Five rescue teams from the Taiwan Red Cross supported government and military emergency services in searching the ruins of collapsed buildings in Tainan City in early February, after a 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck in the south of Taiwan. In the most difficult cases, the teams spent hours digging through a maze of broken concrete walls and rubble. In one dramatic case, Red Cross workers discovered a little boy who was trapped deep inside one of the buildings. Red Cross staff and volunteers helped by providing psychosocial support to patients and their relatives, preparing hot meals, distributing blankets, sleeping bags and warm jackets, and delivering cash grants to the closest relatives of those who were killed, among other things. Photo: REUTERS/Pichi Chuan
It’s the stuff of science fiction: machines that make decisions about who and when to kill. Referred to as “autonomous weapons”, they’re already in use to some degree. But as more sophisticated systems are being developed we wanted to an expert in the field about whether such systems comply with international humanitarian law and what it means for humanity to give machines the power over human life and death.
In this episode, we talk with humanitarian communicator Kathy Mueller who produced our first magazine podcast series, The Wildfire Diaries, about massive wildfires in Northern Canada in 2017. We talk about that series, her many international missions, and the big changes in humanitarian communications since she began with the Canadian Red Cross almost 20 years ago.
In this episode, we talk about the power of storytelling to inform and inspire. “Storytelling is a fundamental aspect of human communication,” says our guest Prodip, a volunteer and multi-media storyteller for the Bangladesh Red Crescent. “It inspires us to be a hero of our own community.” We also speak with one such community hero, Dalal al-Taji, a longtime volunteer and advocate for inclusion of people with disabilities in emergencies response. “In disasters. persons with disabilities sometimes get forgotten.”
Data can save lives and humanitarian organizations are mobilizing to improve the way they collect and use it. But are they ready to handle the largely unregulated, ‘wild west’ of the global data market?
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