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ACLU to police using robots: Tell us more
- BacioiuC 7y agoAll of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
- tyingq 7y agoWasn't an autonomous robot, but I believe that the Dallas PD were the first police force to kill a suspect with a robot, back in 2016. They had it place a bomb on the opposite side of a brick wall from a sniper that had killed several police officers. https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/us/dallas-police-robot-c4-explosives/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/us/dallas-police-robot-c4-exp...
- harimau777 7y agoThat strikes me as a situation where the use of a robot to kill was appropriate.[1] However, I'd be interested in hearing the perspective of people who disagree. Maybe I'm overlooking something. [1] I'm assuming that the police had already exhausted options to resolve the situation non-violently and that a non-lethal robot wasn't available or viable (do they make TASER robots?).
- tyingq 7y agoI can't argue that killing him was a bad idea. He had the high ground and had killed and wounded several police officers. A pound of C-4 in a public place is pretty risky though. He was in a brick alcove on the second floor of El Centro Community College. They detonated the c4 on the other side of the brick wall.
- shakna 7y agoWhilst any explosive in public can be a potentially unsafe compound, C4 is probably one of the better choices. + It is really difficult to detonate accidentally. (Even when it burns it may not detonate.) + It can be shaped, so that the charge only moves in the intended direction. (So the first floor isn't at immediate risk.)
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- claudeganon 7y agoWhile I don’t know all the circumstances of the case, I do know police in other countries manage to capture people like this without resorting to using IEDs. Police in the states already get away with all kinds of corruption, abuse of power, violence/killings, so I think we should do as much as possible to avoid normalizing these kinds of tactics. The only comparable case that comes to mind is when police bombed an apartment block of radicals in Philadelphia: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/13/osage-avenue-bombing-philadelphia-30-years https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/13/osage-avenue...
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- alistairSH 7y agoI was going to bring that up. Totally agree - further normalizing the use of violence by the police should be avoided. While not a sniper, this is the police in the UK apprehending a suspect with a machete. I've never heard of similar tactics being used in the US. And conversations with police have led me to believe they would actively avoid such tactics and instead resort to violence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mzPj_IaMzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mzPj_IaMzY
- philwelch 7y agoI don’t think US police would address the situation much differently if they had the same advantage in numbers. You can actually watch dashcam/bodycam footage of police shootings. In situations where the suspect is armed with a bladed weapon, there’s usually an attempt to call for backup and subdue them with less lethal means. It’s just that there’s more often 1-2 officers instead of a dozen onscene. Also note that, in the clip you shared, at no point does the machete-wielding suspect break into a full-on sprint towards any of the officers. In the police shootings I’ve seen, that moment is the one when police open fire, and rightly so: human reaction time is such that a knife equals or beats a gun within 21 feet or so. This is why you see the British cops backpedaling whenever machete man turns to face them—American cops have done the same in the footage I’ve seen. Also consider what would have happened if machete man here actually made an honest attempt to start killing officers. He would have been successful. And it’s not like British police don’t use lethal force when it’s called for. Just look at what happened to the terrorist on London Bridge.
- afarrell 7y agoWhich was a sound choice under the circumstances. Did the sniper deserve to die? Wrong question. In an ideal world, a man in a bulletproof lycra bodysuit would have shown up and apprehended him bloodlessly. We don’t live in that world. We live in the world where there was a tradeoff between ending only the snipers’ life and endangering more of the lives of the cops. Whichever choice is made, someone gets the short end of that tradeoff[1]. So the right questions are 1) Who should have gotten the short end of the tradeoff in those particular circumstances? 2) How to we create an organization where people hold the values that lead them to make our preferred tradeoff? [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/24/nominating-oneself-for-the-short-end-of-a-tradeoff/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/24/nominating-oneself-for...
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoIt was not autonomous.
- tyingq 7y agoYeah that's what I led my comment with...
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoMy bad - I read that too fast. Apologies.
- prpl 7y agoUnfortunate title - I was thinking the ACLU was going to deploy a bunch of robots
- shahink015 7y agocertified ethical hackers for hire : https://www.hackerslist.co/how-it-works/ https://www.hackerslist.co/how-it-works/
- Shivetya 7y agoACLU made this request in August of 2019 [0] , guess it slipped notice back then. To be honest, they can be very unnerving o watch in action and for those who are video game fans; think Half Life series; they conjure up not so good images. Terminator series would likely be the most related that the public would freely associate with them, especially video on one of these dogs running across terrain. by default I have little issue with them, however with the recent focus on no knock raids and such I am loathe to give the police any tool which is more in line with military use. They already abuse the transfer of purely military vehicles to their forces and their SWAT teams long lost any relationship to traditional police [0] https://data.aclum.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ACLU-Public-Records-Request-Robotics-MSP.pdf https://data.aclum.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ACLU-Publi...
- logfromblammo 7y agoOr Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Just stick a little hypodermic needle with a lethal dose of morphine onto its manipulator, and Spot slips easily into the role of the mechanical hound.
- stebann 7y agoWe shouldn't be worried while police doesn't loose their connection with their people and treat cases properly according to the law, but now it seems that they're being taught to use force for whatever reason in most situations. It's not only a phenomena that could happens in totalitarian states or broken states, now it reaches all countries.
- paulddraper 7y agoInteresting. My reading of most HN threads has been in favor of more automation, objective verifiabilty, and technological use in law enforcement, e.g. body cams. Also strong condemnation of shoot-first-ask-later habits, which are inarguably more appealing when a person is at risk instead of an automaton. It would seem to be that those wanting police reform would be most interested in removing as much of the problematic human element as possible.
- akiselev 7y ago
- rahuldottech 7y agoIt's important to not go down this slippery slope. Right now robot dogs might only be used in extreme cases, but if continue to normalise this, it's only a matter of time before they're used in very morally questionable ways, such as arming them and using them to control (rightful, non-violent) protests, or being given autonomous control and letting them patrol cities and what not. This should be avoided. At all costs.
- jordanpg 7y agoRobots are used everywhere already. Everywhere. This is getting press because it's kind of edgy-looking, involves police, and the ACLU. It's not a question of if, but when and how. Implementation. The most interesting question to me is how regulation will unfold as robots become ubiquitous in public life. At least in the United States, I suspect that it will take several rather grotesque disasters before regulatory bodies get seriously involved and get around to passing the 3 Laws.
- deogeo 7y ago> Robots are used everywhere already. Everywhere. That's utterly irrelevant - the parent poster was talking specifically about robots used against humans. And the reason it's dangerous, is that you no longer need to convince a human to pull the trigger. It concentrates unchecked power into even fewer hands.
- nexuist 7y agoRobots are used against humans everywhere, already. Remember Predator drones? Been in the skies since the early 2000s. They require human authorization, and it is very unlikely that any AI will be given trigger control anytime soon. Nobody would trust their life to an algorithm, and if you rely on the algorithm to determine who's a friendly, your users are not going to like you.
- deogeo 7y agoBy 'everywhere', you mean war zones. I don't have Predator drones flying over my head, and I want to keep it that way.
- Pigo 7y agoWe learned nothing from Robocop... ..sorry I know this is serious
- shadowgovt 7y agoWe seem to have learned from Robocop that turning critically injured humans into cyborg enforcers is awesome and any problems in the system will self-correct via clever word lawyering and the power of the human will. Unless I saw a different Robocop movie. ;)
- Pigo 7y agoWell I thought the message was to only turn really good cops into robots, someone strong enough to deal with the existential hell you're about to put them through.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoCf https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalhead_(Black_Mirror) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalhead_(Black_Mirror). A fictional dramatisation of a post-apocalyptic World in which robot dogs hunt humans (IIRC).
- JulianMorrison 7y agoLet's not over-dramatize what these are. They're remote-controlled vehicles with a bit of pathfinding and modular add-ons. The fact they walk rather than roll is a triumph of software engineering, but it doesn't make them into droids off Star Wars. Police have been using remote controlled vehicles forever.
- jariel 7y agoI'd argue that there isn't anything hugely different from this tech and other kinds of tech. We invest way too much in this term 'AI'. The Army has some pretty ugly weapons for crowd control, we don't use them on civilians because it's just not proportional. I don't even see this as an argument about tech, but simply an age old question of force, legality, proportionality and context. These 'SWAT' clearings are actually one of the uglier scenarios, because both sides are primed for violence; element of surprise, people hidden around corners, heavy weapons, civilians, adrenaline, a hair-trigger / reaction away from weapons being used - literally the worst scenarios in regular public life and we create them ourselves. My first reaction to these robots is actually positive: with the AI dogs out front, there's a much bigger gap between adversaries, the cops have much more information, and there's much less likely going to be a shoot out. It might be possible to know forcefully clear a flat without having to pull a trigger, which is at least a positive opportunity.
- beamatronic 7y agoThe ACLU should build their own robot that chases around the other robots and keeps an eye on them
- StacyRoberts 7y ago> "...the Mass State police is our only public safety-focused relationship to date. I totally read that first as "mass police state" probably because that's what this is. A robotic mass police state.
- foxyv 7y agoI'm interested in how robotics can be used to help in typically dangerous situations like domestic violence calls and suicide by cop calls. If a robot can help save a life then heck yeah! If they are just used as portable spy platforms I'm a little less enthusiastic...