Face the Pitfall in Trial and Error Learning of Drones: Potentially Unacceptable Risks

Drone is desirable in many ways. They are usually deployed for military and special operation applications, but also used in a number of civil applications, nonmilitary security work, scientific research, search and rescue, and a lot more. They are often preferred for missions that are too 'dull, dirty or dangerous' for manned aircraft. As you can see the newly introduced drone delivery of packages, drone is being widely used and is proved to be faster and easier to operate than manned vehicles. Optimistically, drones evidently better our lives, and securer our pilots.

And military drones will also be appreciated without a doubt if the security of innocent people can be assured. With its numerous advantages in targeted strike, the assassin machines known as weaponized drones grew into Obama's Favorite war machine. By 2014, Obama has authorized almost seven times as many as Bush did: about 320 strikes to Bush's 52, killing more than three thousand people. Around 2% of those killed were high-level terrorist targets - hardly a sufficient number of military targets to justify the attacks under international and domestic law conceptions of military proportionality in civilian-soldier death ratios.

Is this an unintended consequence? Definitely no. Letting its operator comfortably sitting thousands of miles away from the battle field, looking at a screen displaying a bird's-eye view of the foreign continent, military drone is designed to conduct surveillance with powerful cameras and sensors, to see human as bug. Laser-guided Hellfire missiles, the weapon carried on the most notorious weaponized drone "Predator", is also incapable to perform neither "assassin" nor "targeted strike". It is almost impossible to kill one or two suspect using a missile without harming people or destroying properties nearby.

"A misguided innovation may produce unbearably costly outcomes ... if (this pitfall) can be avoided, then trial-and-error learning will be more probable, faster, and less damaging." (The Future of Technological Civilization, Edward Woodhouse) In trying to accelerate the trial and error learning of drone, how can technoscientists and others participating in the development of military drone cope with this potentially unbearable risk, the risk of killing innocent people?

The first way would be upgrading the weapon system. Since the official purpose of drone strike is " to mitigate threats to U.S. persons' lives ... The president ... don't like the fact that people have to die. And so he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat ... " (John O. Brennan, Obama's counter-terrorism adviser) It is Taliban terrorists that stand against the US government and people's security. It has nothing to do with the country of Pakistan nor its citizens. Dying under the throne and dying under terrorism actually make no difference to armless civilians. Based on the advanced technology on aerial monitoring, why not install a weapon similar to sniper rifle on drones, instead of missile of lethal, massive destruction? This would probably lower the rate of mission succeed, but as the same time effectively lower the rate of killing innocent people.

Based on the first strategy, the second way would be testing the weapon the drone is using. Let drone operators realize the outcome of pressing the fire button and understand how powerful the missile is. Raise their awareness by requiring some kind of test on the basic knowledge about drone and its social, political and physical effect. I believe when understanding the unbelievable power of drone, pilots will be more circumspect when they determining the live-or-die of people on the screen.

Last but not least,  we need stricter rule of firing. Well, the well-functioned operating interface and the threat-free operating environment may somehow effect the operator's chariness to fire, but ultimately they are not god. They are soldier, who have to follow rules and commands. Firing costs less not only because the operating environment but also the rule of firing is not clear and strict enough. If drone pilots are commanded to fire only when civilians are safe, less undesirable death will occur.

When the potentially unacceptable risk of killing the innocent is lowered, trial and error of drone will be easier to proceed.