Perhaps the most interesting unmanned flight story of the week involved a manned flight: 61-year-old Tampa Bay mailman Douglas Hughes flew a gyrocopter (!)—strapped with 535 letters addressed to US Congressmen—from Gettysburg, PA, onto the lawn of the Capitol Building. It was an act of civil disobedience intended to arrest the news cycle and draw public attention to the issue of campaign finance reform. Hughes apprised officials well in advance of his mission.
Regardless of your feelings about the issue or the method, Hughes’s act raises again the question of no-fly zones and geofencing in Washington, DC—a technological solution that might have unintended consequences of limiting freedoms. Were we to enforce that no-fly zone with mandatory technology—if Hughes’s gyrocopter had been outfitted, for instance, with the same geofencing that DJI applied to all of its quadcopters following the White House drone crash—he wouldn’t have had the chance to execute his nonviolent act of civil disobedience.
As of today, 3DR doesn’t build hard geofence limits into its drones. What do you think about this? In this era of breakneck niche innovation, are companies obligated to use the technology at their disposal to engineer public safety to the best of their abilities (and decisions or agendas), or should we leave such choices up to individual citizens, who then face the consequences of their actions? The fact that no manned helicopter or government authorities forced Hughes to abort the mission (of which they were well aware) seems to be tacit support of his right to exercise his unorthodox nonviolent protest. Should a technology company preemptively shut down what even the authorities themselves would not? The act does raise some serious public safety alarms for DC, but as people from Ghandi to Eugene Debs to MLK, Henry David Thoreau and the suffragettes have shown, civil disobedience can be a powerful, peaceful and effective democratic tool. Should we be concerned that technology might take that tool away?
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Source: Roger | 3D Robotics