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San Francisco Police seeks approval of Killer Robots – will Quincy follow?
– News covered by Quincy Quarry News with commentary added.
This Dallas Police Robot has notched a kill
Image via the Mirror
Well ahead of the Singularity, in the City of Saint Francis, city officials have approved the San Francisco Police Department to use killer robots.
Well, for starters, it is one thing to task a Roomba® to gather up dust and pet hair but quite another to clean up a crime in process.
And for a related example, Tesla is under criminal investigation by the Department of Justice over claims that the company’s electric vehicles can drive themselves even though Teslas are known to on occasion self-drive themselves into accidents and so whet the litigious nature of at least certain personal injury lawyers.
Also note that while the Quincy Quarry news team is a huge fan of Detroit police officer Alex Murphy, the original Robocop, as opposed to a long ago cashiered Quincy police officer wannabe, Murphy is a cyborg and thus ultimately operating per human control and so known, if not also famously so, for making proper as well as effective decisions while on patrol, especially in dangerous situations..
So much for actually helping to clean up things along the parade route
A Quincy Quarry News file photo
Accordingly, mitigating the very real risk of collateral damage within high risk criminal situations should be the prime directive. As such, the dedication to go with killer robots should be predicated on actual needs instead of, well, plausible hypotheticals as opposed to the City of Quincy’s long featuring of the Department of Public Works’ robot as a parade prop.
Plus, not only are robots only as good as their operators and programmers, robots are also fraught with the potential all manner of operational fails as well as very real likelihoods of their ending up used in setting wherein perhaps their designs and programming are less than well-tailored to the need at hand.
Granted, militaries have very effectively as well as ever-increasingly utilized drones and other and other sorts of robots to take on their opponents in ways more tightly targeted and thus more effectively as far as warfighting goes.
Policing, however, is a whole other sort of endeavor.
Police chariot at the ready at Quincy City Hall
A Quincy Quarry News exclusive file photo
For example, as for Quincy, concerns about crime in Quincy notwithstanding, the Quincy Police Department has already greatly upped its equipment in recent years, ranging from equipping local police cruisers with upgraded assault rifles featuring muzzle flash and gunshot sound silencers to an armored urban assault vehicle to prominently placing police equipment at City Hall.
No argument, police should have the equipment they need to do their jobs; at the same time, at what point is some equipment not only more than is needed, its use could well pose the potential to add problems to problematic situations.
After all, at minimum, having a tool not only tends to bait using it, such a tool can bait seeking out even more tools for the most unlikely of hypotheticals.
In other words, think mission creep meets pandering to the public.
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QPD is waiting for the dual-purpose killer robot that displays guns and porn while serving coffee and donuts!
Chief Keenen is waiting for them to come in white.
Why walk, roll, or track when you can fly?
Dictator “Tummy” will have a drone program if left in power.
Ray,
The QPD already has drone equipment. Unclear, however, is if the department also has a dedicated drone van for field deployments, what is the lift capacity of the current drones, and the number of their attachment hard points.
If these robots come in white, the Quincy cops will buy them. Otherwise, too risky.
Honk, honk. Meanwhile, the boys at the fire department are eyeing a set of Japanese gender-neutral robot dolls for sleepovers.
Shush LB — what happens at the QFD’s Germantown station stays in the station.
Engine 8 Ed,
Expect delays — supply chain problems.