[bglazer]

Do you have any ethical concerns about the use of your technology for surveillance of civilian populations?

That’s the obvious use case for this technology, right? Cheaper and more easily retargetable than satellites. Longer duration, quieter, and more resilient than manned aircraft, but not fast or maneuverable enough to survive in contested airspace.

So that leaves large area, long term surveillance in uncontested conditions as the prime use case.

Sounds an awful lot like cops or an occupying force putting a fleet of these up to indefinitely track all movement or signals over entire neighborhoods or cities. Do you plan to market and sell your technology for this use?

[nickpp]

Shouldn’t ethical concerns stop the usage of a technology, not its creation? Otherwise we risk never gaining the upside of said technology.

[dclowd9901]

We can’t even stop usage of it. It’s futile. Best case is to also invent ways of disabling surveillance.

[jthomaslm]

This is a concern for us. As with many disruptive technical advancements (e.g. in Nuclear or AI), there are many ways our technology can be used - both good and bad. It's important to us that what we do is ethical - that means supporting and pursuing use cases with huge positive societal value like rural connectivity or wildfire monitoring. With that said, there are definitely ethically-questionable use cases for this technology and I don’t underestimate how difficult it will be to navigate. We certainly have no intention of monitoring civilian populations and haven’t spoken to any police forces about what we’re doing.

[bglazer]

I'm glad to hear that, I hope you stick to those principles if the police or military come calling. They have deep pockets and your investors will want their 100x.

[nosequel]

Making their plane military-approved would be extremely costly and frankly it probably wouldn't work. There have been a lot of people commenting about the military clearly wanting this and taking over the project, but what makes a plane like this possible is not having the same requirements as military aircraft.

My biggest concern would be weight & power. This plane only works if it stays light and doesn't use a lot of power. If the military wanted this for live video or EO/IR, how would that communicate with ground sensors? KU satcom, UHF? Will it have IFF onboard, will it meet all the no-single-point-of-failure requirements? Everything the military requires will start using up a ton of power and adding a ton of weight. I get people always think these things will be used for evil, but it isn't exactly easy to take something civilian and suddenly ship it off to some USAF squadron.

[burkaman]

I agree that's the most obvious use case, so I think the fact that the founders consciously avoided mentioning it means they must have ethical concerns, or at least understand others' concerns. I think this is a reasonable question to ask, and I'd be interested to hear whether they plan to sell it to surveillors and just feel guilty about admitting that, or if there's some reason they think this won't work for that application.

[Tepix]

Excellent question, this sounds like an enabling technology for mass surveillance on a much larger scale. Creepy.

[dskloet]

Radiolab did an episode about this in 2015: https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky

They actually did do a surveillance experiment in Dayton Ohio in 2014: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-surve...