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I totally agree but I also think the headline needs to include Police Robot Dog. I think in this case this is a great use for a tool like BD's Spot. But I also

I totally agree but I also think the headline needs to include Police Robot Dog. I think in this case this is a great use for a tool like BD's Spot. But I also agree with the ACLU employee, Jongwook Kim, when he says “At some point it will come out again for some different use after the pandemic is over". I would like some upfront thought put into how we, as a society, will use technology like this now and in the future. We obviously can't predict everything but I don't see a problem with trying to come up with some common sense legislation now that cuts off potentially privacy invasive or dangerous uses of this type of tech in the future.

JohnFen 5y ago
> I don't see a problem with trying to come up with some common sense legislation now that cuts off potentially privacy invasive or dangerous uses of this type of tech in the future. We seem to have a problem doing that for existing tech that the police have been using, so I'm not so optimistic about this.
- smhenderson 5y ago
  I thought about that. And I ask, how so? A lot of the examples I could think of are about current law being applied to technology that not only did not exist when the law was written but, in a lot of cases, the people writing the law could never have even imagined the tech/situations the law was being applied to now. I'm certainly not saying bad laws haven't been written to address tech and the police but I don't think that means we can't keep trying. As another poster said, I think the bigger question here isn't about whether or not a robot dog is doing this, it's why are the police handling health issues at a homeless shelter? Why aren't social/healthcare workers doing it? The article doesn't say so maybe the police just loaned them the dog to do this but that's not the impression I get from the article. Bottom line, I do get your pessimism, I generally share it these days. But I think it's also important to not just give in and hopefully we learn from past mistakes and can do better.

JohnFen 5y ago

> I don't see a problem with trying to come up with some common sense legislation now that cuts off potentially privacy invasive or dangerous uses of this type of tech in the future. We seem to have a problem doing that for existing tech that the police have been using, so I'm not so optimistic about this.

smhenderson 5y ago
I thought about that. And I ask, how so? A lot of the examples I could think of are about current law being applied to technology that not only did not exist when the law was written but, in a lot of cases, the people writing the law could never have even imagined the tech/situations the law was being applied to now. I'm certainly not saying bad laws haven't been written to address tech and the police but I don't think that means we can't keep trying. As another poster said, I think the bigger question here isn't about whether or not a robot dog is doing this, it's why are the police handling health issues at a homeless shelter? Why aren't social/healthcare workers doing it? The article doesn't say so maybe the police just loaned them the dog to do this but that's not the impression I get from the article. Bottom line, I do get your pessimism, I generally share it these days. But I think it's also important to not just give in and hopefully we learn from past mistakes and can do better.