Presentation by Dylan Cawthorne: The Ethics of Drone Design – And Why I Quit the Industry
In 2024, Routledge published The Ethics of Drone Design: How Value Sensitive Design Can Create Better Technologies, the result of years of research aimed at building ethically informed drones. Drawing on value sensitive design methods and ethical frameworks, this work involved designing, testing, and flying prototype drones for applications including healthcare delivery, search and rescue, and education.
Along the way, however, deeper systemic challenges became impossible to ignore. Pressures tied to profit maximization and militarization repeatedly constrained efforts to develop technologies oriented toward public benefit. Ultimately, these tensions led the author to resign in protest from a position as Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark in July 2025.
In this talk, the author reflects on the realities of applying ethics within engineering practice—sharing successes, failures, and hard-earned lessons—and invites discussion on a central question: Is it possible to create ethically informed technologies within today’s financial and geopolitical systems, or do those systems demand more radical forms of resistance?