, when I realized that my father was not convinced about the positive impact of this technology, I really felt guilty. So I asked myself, why am I trying to justify the development of a technology that in this moment
09:42
seems to already have gone rogue? Why am I comfortable developing this technology myself? And then, if I'm comfortable, why am I feeling guilty? You know, I grew up watching reruns of Star Trek, Time Treks, and, you know, Knight Rider,
10:02
and I was always so amazed by the protagonists' machines. They were so useful, so efficient, so understanding and human-friendly, you know? I was especially very fascinated with this hovering orb, you know, those were always with our protagonists,
10:20
going around, guiding them, rescuing them from the mouth of certain death. I felt like I really needed one of those hovering companions because I think six siblings were not enough, or maybe because of my six siblings. So when I got the job, the first image
10:43
of the commercial drone, or first imagination that came to my mind, was the possibility of having these drones as our hovering orb companions in some far future. And I say that at the cost of sounding like a naive child but I think humans, when in pursuit of their passion,
11:04
have the possibility or capability of becoming curious and naive children, because I think humans are curious beings, you know, we are fascinated by our imagination. We are also builders. We are, we have the desire
11:21
to turn our imagination into reality. We would keep on developing tools to make the fiction of today a reality of tomorrow. Some of us would keep on experimenting with drones, whether others of us like it or not.
11:40
And you know, I feel like we should keep experimenting with drones because if we stop at this point, we would have familiarized ourselves with the negative aspects of the drones that we know and I have stated. But there are so many positive possibilities also associated with this technology.
12:01
That maybe we don't even know about in this moment. So I feel like we should continue. I cannot promise you that I foresee a future where all our negative concerns about this technology would be allied.
12:21
But if for every fear inducing usage of this technology, we can introduce some positive human-friendly application. I think the development so far of this technology, I think for me it would be justified.
12:41
Because I believe that we can shift the image of drones from being these killing machines to those healing machines that I imagine. I feel like most technology can be used for good or bad depending on the intentions of the user.
13:02
For me, technology is like a tool, you know? It does what the user wishes it to do. I usually give the example of a knife because with this example, it's very easy to decouple the tool from the hand using it. A knife can be used to slit throats
13:21
or to save lives in operation theaters. We cannot blame a knife for the intentions of the user. The responsibility solely falls on the shoulders of the user. This is exactly true for drone technology as well. These remotely controlled devices
13:42
are still controlled devices directed by the hands of humans. And this is what we should not forget. If humans can guide these devices to take lives, they can also guide these devices to save lives.
14:01
You know, when we were younger and we would get really bored and there would be nothing to do at home and we would be really fidgety, my mother would say, if you have so much energy, go and wash the dishes or take garbage out or, you know, work in the garden with me. And this is exactly what we can do with the drones technology as well
14:22
because we know the capabilities of these devices and we can use them for good as well. I mean, of course, to my mother, I could say, what are you talking about, woman? But the drones don't say that to me, you know? So we can make them do very cool things. And as an example, I show you what we do
14:42
at the University of Plineford. Please take a look. I think it's not here yet.
15:00
The video? It's here now, yeah. After a strong storm yesterday, currently, three people are still missing their storm. This video, what you saw was us taking our fears
17:51
of the technology and using them to go against the image that we have so far. So let's take, for example, our fear
18:00
of these eyes in the sky, you know? Taking images or something like that. Let's take it as a capability. The research that when we started, we started in 2008 and we started with drones taking aerial images. This kind of aerial images are really important because they can help in scenarios like firefighting.
18:23
This firefighting scenario, in this scenario when you use drones, you can locate the source of the fire and this can not only be time and resource efficient, but it is also really giving another purpose. It helps reduce risk to the life of the firefighter.
18:44
Then we used this technology a step further and we used multiple drones. The multiple drones somehow collaborate with each other and they need to talk to humans as well. This is where my research started. I was focusing on search and rescue application.
19:01
I'm a communication engineer, so I was responsible of making a communication network between the drones and the humans. So like I said, we were focusing on search and rescue. Search and rescue is a very complex scenario. It is time critical because of the risk posed to the lives of the firefighters.
19:21
It is also an application where human intervention is of utmost importance, so the drones can do all. They have to give the information to the ground personnel and the ground personnel would have to get to the accident spot and perform rescue. On the one hand, the drones have to spread out
19:42
and search for the victim in the shortest possible time and on the other hand, they have to somehow collaborate with each other and stay close with each other so that when they locate the victim, they can carry the information to the rescuers as quickly as possible. And this is what our algorithms are doing to search and to provide this information
20:02
about the searched victim as quickly as possible to the ground personnel. Then we are scared about drones that are delivery drones that are going to take our jobs. Like I showed you here, imagining the same search and rescue scenario, you can use those drones to deliver first aid kits.
20:26
And in that case, it is also very important and very interesting application because if you have multiple victims, your victims are kind of popping up demands for the first aid boxes. So you have to keep in mind not only
20:41
that you want to deliver in the fastest possible time but also to deliver to the victims that are in more need first and then to the other victims. Similarly, we have another project that is working with drones being capable of navigating with visual navigation through forest.
21:01
And this project is basically focusing so we can use it in search and rescue as well because search and rescue can be performed in forest scenarios as well. But we are using this to estimate the biomass of the forest. Biomass estimation is of critical importance in precision agriculture.
21:21
And precision agriculture has a lot of hype these days and not without good reason, you know? Because the world population is increasing by many folds in the next coming years and our demands for food would double in the coming years while 80% of the land is cultivated land already.
21:42
So we need precision agriculture techniques to be able to estimate our yield, to locate the diseases and to locate the weed and to find out the plant cover. I think it would not be an exaggeration if I state that the drone technology has actually brought the precision agriculture techniques
22:02
to the farmers, to any farmer. These examples that I gave you right now, these are just a few examples of things, of capabilities of drones, what we were scared of and how we are using them for the good of humanity.
22:21
There's so much more. This is just something that is happening in a very small university, in a very small city, Frankfurt, maybe you didn't even hear about it, in a very small country called Austria. Imagine the scale of the good research that might be happening in the world.
22:41
There are researchers in ETH Zurich who are using drones to make very basic rope bridges for places where the ground conditions are so perilous that humans and other kind of instruments cannot construct there.
23:01
Then there is the example of war-affected zones where even UN would not send its staff to deliver these first aid medical kits. We lost our really big heroes like Peter Kasich
23:20
while doing that. He went to Syria to provide medical relief in a very far-off region and was captured and we lost him. Drones can really help us reduce these silent losses that we suffer each day. I really believe that we can hijack the technology
23:43
and we can use it for human benefit. I really believe that. As a human and as a scientist, Sameera, I'm really looking forward to many more healing applications coming up.
24:01
As a human, I'm still feeling very guilty because I feel like I should raise my voice more against what the bad usages of any technology would be. I feel like all of us as world citizens should ponder and question all what our actions are.
24:27
The positive or negative ethical implications of all our actions, of all the actions of our politicians or our scientists or our artists or our humans.
24:42
But as a scientist, I can tell you that I can work guiltlessly with this technology because for me, the tool called drone is not defined by the intentions of the people, other people using it. It is defined by my own intentions.
25:02
I feel like the drones have and will keep on being healing devices provided that the humans in command become more human friendly. Thank you.
25:28
Does anybody have questions? Raise your hands, please.
25:41
Nobody? Come to me. Yeah, first of all, thanks for your very interesting presentation and especially for the message that it's the humans
26:03
that need to become more human friendly in the first place. You seem to be thinking about that already for quite some time. Do you already have a suggestion? How would you get the people to be more human friendly? I think it's a very important question
26:23
and like you said, I have been thinking about it very, very long time but I mean, I think for me, it all comes from education, from educating people. That's the main problem. I'm really against our education system as well because I think we are being fed, fed, fed
26:41
and we are not told to ponder or think or explore different possibilities from our own perspective. We are given a perspective and this is where I think as a society, we can come together and decide, okay, this has been enough. This education system worked maybe for others.
27:01
It's not working anymore. We have evolved into another being now. So we should start and maybe if we can't make a bigger change, we can start at home. We can start with our kids. We can teach them to ponder, to think about things and not just accept what is given to them. I think this is my suggestion for it.
27:25
Thank you very much.