They’re Normalizing Police Robots By Calling
Them “Dogs”
By Caitlin Johnstone
August 02, 2021"Information
Clearing House" -
Hawaii police are defending their use of pandemic
relief funds for a robotic “police dog” made by
Boston Dynamics which scans homeless people’s eyes
to see if they have a fever.
“If you’re homeless and looking for temporary
shelter in Hawaii’s capital, expect a visit from a
robotic police dog that will scan your eye to make
sure you don’t have a fever,” says a
new report from Associated Press. “That’s just
one of the ways public safety agencies are starting
to use Spot, the best-known of a new commercial
category of robots that trot around with animal-like
agility.”
“Acting Lt. Joseph O’Neal of the Honolulu Police
Department’s community outreach unit defended the
robot’s use in a media demonstration earlier this
year,” AP reports. “He said it has protected
officers, shelter staff and residents by scanning
body temperatures between meal times at a shelter
where homeless people could quarantine and get
tested for COVID-19. The robot is also used to
remotely interview individuals who have tested
positive.”
Hawaii Police Department starts using Boston Dynamics robot dogs in order to avoid any unnecessary social contact amid the pandemic
This has understandably elicited criticism from
civil rights advocates.
“Because these people are houseless it’s
considered OK to do that,” Hawaii ACLU legal
director Jongwook Kim told AP. “At some point it
will come out again for some different use after the
pandemic is over.”
This report comes just days after we learned that
police in Winnipeg have also obtained a “Spot” robot
which they intend to use in hostage situations.
The Winnipeg Police Service is set to acquire
a pricey dog-shaped robot, to be used in hostage
situations, that’s already been ditched by
police in New York City.
“Spot” is made by Boston Dynamics, which
sells the device for US$74,500. Winnipeg police
are spending $257,000 to acquire and use Spot.
The 32-kilogram robot “has the ability to
navigate obstacles, uneven terrain (and)
situations where our traditional robot platforms
can’t go into,” said Insp. Brian Miln at a news
conference Wednesday.
Months earlier the New York Police Department
cancelled its lease of the same type of robot they
obtained last year following public outcry. More
from AP:
The expensive machine arrived with
little public notice or explanation, public
officials said, and was deployed to already
over-policed public housing. Use of the
high-tech canine also clashed with Black Lives
Matter calls to defund police operations and
reinvest in other priorities.
The company that makes the robots,
Boston Dynamics, says it’s learned from the New
York fiasco and is trying to do a better job of
explaining to the public — and its customers —
what Spot can and cannot do. That’s become
increasingly important as Boston Dynamics
becomes part of South Korean carmaker Hyundai
Motor Company, which in June closed an $880
million deal for a controlling stake in the
robotics firm.
To be absolutely clear, there is not actually any
legitimate reason for any normal person to refer to
these machines as a “robotic dog”, or a “high-tech
canine”, or by a cutesy cliché name for a pet. These
are robots. Robots that are being used by police
forces on civilian populations. If the robots being
used had two legs, or eight, they would not be able
to apply such cuddly wuddly labels, and public alarm
bells would be going off a lot louder.
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Which is of course the idea. As AP noted above,
Boston Dynamics is acutely aware that it has a PR
situation on its hands and needs to manage public
perception if it wants to mainstream the use of
these machines and make a lot of money. Because it’s
a known fact that westerners tend to be a lot
more sympathetic to dogs than even to other humans,
arbitrarily branding a quadrupedal enforcement robot
a “dog” helps facilitate this agenda.
On-the-ground robot policing is becoming
normalized today under the justification of Covid-19
precautions in the same way
police around the world have normalized
the use of drones to police coronavirus
restrictions, at the same time police departments
are
rolling out dystopian systems for predicting
future criminality using computer programs and
databases.
Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University
is an expert on police and military
technologies, and last year correctly predicted
this pack-hunting mode of operation would
happen. “The giveaway here is the phrase ‘a
non-cooperative human subject’,” he told me:
“What we have here are the beginnings of
something designed to enable robots to hunt down
humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is
perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they
will become autonomous and become armed.
We can also expect such systems to be
equipped with human detection and tracking
devices including sensors which detect human
breath and the radio waves associated with a
human heart beat. These are technologies already
developed.”
These developments always elicit nervous jokes
about Terminator movies and the idea of Skynet
robots going rogue and enslaving humanity, but the
far more realistic and immediate concern is this
technology being used on humans by other humans.
For as long as there have been governments and
rulers, there has been an acute awareness in elite
circles that the public vastly outnumber those who
rule over them and could easily overwhelm and oust
them if they ever decided to. Many tools have been
implemented to address this problem, from public
displays of cruelty to keep the public cowed and
obedient, to the circulation of propaganda and
power-serving religious doctrines, but at no time
has any power structure in history ever produced a
guaranteed protection against the possibility of
being overthrown by their subjects who vastly
outnumber them.
The powerful have also long been aware that robot
and drone technologies can offer such a protection.
Once the legal and technological infrastructure
for robotic security systems has been rolled out,
all revolutionary theory that’s ever been written
goes right out the window, because the proletariat
cannot rise up and overthrow their oppressors if
their oppressors control technologies which enable
them to quash any revolution using a small security
team of operators.
Or, better yet, fully automated technologies
which can fire upon civilians without the risk of
human sympathy taking the side of the people.
According to a recent UN report, a Turkish-made
drone may have been the first ever to attack humans
with deadly force without being specifically ordered
to.
At least one autonomous drone operated by artificial
intelligence (AI) may have killed people
for the first time last year in Libya, without
any humans consulted prior to the attack,
according to a U.N. report.
According to a March report from the U.N.
Panel of Experts on Libya, lethal
autonomous aircraft may have “hunted down and
remotely engaged” soldiers and convoys fighting
for Libyan general Khalifa Haftar. It’s not
clear who exactly deployed these killer robots,
though remnants of one such machine found in
Libya came from the Kargu-2 drone, which is made
by Turkish military contractor STM.
So at this point we’re essentially looking at a
race to see if the oligarchic empire can manufacture
the necessary environment to allow the use of
robotic security forces to lock their power in place
forever before the masses get fed up with the
increasing inequalities and abuses of the status quo
and decide to force a better system into existence.
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