Police Robots

[Debi]

Rise of the police robots

History has time and again taught us that, science fiction is only a fantasy until science makes it a reality. In the 1940s Isaac Asimov, a prolific science fiction writer wrote about a future where robots are a part of the human world. Similarly, in a sci-fi film, Robocop made more than 30 years ago, a robot is built-up in order to solve an unprecedented crime problem in dystopian crime-ridden Detroit. Today science fiction has become a reality. Police in different parts of the world are using robots for law enforcement and first, ever robotic police officers have become deployed across China, Dubai and Hyderabad in India.

Dubai Police introduced its first robot police officer on May 24
last year. Wearing a police cap and moving on wheels, the robot features a
computer touch-screen on its chest that can be used to report a crime or inquire about speeding tickets. At 5ft 5in tall and weighing 100 kg, it can speak six languages and is designed to read facial expressions. The UAE has big plans for the future. By 2030 it wants robots to make up 25 per cent of its police force, including fully functioning androids capable of chasing down offenders and making arrests.

Hyderabad has launched the country’s first smart policing robot called the smart Robocop. The robot has capabilities to move, recognise people, take complaints, detect bombs, identify suspects, interact with people and answer to queries. It is equipped with cameras and has an array of sensors connected to GPS in its beta version. It has been developed by H-Bots Robotics, a Hyderabad-based robotics technology company.

In Zhengzhou, China, Police robots that look like armless Daleks roam the high-speed train station, they use facial-recognition software to help officers identify suspects, interact with customers and answer their questions. At Beijing’s Tiananmen Square stun gun-wielding robots patrol crowds of tourists. The robots negotiate their own path along designated routes, and an officer monitoring the bot remotely controls the stun guns.

Kinshasa, the Republic of Congo in the year 2013, in an effort to enforce traffic rules and reduce road accidents, installed giant solar-powered robots, at busy intersections which controls traffic with arms that signal red and green flags and ushers pedestrians safely across roads. The robots are also equipped with surveillance cameras which send footage of reckless driving to the police.
Ford Motors is reported to have filed a patent for a robot-controlled autonomous car that would use artificial intelligence to issue speeding tickets from roadside hiding spots. The robot would be able to detect violations independently on its own or by connecting to the roadside surveillance cameras.

Robots like humans have also perpetrated crimes and have been arrested for committing them. On August 18, 1982, a robot called DC-2 was the first robot ever to be taken into custody by the Beverly Hills Police Department for illegally distributing flyers on North Beverly Drive. In Russia, an activist robot called Promobot was arrested for taking part in a political rally in support of Russian parliamentary candidate Valery Kalachev in Moscow. Conversely, robots have
also helped police in arresting criminals in several instances. In May this
year, a man was arrested in Berlin for allegedly beating up his girlfriend and later firing shots at her vehicle.

Full story at site

 

[Debi]

OK, does this make anyone else nervous out there??? (Please tell me I'm not alone in hating this idea on many levels.)

 

[Paulm]

OK, does this make anyone else nervous out there??? (Please tell me I'm not alone in hating this idea on many levels.)

just think of the possibilities this has with the drone technology that we now have......everywhere in the city there could be drones, asleep until something happens, to be awakened to respond to said situation....an instant "eye in the sky" if you will....armed if need be....could really be the beginning of an Orwellian society....( even more so than we already have)

 

[Ronin]

OK, does this make anyone else nervous out there??? (Please tell me I'm not alone in hating this idea on many levels.)

Removing human interaction from scenarios that by definition require human interaction is always a bad idea. Laws and law enforcement aren't binary things and require both nuance and judgement. An automated platform has neither.

Now, the whole 'android' think is a pipe dream, plain and simple.

 

[Debi]

Removing human interaction from scenarios that by definition require human interaction is always a bad idea. Laws and law enforcement aren't binary things and require both nuance and judgement. An automated platform has neither.

Now, the whole 'android' think is a pipe dream, plain and simple.

So why are they letting these things loose in the city?

 

[Ronin]

So why are they letting these things loose in the city?

They haven’t watched ANY science fiction in the last 70 years?

 

[Debi]

They haven’t watched ANY science fiction in the last 70 years?

Ronin, in case you haven't caught on yet, I may...just may...have watched a bunch of that sci-fi stuff helping to form my current state of paranoia about techi stuff.

 

[Ronin]

Ronin, in case you haven't caught on yet, I may...just may...have watched a bunch of that sci-fi stuff helping to form my current state of paranoia about techi stuff.

Indeed.

In all seriousness, one of the fundamental things you learn in any kind of engineering or applied sciences is that the more you learn is possible, the more you learn you can't do those things in impossible ways. Speaking of technology, we really have done some marvelous things in the past 6,000 years, with the general trend of doing more impressive things as we go*.

But we're limited by the materials available to us. Modern houses can be very safe, comfortable affairs, but at the end of the day, we're still building with rocks and sticks. We can craft machines to make finer and finer cuts, and we can shape things to be more effective as their tasks. Nevertheless, firearms technologies aren't much more impressive than when we started using them, but rather more effective and specialized. Nowhere can what I mean be summed up better than military tanks. We use composite(layered) armor now because we only have materials with limited properties available to us, so we have to combine them to be effective against anti-tank weapons. Depleted uranium isn't great at busting armor because of any property other than its raw, natural density. So while it all looks and sounds terrifying, 6,000 years of recorded history on, all we've done is come up with a better sling for our shepherds to protect their flocks - quite literally.

So when it comes to technologies and their promise and fear, what you really need to be concerned with is something like Skynet, not something like a terminator. You need to fear a skynet because of its potential to be jacked into a nuclear arsenal or inserted into a legitimate chain-of-command for a military. But we are several MAJOR technological breakthroughs away from anything like a self-sustaining robot that is dangerous to humanity. Yes, we can definitely build a robot dangerous to some individual people (and even then mainly with the element of surprise), but not to humanity as a whole. And even IF you get all those technological breakthroughs, you still just have a limited run of machines. Those machines aren't going to be built to be all-purpose and self-improving like humans are; they won't just be able to grab a pick and go mine more metal to make more machines like themselves, or work out and get stronger so they can move oddly-balanced large things, or get more dexterous to be able to finely manipulate delicate things. Heck, it's beyond the ability for military drones, as deadly as they can be, to refuel and rearm themselves.

So while I do agree with you that certain things - such as police robots - are a bad idea, it's not because I agree with you on potential scale, it's because I'm concerned with the small subset of people that are likely to be victimized by the application of technology that just isn't up to the tasks being demanded of it. This includes injuries, yes, but also what likely to be far more unjust tickets, arrests, etc, and the accompanying psychology from humans that the machines are somehow "infallible" or "incorruptible", because what's almost always forgotten is that the machines are only as good as their creators made them, and the humans making them are fallible and corruptible, and in many cases will have incentives to be so (greed).

A healthy caution and skepticism of this type of technology is, IMHO, a must. Just make sure it's in a realistic direction while you join in with the many scientists and philosophers who have started advocating control of this kind of technology so that we *don't* end up with terminators.

*There are still a number of materials and methods the ancients had that are better than what we can make or do today. Humans are some creative critters.

 

[Debi]

Well, Skynet has been one of my favorite references here. But I'm also adding to that the new fact that some of the implants used for brain function can be hacked. Or a pacemaker can be hacked. The potential for control of someone is now an issue. (It's those "little" things, Ronin.)

 

[Ronin]

Well, Skynet has been one of my favorite references here. But I'm also adding to that the new fact that some of the implants used for brain function can be hacked. Or a pacemaker can be hacked. The potential for control of someone is now an issue. (It's those "little" things, Ronin.)

Yes, but those are design flaws, not implementation flaws. We're in a phase of people networking things that have no business being networked - just because they can and some manager saw an article in a shiny magazine. At some point those personal devices getting compromised is going to kill enough people - or the right people - and we'll see governments forced to step in and stop this foolishness.

Again, I'm not discounting your paranoia, as I'm of the "if it can be abused, it will be" school of cynicism. I'm just arguing which things to focus that paranoia on.