What happens when software makes physical-world decisions and no human is close enough to intervene?
Chad Butler joins Joe and Adam for the full interview on drones, AI, autonomous systems, and the line where a security failure becomes a safety failure. The conversation starts with commercial drone delivery and beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations, then widens into GPS spoofing, detect-and-avoid controls, sensor trust, autonomous vehicles, AI agents, and the management culture that can bury engineering concerns when launch pressure gets high.
This is not an anti-drone or anti-autonomy conversation. It is a conversation about building autonomous systems with the right security and safety bar before failures happen in the real world.
If you want the tighter feature version first, it is also available:
- YouTube feature cut: https://youtu.be/etBRzFpyBtw
- Spotify feature cut: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0B7ZQwz6RBEUtzoWOBmXOu?si=5R9gFduVSpObe93c5GfK7w
- Apple feature cut: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autonomous-systems-have-a-security-problem-with/id1679376200?i=1000774264922
- Amazon feature cut: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d11e431a-f7b1-4bb0-8671-024afce9ade6/episodes/f72f633e-4d59-40da-91fc-44c2df14bcea/security-cocktail-hour-autonomous-systems-have-a-security-problem-with-chad-butler
Topics Discussed
- Why beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone operations change the security and safety model
- GPS spoofing, ADS-B, and detect-and-avoid tradeoffs
- Why autonomous systems need to treat sensor data as potentially untrusted
- How drones, self-driving vehicles, robots, and AI agents share the same security problem
- Why one autonomous-system failure can damage trust across an entire industry
- What Challenger, NASA, and Feynman still teach us about engineering culture
- Why security concerns need to be design requirements, not launch blockers