Are we really ready to have ED-209 patrolling our streets?
ED-209, as some of you may recall, was the terrifying military robot from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 classic, Robocop. Sporting twin heavy-calibre machine-gun arms, ED informs a make-believe armed robber at a corporate demonstration, to Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply. Except that ED’s software glitches and an ambitious young executive type is reduced to so much hamburger meat.
Well, folks, the future of law enforcement is here and about to be cleared to use deadly force.
On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to enact a policy that will allow its officers to kill people with robots. The ordinance’s language states that the robots “will only be used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD.” The department’s policy had previously explicitly banned police from unleashing drones and robots that could use force against people.
To be fair, what they’re talking about — so far — are not so much “robots” in the sense most of us would have, of autonomous, self-directed machines. In reality, we’re likely looking at sophisticated remote-control devices. For instance, the Andros Mark V-A1, familiar to many of us as bomb-disposal robots. These are, of course, controlled by a remote operator. Drones are also widely used by police to monitor everything from protests to drug deals.
But even these are being weaponised for purposes far beyond their original design.
In 2016, the Dallas Police Department took the extraordinary step of mounting a bomb to its bomb disposing robot and using it to kill a mass shooting suspect.
Since that incident, civil liberties groups have raised concerns that law enforcement would seek to use robots to kill people in greater numbers. Police are now showing that those fears were not unfounded. In the last few months, at least two different cities have officially proposed allowing police officers to kill people using robots. In September, the Oakland Police Department discussed the possibility of using a Remotec Andros Mark V-A1 robot equipped with a shotgun to kill suspects during “high-risk, high-threat” events, as local journalist Jaime Omar Yassin and The Intercept reported. After public outcry over potentially being shot to death by a ‘roided-out Mars Rover, the department abandoned the idea. For now anyway.
How long before some bright spark down at the precinct comes up with the idea of mounting a Hellfire on their “surveillance” drone?
Then there are those “robotic dogs” which are, if anything, even more terrifying than ED-209. The Chinese military have already developed a machine-gun-equipped robotic dog, with a drone delivery system. Think of it as Amazon Prime Air with extreme prejudice.
In 2021, residents and local politicians castigated the New York Police Department for its use of a so-called “Digidog”—an unarmed, four-legged, robotic “dog” built by Boston Dynamics—after footage of its deployment in two separate incidents went viral. The city has since canceled a $94,000 contract to lease the robo-dog. While Boston Dynamics was one of multiple companies that signed an open letter last week condemning the use of armed robots, other companies haven’t drawn such a line in the sand. As TechCrunch noted this week, a Philadelphia company named Ghost Robotics sells its products to the U.S. military and seems totally fine with the strapping of rifles to its robo-dogs.
Unlike the Andros Mark V-A1, the “digidogs” use AI to navigate, rather than rely solely on a human navigator. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to imagine its AI being upgraded to include threat identification protocols… and who knows what else.
On Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital privacy nonprofit, issued a scathing statement slamming the San Francisco Police Department’s request for killer robots.
“This is a spectacularly dangerous idea and EFF’s stance is clear: police should not arm robots,” the organization said. “Police technology goes through mission creep–meaning equipment reserved only for specific or extreme circumstances ends up being used in increasingly everyday or casual ways. We’ve already seen this with military-grade predator drones flying over protests, and police buzzing by the window of an activist’s home with drones.”
Scheerpost
Recall Victorian premier Dan Andrews deploying heavily-armed police, using an armoured personnel carrier supposed to be reserved for terrorist incidents against anti-lockdown protesters in Melbourne last year. Would you trust Dictator Dan with a squad of killer robots?