ok, but honestly, it is unfortunate. you know how weāre always passing around thatĀ āyou are not immune to propagandaā meme? this is the propaganda itās talking about.
itās cute dancing robots! they have a cute robot dog! itās cute! itās friendly!
well, the robot dog friend? cute little jumpy guy, does some careful ballet-esque steps, often between the humanoid robots? so far, both the boston police and the nypd (heads up: autoplaying video, with sound) haveĀ ādeployedā the cute dog friend. both departments say that the robots are being used asĀ āobservation devicesā, sent into buildings with lights and a camera that sends a videofeed back to the cops.Ā
part of why i think this video (and others like it) is so interesting is because boston dynamics has defended police use of the robots, saying that thereās a clause that the robots canāt be used in a way that wouldĀ āphysically harm or intimidate peopleā. i donāt know about you, but if i were at, say, a protest, or honestly literally anywhere, and a robot dog started running towards me, iād be pretty fucking intimidated. iād assume that it was going to hurt me. if one of the humanoid robots were running towards me, iād assume it was straight-up about to kill me.Ā
but these videos do a lot of work to erode that assumption. how can anyone claim that theyāre intimidated by, say, a line of robot dogs at a protest? the robot dogs do funny dances online! the video above has been live for about two months, and it has thirty million views. people love them! they can dance!
so when they start being used as mobile security cameras, or when they start being used to maintain a perimeter or for crowd control or whatever, itās not really a violation of the contract. the robots are friendly! my bet is that when they start setting them out to do security or whateverāand i donāt doubt that theyāll be used for security, etcāthey might even do funny little dances and interact with people who stop to gawk at them. anything to normalize increasingly autonomous roboticized policing. get one of the humanoid ones out in the field, and itās a remarkably short step to autonomous, mobile cctvāthat can also detain you if it doesnāt like what youāre doing, or if there was a crime and youāre in the area, or if your face looks like someone from a database, orā
and all that assumes, of course, that the no-harm clause stays there forever, and that police departments, so famous for their love of doing things by the book, adhere to it. but just for fun, watch that video again, and imagine even one of those robots weaponized, outfitted with evenĀ ānonlethalā crowd control.Ā
iām not arguing that the robots are inherently bad, or that thereās no reasonable use for them, even by cops. but the time to get critical of them is now, not in five or ten years when their use has been largely normalized. this is cute propaganda, but itās still propaganda, and we should acknowledge it for what it is.