“There are many reasons why it’s a bad idea to arm robots,” says Peter Asaro, an associate professor at the New School in New York who studies the automation of policing. He believes that this decision is part of a broader movement aimed at militarizing the police. “You can conceive of a potential use case where this would be useful in the extreme, like in hostage situations, but there are all kinds of mission creep,” he says. “It’s harmful to the public, and particularly to communities of color and poor communities.”
Asaro also downplays the suggestion that the robots’ weapons could be replaced with bombs, saying that the use of bombs in a civilian context could never be justified. (Some police forces in the United States are currently using bomb-carrying robots to intervene; in 2016, Dallas police used a bomb-carrying robot to kill a suspect in what experts called an “unprecedented” moment .)
Introducing killer robots would also actively harm the police force’s ability to interact with the community in other ways, Asaro says. “There aren’t enough applications where these things could be useful,” he says. Meanwhile, other areas where robots are important — like passing phones and other objects in hostage negotiations — would be tarnished by suspicion that a phone-carrying robot might actually be a robot armed.
But beyond the practicalities, there is a more fundamental problem: robots of any type, even remotely controlled, should not be capable of killing humans. For Aitken, the idea of even considering allowing robots to make life-or-death decisions is misguided. “There is a clear disconnect between the action and the person making the decision,” he says. “It is the human who makes the decision to act, but the robot would physically carry it out on orders from a person who may or may not have a full assessment of the situation.”
San Francisco supervisors who decided to shift allegiance around the use of deadly force for robots were welcomed by activists who sought to prevent the decision made last week. “Thanks to passionate Bay Area residents and the leadership of Supervisors Preston, Ronen and Walton, the Board today voted against SFPD’s use of deadly force with remote-controlled robots,” said Matthew Guariglia , policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
But it’s only a temporary reprieve: Supervisors will reconsider the decision at a later date, and they’ll likely come up with an equally strong response, Guariglia says. “If the Rules Committee revisits the issue, the community must come together to stop this dangerous use of technology,” he said.
