Armed Police Bots with Stun Guns 219
foniksonik writes "'On 28 June, Taser International of Arizona announced plans to equip robots with stun guns ... the new stun-capable robots could be used against civilians.' Non-lethal weapons experts are concerned that the robots will have to stun the suspected criminal for longer periods of time while awaiting human police to come make the official arrest. "If someone is severely punished by an autonomous robot, who are you going to take to a tribunal?" asks Steve Wright, a security expert at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK."
Wellllll... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wellllll... (Score:5, Funny)
"I'll be back... for the appeal."
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So a company in America says they're going to try mounting tasers on robots, and before the first prototype is even built, and long before the first police department decides to evaluate them, some guy on the other side of the Atlantic is worrying about who to sue, if the robots ever get used in his country?
Besides, isn't the answer obvious? You sue the organization or individual who decided to deploy the robot
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So a company in America says they're going to try mounting tasers on robots, and before the first prototype is even built, and long before the first police department decides to evaluate them, some guy on the other side of the Atlantic is worrying about who to sue, if the robots ever get used in his country?
Besides, isn't the answer obvious? You sue the organization or individual who decided to deploy the robot
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Why wont people stop..... (Score:2, Funny)
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Heheh. Zap!!
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ED209 says ... (Score:5, Insightful)
ED-209: [menacingly] Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.
[Mr. Kinney drops the pistol on the floor]
ED-209: [ED-209 advances, growling] You have 15 seconds to comply.
[Mr. Kinney tries to run away]
ED-209: You have 10 seconds to comply.
[entire room of people in full panic trying to stay out of the line of fire]
ED-209: You have 5 seconds to comply... four... three... two... one... I am now authorized to use physical force!
[ED-209 opens fire and shreds Mr. Kinney]
From the movie Robocop.
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Homo Habilis? What you think they are gone???? (Score:2)
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well this is the real explanation.
pretty funny.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Target acquired... (Score:2, Interesting)
On a more serious note, it's not like this was unexpected, and it's not the first of the line either. We're smack right in the middle of the robotic era, from mini automated vacuum cleaners, to hover spy robots, to shotgun equipped killing machines. This is just another step, and it's not going to end, ever.
Well......it could end for us, but not for the robot
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Now, I may be behind on things, but what autonomous robot systems, if any, are in use today with law enforcement? From my knowledge of el
Hovering drones with cameras (Score:2)
People we are talking Jessica Alba here (the only think that makes the Fantastic Four films worth seeing) Dark Angel had several episodes about them. They are a staple of William Gibson Cyberpunk stories. Enough prior art to gag a hippo so no patent needed.
Just wait till the oil runs out. (Score:2)
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Take out a policeman that's attacking you - Murder charge and the hatred of every policeman who misses his buddy.
Take out a taser wielding robot that's attacking you - property damage charge.
Please note for all the profiling bots - I do not necessarily advocate either of the above. Really
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Easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Easy... (Score:4, Interesting)
A long time ago I heard about a survey of bank customers who preferred automatic teller machines to human tellers because the computerised version is friendlier.
Now, cops are not known to be friendly, in fact, many problems arise when they depart from established procedures and start setting policy, rather than enforcing it.
I would say that a robot which is programmed to respond in a particular way would do so all the time. The real problem comes when Government finds out that robot police are so cheap they can put one every ten metres along every street in the city. That would worry me. Probably worth pointing out that while speed cameras pay for themselves we don't have millions of the things on the roads yet, at least where I live.
As long as we can trust our governments to want to stay popular, they might continue to use technology appropriately. I hope so, anyway.
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If you think the traffic laws themselves are unjust, you should strike those rather than their enforcement, as unequal or imper
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Speed cameras don't do anything about the Corsa which cut me up at 70mph on the motorway yesterday. Speed cameras don't stop the motorist who was all over the lane while yakking on his mobile phone. They don't stop the tailgating motorist who caused an accident which (thankfully) didn't look too serious but could have been far worse.
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On the next episode of "brilliant fucking ideas" (Score:5, Funny)
Diminishing Returns (Score:3, Funny)
and the result will be... (Score:2, Insightful)
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HACK ME
sign on their backs. This will happen faster then you can say ROBOT WARS.
You have 30 seconds to comply! (Score:2)
After seeing a video of a sentry bot with a machine gun onc, I'm not looking forward to further developments in this field:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YftEAbmMQ [youtube.com]
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Unless you had access to inside info, how would you know how many rounds of ammo are loaded in the sentry bot? Maybe it will be designed to fire thousands of rounds, make a click-click-click sound like a gun dry-firing and sit silently like it has run out of ammo. Then when you and your friends shout "It's out of ammo. Let's get it!", the sentry bot waits until you are within ten yards and then it opens fire a
Overkill. A marginally thicker jacket will do it. (Score:2)
Tell you what. I'll get worried about robots when they develop flinch reactions.
obligatory (Score:2)
There really has to be a good Ed-209 [wikipedia.org] joke in here somewhere.
Evil doers (Score:3)
Not Nonlethal (Score:2, Interesting)
In my research, I found this article: Prehosp Emerg Care. 2006 Oct-Dec;10(4):447-50 "Taser use in restraint-related deaths."
You can search pubmed [nih.gov] for this art
why not just (Score:2, Insightful)
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A hackers dream, hacking a guard bot, would it be an inside job if a electronic guard bot stuns every body and robs the place. As for restraining people, yeah, set off a smoke detector and the bot has to let you go or else in the event of a fire you could get roasted innocent victims.
Now I wonder who will be guaranteeing the quality of the software
re: the Taserbots (Score:2)
'Cause if MS gets the contract, we are in deep shit.
Cue the Tentacles jokes (Score:2)
Netting, which is kinda one shot and what if they got a knife? (most likely)
Or some sort of Tentacles. The artist of Hentai are obsessed by tentacles and with robots? I don't think we need to go any farther with this. My spider sense are tingling already. (opps thats not my spider sense)
Steve Wright? (Score:2)
Why only worry about "autonomous robots"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Where does it say that these robots are autonomous?
Computerworld [pcworld.com] describes them as remote cotrolled.
Even remote-controlled robots with stun guns would worry me. Anything that would make it easier for a cop to hurt someone without looking into the whites of their eyes would worry me.
The cop is wearing a face plate and body armor. The cop doesn't see the whites of your eyes.
So you would rather be taken out - permenently - by the S.W.A.T. team sniper or emerge f
Sore thumbs (Score:2)
Uniformed officers are easy enough to avoid, I can only imagine how many episodes of Americas' dumbest criminals are going to be based on criminals dumb enough to get anywhere near these robots.
business plan (Score:2)
1. Hack Sunbot3000, preferably installing Linux or BSD on it.
2. Program it to shock corrupt cops, Christian fundamentalists, members of the Bush administration, corporate executives, and other undesirable figures. Perhaps speech to text and a bit of grepping could be enough to determine who is/isn't an undesirab
3 Laws (Score:4, Interesting)
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Isn't this a violation? Oh, wait. It was human programming.
Don't forget the Fourth Law! (Score:2)
Those aren't laws... they are bits from a novel (Score:3, Interesting)
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Time to take out a policy (Score:2)
I'll be darned if they use my per-scrip-shun drugs for fuel! (Medicare "D" was just a ploy!)
--
Toro
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Truer words were never spoken.
The operators (Score:2)
Same
Civilian uses ? (Score:3, Funny)
If you're not doing anything wrong... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh... wait...
Who gets to read the source code? (Score:2, Funny)
In Soviet Russia buggy robot source code stuns you.
tribunal? (Score:2)
Does it matter? the IPCC will exonerate everybody anyway, like they always do.
Some Straightening Out (Score:2, Insightful)
Secondly, I find it interesting that according to the official announcement from Taser International [taser.com], this is coming about as part of a "strategic alliance" with iRobot, the company who's building robots for the military. According to Taser Int'l, "This combination of capabilities will allow law enforcement, federal, and milita
There would be some positives. (Score:4, Insightful)
Cops have caught a lot of flack lately for over aggressiveness and in a lot of those cases the reason is the cop has to be aggressive is to protect himself. With a robot we can let it basically do totally suicidal things to try and subdue the suspect without harming him.
Also cops can be intimidating when it's not necessarily good to be intimidating. If a big guy with a gun and a nightstick comes after you then your fight or flight responses kick in and you might start acting irrationally. If a weak robot without weapons attempts to arrest you it could lead to much more calm thought and actions on both sides of the fence. Of course thats assuming the suspect to be arrested would act rationally in the first place.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Think of it as an electric fence, without the fence.
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Good luck with that. The identity of the operator will be classified under Homeland Security regulations. Just try to identify the operators of the surveillance drones now appearing over your city.
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I, for one (Score:5, Funny)
A human could take a robot easily (Score:2)
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I think what you're saying is that robots aren't intelligent enough to stand up to an unarmed, or nearly unarmed, human being. Now that's true, if you put them on nearly equal terms physically. On the other hand, there's no reason to do that, just like in a video game where the machine's AI offsets it's own relative stupidity by creating opponents that shoot faster or more ac
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Taking an extreme case, suppose you took an M-1 Abrams Main Battle Tank and set it up to run autonomously (or fitted it out for remote control.) Hell, you'd have something resembling one of Keith Laumer's Bolos if you did that. In any event, a bare-handed human wouldn't stand much of a chance as the robot ground him up beneath its treads. Human beings have physical limits, but you can scale up a machine as far as you like.
I'd put money on unarmed humans winning a war against semi-intelligent automated or even remotely controlled battle tanks. Tanks only work because they're backed up by humans. Out on it's own it's dead.
Stick or not, if you saw that thing coming, what would you do?
Watch. Ambush. Tank trap.
Hell, people aren't durable or particularly smart either.
Show me a machine which lasts 70 years. Human bone is stronger and lighter than concrete and human intelligence is a normal distribution, we have genius as well as stupidity. To top it off we can communicate. We're the top predator on the planet (by far) despite being smaller, slow
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Develop Technology that allows you to carry a machine gun, a shotgun, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, a railgun and ammunition for all of these, all while jumping and running like a champion athlete.
Also develop technology that allows you to instantly treat any injury by merely swallowing a special package.
Then all you have from what you're describing is a boss level.
Ahhnold (Score:2)
oh, a web page with photos (Score:2)
In related news .. (Score:2)
Spokespeople for the employer sited a "surge in demand" as the mai
An accident waiting to happen (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm betting these robots won't be able to smell gas. That's just one situation and limitation. Everything they can't do that a person can is a possible problem.
Hmm... (Score:2)
This year it is robots with tazors, next year, we get Robots with AI.
Maybe something should just not be done. Maybe this will make people obey traffic laws. We could use a few around here to keep the bicyclists off the sidewalks, pedestrians from j-walking, and red-light runners, as these are against the law.
Industrial Accidents... (Score:2)
UK Cameras (Score:2)
I can't wait (Score:2)
Re:My Question for Humanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Intent to do harm??? How can a robot determine that? As a helpful hint, humans have a problem figuring that out - that's why we have courts, juries and appeals. But here a dumb robot is suddenly capable to tell if you have an intent to do harm? For example, can this wonderful robot tell the difference between a weaponless pocket thief and a group of boys armed with super-soakers? Any generic machine would taser the boys and leave the thief alone; to do it the other way around you need to understand far more about our society that a modern excuse for a computer can possibly do.
P.S. Tasering a child can kill the child; if that happens I have no pity for any official who promoted the idea. At this stage of development of an AI I can trust the computer only to show a letter 'a' on the screen when I press the 'a' key.
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I think it can be summarised like this:
- Current AIs are not clever enough to be in charge of weapons, because they aren't capable of understanding when they should be used.
- Science fiction AIs are too clever to be in charge of weapons, because they always use them to take over the world.
On the whole, it sounds like a really really bad idea to give an AI a gun, no matter how smart
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To be fair, a real cop would shoot the boys anyways.
Then the thief would get robbed by a thugg who actually had a weapon on the way home from the heist.
But seriously, I don't think the first application of this robot is to have it patrol willy nilly. They'd probably send it in when a real cop wouldn't do when dealing with barricaded suspects.
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You are very likely correct; but what about the second, and other applications?
They'd probably send it in when a real cop wouldn't do when dealing with barricaded suspects.
You'd need some Arkonide battle robots for that, complete with force fields and particle weapons, powered by a built-in thermonuclear reactor. The mobile robots that we have today are clumsy, stupid, blind and powerless to inflict any harm (or even ta
A boon for enforcement equality (Score:2)
You can also trust the computer to not get more aggravated because the suspect is of a wrong race. You can also trust it to not engage in selective enforcement [wikipedia.org] — the machine will either prosecute no one or every suspect (as much as the time allows).
The taser-ing may be too much for the current state of the Art of Computer Programming, but issuing speeding tickets ought to
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Be careful what you wish for. We have an extensive speed camera network in the UK, and over a period of time they do reduce average speed, but it's received criticism for a number of reasons:
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Having a policeman there — on occasion — is only worse. The camera, that tickets everyone, leaves a chance, that enough people, who go to town hall meetings and otherwise affect the law-making, will get bitten and revise the speed limit eventually.
Otherwise the speed-trap will be perpetual.
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Just have it cast "Detect Evil" periodically and "Smite Evil" on any evil so detected. Add some random wandering algorithm and there you have it, and automated paladin :).
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You must not be an MS Word user. Sure, it *might* display 'a' when you type 'a' - or it might decide to indent, start a bulleted list, knock an illustration or two down to the next page, reformat your columns, and summon an annoying animated dog to ask you inane questions about your intentions.
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I guess you weren't around for LEAA in the late 60s when Nixon gave brain-dead redneck cops all over the country the high-tech toys of the day (helicopters with gas dispensers,
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2) He was told to produce ID or leave. He refused to produce ID. The Kampus Kops called the real cops, and when they got there, HE WAS IN THE PROCESS OF LEAVING THE LIBRARY. That's right- he was given the choice to show ID or leave, so he was leaving. Then the cops GRABBED him even though he was following the instructions (show id or LEAVE). They handcuffed him THEN tasered him several times.
And you defend them?
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2) non-lethal? Not really. Less lethal, probably. Certainly more given to torture via electrical burns.
3) honest? Depends on what you mean. Possibly less likely to accept bribes, at least on the scene. In any other way? Why would you think that?
4) human nature? Yep. In full force. And unmitigated by any sympathy that seeing someone writhing in agony might inspire.
5) human weaknesses? Some yes, some no. Depends on just what you're thinking of.
All i
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Here [theage.com.au]