Civilian Use of Drones (EUC Report)

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, let me congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, and other members of the committee on their excellent report. As the report notes, two types of drone probably get most attention in the media: those that are used to play with and those that are sent to kill. Yet there is a huge variety of other uses to which drones can be put in between these two extremes.

The report mentions continuities with model aeroplanes in the past, but I argue strongly that we have to understand drones in the context of the digital revolution. To me this is crucial to the issue of regulation and their future. That revolution, however, is widely misunderstood because it is often identified with the internet. The digital revolution has to be seen as the interplay between the internet, supercomputers and robotics, with supercomputers having the core role because of their massive algorithmic power. The iPhone in your pocket or handbag is a supercomputer more powerful than the biggest supercomputer of 30 years ago.

Drones are essentially flying robots and their extraordinary range of actual and potential uses comes from this conjunction of factors. In my speech, I shall continue to deploy the word “drone” in spite of what one source describes as “the interminable debate” about the use of the term. Drones are converging with orthodox aviation as well as providing ticklish challenges to airline safety. Most planes, most of the time, are flown by their computers in interaction with the supercomputers on which global air traffic depends. Used appropriately, drones can be deployed to protect orthodox air traffic rather than just pose problems for it, as the Government’s response to the report notes.

As the report makes clear, drones have the potential to be used positively in a vast range of environmental, ecological and scientific applications, in addition to their more commercial ones. They can even be combined with 3D printers. A drone has recently been wholly 3D-printed on a ship and carried out a successful short flight afterwards. My point is that this is an extremely rapidly evolving field, which overlaps in a fundamental way with dramatic advances in other areas of technology. It will be a demanding task indeed to reconcile the extraordinary potential of drones with the many risks that they present, not the least of which is their overlap with terrorism. Two IS militant figures were killed by drones, we were told yesterday, but IS is already using drones for reconnaissance and battlefield co-ordination and is said to be plotting to use drones to execute small bombing attacks on public events in the West. I know that the report concentrates exclusively on the civilian use of drones, as the noble Baroness said, but this must be watched because the division between civilian and more noxious uses of drones is going to be pretty fluid and difficult to draw.

I have three basic questions for the Minister. There is a great deal of agreement between the committee’s report, the Government and the proposed framework for the EU—an unusual event, I must say, in this House to say the least. However, I hope that the Minister will respond to this and that the Government will recognise just how fast the pace of change is likely to be in this area. I shall pick up what to me is the central point: this is part and parcel of the digital revolution, which is not just about drones themselves but about the total system within which they are enveloped. Constant updating and revision of whatever regulations are established will be absolutely essential in my view, and it would be good if the Minister could say something about that. It is not easy to have regulation which is continually evolving.

Secondly, there is not much here about drones and privacy, which is a huge issue already in the US, and rightly so. No existing category of law, either in the United States or the EU, is as yet robust enough to cope with this issue. The EU does have plans to deal with this, but it would be good to hear some comment from the Minister.

Finally, the Government are preparing a public dialogue this year on the use of drone technology. What form will this take exactly? I hope, again, it will recognise that the dialogue will have to be an evolving one. If I am right in my emphases so far as drones are concerned, we ain’t seen nothing yet. We are at the very beginning of their evolution and their integration with the wider digital revolution, which to my mind is probably the greatest transformative force to have global impact within such a short period of time ever in human history. The Industrial Revolution was crucial, but it moved quite slowly; when the first telephone was invented, it took 50 years to reach 75 people. The iPhone first came out in 2007, and there are now almost 1 billion in the world, and 3 billion smartphones. There has never been any pace of technological innovation like this, and it would therefore be a really bad mistake to treat drones just on their own, as an isolated phenomenon. They will be deeply integrated in the evolution of this revolution.