Research Archives – Page 2 of 7

Category Archives: Research

San Francisco U-turn on ‘killer robots’: Are we any safer as a result?

26th December 2022 Mike Ryder Comment

In December 2022, San Francisco lawmakers voted to overturn a decision to allow police robots to wield deadly force.

In a controversial policy proposal, the 17 robots currently used by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) could have been equipped with explosive charges to take out active shooters or suicide bombers in ‘emergency’ situations.

While the policy was initially approved by lawmakers, officials have since overturned the policy in response to pressure from civil rights groups.

The biopolitics of the bird-flu pandemic

8th December 2022 Mike Ryder Comment

There’s a pandemic on don’t you know.

Or maybe you don’t: that’s the problem. Across the globe now, millions of birds have died, and many more have been put to slaughter in order to try and curb the spread of the deadly strain of bird-flu that has ravaged its way through swathes of the global bird population.

OODA loops and reflective practice

12th September 2022 Mike Ryder Comment

As a university lecturer, I spend a lot of my time thinking about the process of learning and how we can equip our students with the tools and techniques to reflect upon their individual journeys and so use critical self-reflection as a means to develop and grow.

In the workplace, this is often referred to as ‘reflective practice’ – the process by which we seek to reflect and learn from our experiences

While this process can be applied to any form of work, it will perhaps be most familiar to readers working in the healthcare professions, where reflective practice is a key part of professional development.

Produce, consume, repeat: what the science fiction of Frederik Pohl tells us about consumption

4th August 2020 Mike Ryder Comment

These days it’s all but impossible to separate the things we produce from the things we consume. Whether it be working on a production line, or staying at home raising children, many of the things that we do are a form of production – whether we get paid for that work, or not. And yet at the same time, we are also consumers, for we all pay bills, we all shop for food, and we all send our children to school.

Things then become problematic when production and consumption start to blur, for we produce in order to consume, but we also consume in order to produce. Whether it be catching a bus or paying for lunch, even the process of working itself is a form of consumption, and more often than not, many of us will also then consume the same product we have a hand in producing.

Humans, robots and rules: what the Covid-19 pandemic tells us about decision-making and rules

27th March 2020 Mike Ryder Comment

As we all set ourselves up for weeks, or even months, of self-isolation, never has there been a better time to think about rules, and the reasons we do the things that we do.

While the UK government has imposed new rules, telling us that we need to stay at home, these rules are only ever an approximation of the ideal rule, which in this case, is the idea that everyone needs to stay at home. The issue here is that while universal isolation is all well and good in theory, we still need health workers and we still need to keep the electricity flowing and the water running.