
ACLU to police using robots: Tell us more - dnetesn
https://techxplore.com/news/2019-11-aclu-police-robots.html
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Shivetya
ACLU 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-
Publi...](https://data.aclum.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ACLU-Public-
Records-Request-Robotics-MSP.pdf)

~~~
paulddraper
Interesting.

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
Most of the successful police reforms (that I'm aware of here in California)
have revolved around community policing and getting back to that human
element. The rest have been oversight based, like the police body cameras.

Policing without infringing on rights is a very hard problem and I don't think
many serious reformers see any one solution or ideology as sufficient on its
own.

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rahuldottech
It'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
Robots 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.

~~~
manifestsilence
And you know how the 3 laws turned out in Asimov's world...

Seriously though, I don't think Asimov was being naive with his choice of laws
and then showing how they were then subverted. I'm sure he was aware of things
like Godel's proofs and the difficulties involved with fuzzy logic and AI.

Asimov kept his laws simple so they would work in a story, but was likely
well-aware that real laws could be made more nuanced and that they inevitably
would still fail in the ways he described.

Implementation is going to be very, very hard to get right, if at all
possible.

~~~
shadowgovt
> And you know how the 3 laws turned out in Asimov's world...

Pretty well? If you're referring to the original book (and not the excellent
Will Smith movie that deviated from the source material significantly but was
extremely entertaining in its own right), the robots correctly surmised that
humans lacked the wetware capacity for global-scale planning and took on that
burden. The world at the end of Asimov's story is many things, but it isn't
dying from an utterly avoidable climate change disaster because of a
transcontinental tragedy of the commons.

(It is, of course, a fiction. But if we can't take away from the fiction "We
should trust robots with global resource planning" without some critical
thinking, we shouldn't take away "robots can never be trusted and will always
betray humanity" without some critical thinking either).

~~~
TheCoelacanth
I would assume they're referring to the original short stories published in I,
Robot, which has numerous robots gone awry stories, but not the the taking
over planning for all of human civilization plot that you are referring to.

That plot was from books he wrote 40 years later to unify the Foundation and
Robots series. Many fans consider it a rage-inducing retcon.

~~~
shadowgovt
I'm referring specifically to "The Evitable Conflict"
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict)),
which I believe appeared in the original 1950 collection. It specifically
includes the plot of the world coordinating machines causing some harm to come
to some individuals to optimize the survival of the machines and the outcome
for humanity as a whole.

I'll have to look up the other stories you referenced though; I'm unfamiliar
with them and they sound fascinating.

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tyingq
Wasn'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-exp...](https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/us/dallas-police-
robot-c4-explosives/index.html)

~~~
harimau777
That 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?).

~~~
claudeganon
While 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...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/13/osage-avenue-
bombing-philadelphia-30-years)

~~~
alistairSH
I 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
I 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.

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prpl
Unfortunate title - I was thinking the ACLU was going to deploy a bunch of
robots

~~~
croon
Yeah, it took me a while to not read "police" as a verb.

~~~
weberc2
Wow. I definitely read it as “ACLU would use robots to police” and I thought
it was just a clumsier way of saying “ACLU to police the use of robots”. I
didn’t actually realize police was a noun until your comment.

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beamatronic
The ACLU should build their own robot that chases around the other robots and
keeps an eye on them

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pbhjpbhj
Cf
[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).

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foxyv
I'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...

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JulianMorrison
Let'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.

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Pigo
We learned nothing from Robocop... ..sorry I know this is serious

~~~
shadowgovt
We 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
Well 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.

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BacioiuC
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

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StacyRoberts
> "...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.

