5 ms·

I agree that killer robots are a bad idea. Asking a cop to walk into an active shooter situation isn’t great either.

eternalban 4y ago
Why not make a robot that takes down the shooter? Doesn't need to kill. Just tackle the person and pin them down. A bit of armor would do it, right?
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  Mixed feelings about involvement of robots at all, but ABSOLUTELY YES the use of NON-LETHAL FORCE is outrageously under-utilized in every kind of policing IRL and as depicted in popular media. Set em on stun, FFS.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    I wonder if what is really happening, whether by design or a misaligned universe, is that firms that build these devices are really building for the military, and the thoughtless trend of militarizing police forces is intensifying. Why do I say this? Because the idea to use non-lethal force is frankly obvious and various think tanks were looking at this stuff for years. Ditto concerns over lethal robots. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA654-1.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA654-1.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/02/us-rejects-calls-regulating-banning-killer-robots https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/02/us-rejects-c... https://www.uclalawreview.org/policing-police-robots/ https://www.uclalawreview.org/policing-police-robots/ abstract: Just as they will change healthcare, manufacturing, and the military, robots have the potential to produce big changes in policing. We can expect that at least some robots used by the police in the future will be artificially intelligent machines capable of using legitimate coercive force against human beings. Police robots may decrease dangers to police officers by removing them from potentially volatile situations. Those suspected of crimes may also risk less injury if robots can assist the police in conducting safer detentions, arrests, and searches. At the same time, however, the use of robots introduces new questions about how the law and democratic norms should guide policing decisions—questions which have yet to be addressed in any systematic way. How we design, regulate, or even prohibit some uses of police robots requires a regulatory agenda now to address foreseeable problems of the future.
    - eternalban 4y ago
      That last cite actually answered my own question: "The future of robotic policing can now be found in developments within the military.(54) The military has used remote controlled robots for more than a decade.(55) The Department of Defense is preparing for a future in which nearly autonomous robots will play a central role in warfare.(56) Consequently, the military is spending the most money and attention on robotics." (54). [P.W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century (2009)], supra note 20, at 78 (observing that the “military sets the agenda in AI”).
- XorNot 4y ago
  Or a drone which dives bombs with a tazer. That's the worst thing about this: robotics should mean that we have options because robots are replaceable and should be expendable. But this tells you the real story: an expensive robot is more valuable then a human life.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Perhaps it can ask the shooter to "please put down your weapon, you have 40 seconds to comply", giving them an opportunity to surrender before unloading a machine gun into them[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvqDaFpXeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvqDaFpXeM
JadeNB 4y ago
> Asking a cop to walk into an active shooter situation isn’t great either. Indeed, cops are just humans, and we correctly think of them as such when asking them to perform duties on behalf of the citizens they are supposed to protect. But somehow, when it comes time to holding them accountable for misdeeds carried out in the course of their professional duties, they are held apart from other humans. At least one side of this imbalance should be rectified.
- chimeracoder 4y ago
  > asking them to perform duties on behalf of the citizens they are supposed to protect. SCOTUS has ruled that police have no duty to protect citizens. "Protect and serve" is just a marketing slogan, just like "Don't be evil".
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > > asking them to perform duties on behalf of the citizens they are supposed to protect. > SCOTUS has ruled that police have no duty to protect citizens. "Protect and serve" is just a marketing slogan, just like "Don't be evil". Right, I meant "supposed" in the notional sense, like the average citizen supposes that they are going to be protected by the police, though I agree it was very confusing wording. I was referring exactly to decisions like the one you cite as evidence of cops receiving a double standard of treatment.
  - butlerm 4y ago
    > SCOTUS has ruled that police have no duty to protect citizens. That is not remotely true. What SCOTUS has ruled is that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens, i.e. the Constitution doesn't say anything about it one way or another. The actual duty of police to protect citizens arises from state law, departmental policies, and/or employment contracts. If you are so unfortunate as to live in a municipality that imposes no duties on their employees, perhaps you should vote for someone who will.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
chimeracoder 4y ago
> Asking a cop to walk into an active shooter situation isn’t great either. Empirically, they don't, so this is a straw man. It has literally been three days since the last mass shooting in which cops waited outside until victims had subdued the attacker before entering. And it's not like that's an isolated incident either - it's the de facto standard practice, even though officially all documents say otherwise.
mushbino 4y ago
They don't, even if the victims are children and the ratio of cops to shooters is 100:1
roughly 4y ago
> Asking a cop to walk into an active shooter situation isn’t great either. That’s quite literally the job. There’s a bunch of other stuff cops do, but at the end of the day, they exist to risk violence so the rest of us don’t have to - without that, there’s no point to a group of state-sanctioned violence dealers.
heavyset_go 4y ago
> Asking a cop to walk into an active shooter situation isn’t great either. I don't think valuing a cop who doesn't want to do their job, but still demands to keep it, over innocent civilian lives that they were hired to protect is a great situation, either. Delivery drivers have more dangerous jobs than police officers do, and they're asked to walk into situations where they can be murdered, and are statistically more likely to be than cops, literally everyday, multiple times a day. Cops are often the highest paid employees on a government's payroll, and it is very common for over 50% of a municipality's total budget to go towards cop salaries and benefits. In my state, cops earn a median salary of over $105,000 a year before overtime, bonuses or benefits, and they can earn over $250,000 a year with overtime. They can retire after only 20 years of working with a full pension that they can draw from for life. In my area, they're also given special mortgage rates of about 2% versus the more common ~6%+ as of late. For comparison, software engineers in my state only have a median salary of $89,000. Delivery drivers barely make minimum wage, they often have no benefits, and their employers tend either pay them off the books or classify them as independent contractors. Cops are rewarded even more handsomely than military members are, for the very miniscule risk they take on. This is what they signed up for, often because the rewards are that good.
wheresmycraisin 4y ago
> Asking a cop to walk into an active shooter situation isn’t great either. They aren't asked to. In the US, they have no legal obligation to protect children being murdered, or otherwise protect innocent civilians in any way.
l3uwin 4y ago
That's a cops job. If they cant do it they shouldn't be a cop. Case and point, uvalde. What's to point of arming some fragile white guy who peaked in high-school to the teeth if he's just gonna stand outside and watch kids get shot anyway. You're telling me that even in an armored car, while wearing bullet proof plates, next to a whole squad of armed and armored dudes, cops still are soooo weak and scared to do their jobs we have to pay for them to have new gun robots? Fuck that. ACAB

Why not make a robot that takes down the shooter? Doesn't need to kill. Just tackle the person and pin them down. A bit of armor would do it, right?

chrisweekly 4y ago
Mixed feelings about involvement of robots at all, but ABSOLUTELY YES the use of NON-LETHAL FORCE is outrageously under-utilized in every kind of policing IRL and as depicted in popular media. Set em on stun, FFS.
- eternalban 4y ago
  I wonder if what is really happening, whether by design or a misaligned universe, is that firms that build these devices are really building for the military, and the thoughtless trend of militarizing police forces is intensifying. Why do I say this? Because the idea to use non-lethal force is frankly obvious and various think tanks were looking at this stuff for years. Ditto concerns over lethal robots. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA654-1.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA654-1.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/02/us-rejects-calls-regulating-banning-killer-robots https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/02/us-rejects-c... https://www.uclalawreview.org/policing-police-robots/ https://www.uclalawreview.org/policing-police-robots/ abstract: Just as they will change healthcare, manufacturing, and the military, robots have the potential to produce big changes in policing. We can expect that at least some robots used by the police in the future will be artificially intelligent machines capable of using legitimate coercive force against human beings. Police robots may decrease dangers to police officers by removing them from potentially volatile situations. Those suspected of crimes may also risk less injury if robots can assist the police in conducting safer detentions, arrests, and searches. At the same time, however, the use of robots introduces new questions about how the law and democratic norms should guide policing decisions—questions which have yet to be addressed in any systematic way. How we design, regulate, or even prohibit some uses of police robots requires a regulatory agenda now to address foreseeable problems of the future.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    That last cite actually answered my own question: "The future of robotic policing can now be found in developments within the military.(54) The military has used remote controlled robots for more than a decade.(55) The Department of Defense is preparing for a future in which nearly autonomous robots will play a central role in warfare.(56) Consequently, the military is spending the most money and attention on robotics." (54). [P.W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century (2009)], supra note 20, at 78 (observing that the “military sets the agenda in AI”).
XorNot 4y ago
Or a drone which dives bombs with a tazer. That's the worst thing about this: robotics should mean that we have options because robots are replaceable and should be expendable. But this tells you the real story: an expensive robot is more valuable then a human life.
heavyset_go 4y ago
Perhaps it can ask the shooter to "please put down your weapon, you have 40 seconds to comply", giving them an opportunity to surrender before unloading a machine gun into them[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvqDaFpXeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvqDaFpXeM

JadeNB 4y ago

> Asking a cop to walk into an active shooter situation isn’t great either. Indeed, cops are just humans, and we correctly think of them as such when asking them to perform duties on behalf of the citizens they are supposed to protect. But somehow, when it comes time to holding them accountable for misdeeds carried out in the course of their professional duties, they are held apart from other humans. At least one side of this imbalance should be rectified.

chimeracoder 4y ago
> asking them to perform duties on behalf of the citizens they are supposed to protect. SCOTUS has ruled that police have no duty to protect citizens. "Protect and serve" is just a marketing slogan, just like "Don't be evil".
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > > asking them to perform duties on behalf of the citizens they are supposed to protect. > SCOTUS has ruled that police have no duty to protect citizens. "Protect and serve" is just a marketing slogan, just like "Don't be evil". Right, I meant "supposed" in the notional sense, like the average citizen supposes that they are going to be protected by the police, though I agree it was very confusing wording. I was referring exactly to decisions like the one you cite as evidence of cops receiving a double standard of treatment.
- butlerm 4y ago
  > SCOTUS has ruled that police have no duty to protect citizens. That is not remotely true. What SCOTUS has ruled is that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens, i.e. the Constitution doesn't say anything about it one way or another. The actual duty of police to protect citizens arises from state law, departmental policies, and/or employment contracts. If you are so unfortunate as to live in a municipality that imposes no duties on their employees, perhaps you should vote for someone who will.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago

chimeracoder 4y ago

> Asking a cop to walk into an active shooter situation isn’t great either. Empirically, they don't, so this is a straw man. It has literally been three days since the last mass shooting in which cops waited outside until victims had subdued the attacker before entering. And it's not like that's an isolated incident either - it's the de facto standard practice, even though officially all documents say otherwise.

mushbino 4y ago

They don't, even if the victims are children and the ratio of cops to shooters is 100:1

roughly 4y ago

> Asking a cop to walk into an active shooter situation isn’t great either. That’s quite literally the job. There’s a bunch of other stuff cops do, but at the end of the day, they exist to risk violence so the rest of us don’t have to - without that, there’s no point to a group of state-sanctioned violence dealers.

heavyset_go 4y ago

> Asking a cop to walk into an active shooter situation isn’t great either. I don't think valuing a cop who doesn't want to do their job, but still demands to keep it, over innocent civilian lives that they were hired to protect is a great situation, either. Delivery drivers have more dangerous jobs than police officers do, and they're asked to walk into situations where they can be murdered, and are statistically more likely to be than cops, literally everyday, multiple times a day. Cops are often the highest paid employees on a government's payroll, and it is very common for over 50% of a municipality's total budget to go towards cop salaries and benefits. In my state, cops earn a median salary of over $105,000 a year before overtime, bonuses or benefits, and they can earn over $250,000 a year with overtime. They can retire after only 20 years of working with a full pension that they can draw from for life. In my area, they're also given special mortgage rates of about 2% versus the more common ~6%+ as of late. For comparison, software engineers in my state only have a median salary of $89,000. Delivery drivers barely make minimum wage, they often have no benefits, and their employers tend either pay them off the books or classify them as independent contractors. Cops are rewarded even more handsomely than military members are, for the very miniscule risk they take on. This is what they signed up for, often because the rewards are that good.

wheresmycraisin 4y ago

> Asking a cop to walk into an active shooter situation isn’t great either. They aren't asked to. In the US, they have no legal obligation to protect children being murdered, or otherwise protect innocent civilians in any way.

l3uwin 4y ago

That's a cops job. If they cant do it they shouldn't be a cop. Case and point, uvalde. What's to point of arming some fragile white guy who peaked in high-school to the teeth if he's just gonna stand outside and watch kids get shot anyway. You're telling me that even in an armored car, while wearing bullet proof plates, next to a whole squad of armed and armored dudes, cops still are soooo weak and scared to do their jobs we have to pay for them to have new gun robots? Fuck that. ACAB