I absolutely love that these things seem to always end up committing suicide, and every instance I’m aware of one of these being used ultimately just proves that they’re frickin useless. Got water on the property? they’re taking a life-ending swim. Got grass? they gettin’ stuck. rocks? also stuck. speed bumps? fucker’s 'face’planting. And don’t get me started on people bum-rushing them, and just kicking them right over. In every way these are worse than humans, the only thing that’d make them better is if they exploded the moment something happens to them.
the only thing that’d make them better is if they exploded the moment something happens to them
I know you’re joking, but if the police could make them shoot people, they would. And they’d still be as racist as human cops.
imagine one getting suck in some grass, then just fuckin’ exploding, that’d make it worth it.
It’d probably find a way to kill all but white people though
You know it’s prolly deployed in primarily non-white neighborhoods.
Yeah, but believe me, it’s not going to take long before this stuff works, and then it’s going to be metal on the pedal surveillance capitalism, with ultra biased algorithms designed to be racist, cl assist, and so on.
phase 1: deploy a useless robot and let people get use to it.
phase 2: upgrade the robots in many small steps so people won’t freak out
It works most of the time for surveillance laws and similar, why not for robots?
I should probably take a second to point out that though this article calls them “police robots”, these are and have only been used as site security. These are not equipped in any way to do police work and just serve as a mobile camera and alarm system. These also, predominately, only patrol high-income properties. In the US you’re most likely to find these in industrial parks in the Silicon Valley protecting office space of major tech firms, and in practicality are only useful for that. In every possible way, they’re less useful than employing a human security guard and the only benefits of using one of these are costs of operation (humans need minimum wage, bots don’t) and the aesthetic of having a machine constantly patrolling your site.
These have been a thing for nearly a decade, the first time I learned about them was on an article by SourceFed (rip) about one driving into a fountain in perhaps 2013 (don’t wanna look that up rn). And In that nearly a decade lifespan, they’ve changed extremely little. This is nothing more than an attempt to find the cheapest possible long time solution to paying workers wages, and as long as they work well enough on flat and smooth pavement, they’re not going to receive any real improvements. Perhaps the company that makes these, Knightscope, will come out with one that’s better at going off path, but seeing as they’ve kept the exact same design language and dimensions for all this time, i highly doubt they’d just do it.
so TTYL: These aren’t cops, they’re piss poor excuses for security guards that the company has advertised as being “police bots”.
