This episode premiered on Dec 13, 2016.  The episode focuses on how drones are being used currently, and what research is going into using drones in the future.  You can find it on Viceland. You will need to be subscribed to one of their cable links in order to view on line, or you can try to find a replay on Viceland TV.   Here is a quick summary of the episode:

Gábor Vásáerhelyi, Researcher and programmer at Eotvos University – Working on Drone Swarms, a flock autonomous drones moving and making decisions as a group.    These drones work together as a team to follow a set of instructions.  This could have huge military implications.

John Potter,  NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation – Working on IoT for underwater ‘things’.  Mapping oceans with drones.  Devices underwater need to have intelligence.  His ‘drones’ work as a team. He wants to make sure that all of the stake holders understand the implications of his research.

Joăo Alves, NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation   – Working on Anti-submarine warfare in his ‘ocean lab’.  Working on the autonomy of the devices. He is not interested in weaponizing the drones.

Naureen Shah, Director of Security with Human Rights for Amnesty International – Robots can make judgments during war. She is worried about autonomous technology and believes that autonomous weapon systems should be banned.

Ron Arkin, Professor at Gerogia Institute of Technology – Designing ethics into robots.   The school is trying to prove that a robot can determine the difference between a threat actor and an innocent, making decisions on both when and when not to fire. He believes that we typically choose to trust human beings over technology, and that is not always the best solution.

Todd Humphreys, Director of Radionavigation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin – Working with suicide drones.  16 of his small drones could take on a single large drone with no problem.  He trains the drones to play capture the flag.  Drones can be hacked.  Security is an arms race:  there will always be vulnerabilities. He thinks that a drone swarm would need to have an iron clad kill switch.

Robert Work, US Deputy Secretary of Defense –  The US government is focusing interest in autonomous weapon systems.  He thinks taking the human out of the equation is dangerous.  Would a totally autonomous swarm of drones do better or worse against a combined autonomous swarm of drones with human input?