The camera shook with the sound of an explosion and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro looked up, confused. Guards swiftly surrounded him with protective shields; soldiers in the military parade he was addressing scattered for cover. So did everyone else around him, reacting to the sound of a nearby explosion from the sky. Maduro and the Venezuelan government say—and
video evidence seems to confirm—that someone tried to attack him with an explosives-laden consumer drone, likely made by Chinese drone manufacturer DJI. Open-source reporting organization Bellingcat and other investigative outlets agree that the attack
involved drones, despite early reports claiming otherwise.
There have been fears for years that commercial drones would be turned into deadly weapons. But was this their coming-out party, the incident where death-by-drone moves from the military into the hands of terrorists and assassins? I don’t think so. Neither does European Council on Foreign Relations policy fellow Ulrike Franke, who told me: “To put it bluntly, I don’t think that this was the event that changes the view of smaller commercial drones from good to bad.”
Drones can be indisputably dangerous. They can be used to violate individual and group privacy, they can be used to drop dangerous materials, they can
crash into manned aircraft, and they can even harm people physically by crashing into them. A drone is likely to be much more useful to terrorist organizations as a means of quietly gathering information that permits an attack by more conventional means than it is as a flying explosive. Still, the risk of anyone being harmed by a drone is vanishingly small. While no data is available, Bellingcat researcher Nick Waters roughly
estimates that the number of casualties from commercial drones is somewhere in the high hundreds, the vast majority if not all of which having occurred in active war zones.
I cannot find any instances of a commercial drone killing someone by intentional or unintentional means in North America or Europe.
While it is likely that
this will change, so far drones remain a worrisome but still largely theoretical threat compared to, for example, the approximately 10,000 gun homicides in the United States each year. If a terrorist organization’s sole goal is to kill a particular target, it is highly unlikely that they would choose a drone to do the job. Firearms, car bombs, and other more conventional methods of assassination have proven much more successful.
And yet, while commercial drones remain an ineffective means of killing people, the Maduro incident shows they are marvelously effective as weapons of terrifying propaganda.
Propaganda manipulates one’s emotions; it exists outside empirical logic and calm, rational analysis. People’s well-documented distrust of small drones is not rooted in bloodless assessment of risk. There is something both cool and creepy about drones, something ineffably
weird about them.
Public opinion
polling bears this
distrust out. Even though opinion has
somewhat softened toward drones in the United States, more than
two-thirds of respondents described themselves in a survey last year as either “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about the presence of drones in airspace. A 2017 survey on
technological fears found that, of the 18 new technologies listed,
Americans are most concerned about a “swarm of autonomous drones.” Remote-controlled aircraft have existed since the mid-20th century, but pretty much no one was frightened of them then. Why are people today so much more terrified of drones, beyond their actual, mediocre, offensive abilities?
For starters, drones are still associated in confusing ways with large military drones, and the line between “toy” and “military device”—as illustrated by terrorist attacks carried out with explosives-laden consumer drones—getting ever grayer. People are unsure how to categorize small, consumer-designed drones, and that makes them nervous. Small, multirotor drones are denizens of the “
uncanny valley,” a concept proposed by Japanese professor Masahiro Mori in the 1970s. Their international computers allow them to hover in place with remarkable stability, a creepily organic motion rather like that of a curious garden hummingbird. While we may know intellectually that drones aren’t alive, they do things that seem to suggest otherwise.
This sense that drones are more clever or organic than they are is encouraged by how we technically describe them. While drone experts and the media regularly talk about how drones are “semi-autonomous,” clear explanations of what that means remain rare. Drone experts know that the
term means a computer-controlled, sensor-equipped device capable of performing relatively simple tasks, such as following a preprogrammed route. That isn’t necessarily apparent to the layperson, who might see the word “autonomous” and assume the drone can largely function on its own.
Many people are relatively familiar with the super-intelligent drones of TV and movies. Think of
Ready Player One,
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., or even
Minority Report, which all feature ultra-intelligent, largely independently operating drones with superb facial recognition capacities. The drones of 2018 are stupider than that by a few orders of magnitude, but how would the average person be expected to know that?
Popular confusion over how smart drones are is coupled with an observer’s inability to determine what a drone is up to. And that, quite reasonably, scares some people, as a
Danish study on public reactions to drones demonstrates. There is no established method of
identifying a drone’s owner or intention, and there is no well-known mechanism for marking different organizations’ drones. The “uncanny valley” effect, cultural fear of artificial intelligence, and drones’ inherent inscrutability all play off one another; perhaps some people subconsciously assume that a creepily natural or intelligent-seeming drone has intentions or desires of its own, separate from whoever is presumably piloting it.
By Georgina Lee-16 Aug 2018
AUGUST 19, 2018
Pistol prices in Maher’s shop range from $1,000 to $4,000, while Kalashnikov assault rifles can be had from as little as $400 up to $2,000, depending on the brand and manufacturing origin, he said.
Venezuelan security forces check a nearby building after a drone attack on President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas on Aug. 4. (Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images)
Authorities in the southern state, which is home to 33 million people, have placed local agencies on the highest alert level in what has turned out to be Kerala's worst monsoon in almost a century. 
19 August 2018
Camelia Nathaniel-Saturday, August 18, 2018
How can one sleep hearing holy-Inquisition-style Sri Lankan discourses? – Reply to Grusha Andrews’ wet dream on glyphosate
