Hacker News Reader

Comment by radiorental | Hacker News Reader

It's really hard to see how a wepaonised version could be of practical use in an active situation. Granted, it has that nice Hollywood sci-fi look about it, I feel it wouldn't be any more accurate than throwing a grenade into a room.

I would imagine one group opposed to such a device would be the police themselves. They are as likely to get shot as anyone else.

I think a more practical application would be camera mounted infantry for SWAT teams. And, based on some of the incidents we've seen recently, assessing situations is where many interactions go south.

View on HN

>It's really hard to see how a wepaonised version could be of practical use in an active situation.

Dallas Police used a bomb defusing robot to blow a guy up... so it's not too hard to imagine.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/8/12128230/dallas-police-bom...

This is super edge case, and the robot didn't shoot.. it placed a bomb. This is apples and oranges to putting a gun on a mobile robot and have it effectively target a human.

That seems like a distinction without a difference. If the bomb disposal robot had been remotely controlled to detonate the bomb it was carrying while standing in front of the suspect, would that be different in any ethical or legal way from a Boston Dynamics robot being remotely controlled to pull the trigger of a gun while standing in front of a suspect?

I suppose one small difference would be whether the bomb disposal robot in that situation was destroyed by the explosion it caused, since it presumably wouldn't be destroyed by shooting a gun (unless the suspect returned fire or had a dead man's switch on his own bomb). I highlight this difference not because of the ethics of sending robots to their "deaths", but the minor practical consideration of whether a given robot is considered reusable, that is, able to amass a potentially unlimited number of kills.

From my perspective the difference is the control design loop.

To place a bomb is a linear bang-bang controller (pun intended) And the decision is already made wrt collateral damage

But to target a moving object from a moving object holding a gun on a 3-dof mount is an order of magnitude harder to control and the question of collateral damage is an unknown.

>the question of collateral damage is an unknown.

Sure... but collateral damage is already a problem, as humans are very poor at actually hitting targets. People who are trained to shoot in high pressure situations are only in the area of 18-30% accurate.

I suspect if your goal was 30%< accuracy during an active shooting, it's absolutely within the realm of possibility today.

>According to a 2008 RAND Corporation study evaluating the New York Police Department’s firearm training, between 1998 and 2006, the average hit rate during gunfights was just 18 percent. When suspects did not return fire, police officers hit their targets 30 percent of the time.

Mounting a facial recognition face-tracking camera-gun combo is somehow going to be inaccurate? Walk the dog round the corner of a bank-heist hostage situation, have it stand on guard and shoot whenever it gets a human verified lock?

I know saying use 'technology' is like saying use 'magic', but all of this seems totally within the boundaries of what is available today or near-tomorrow at the very least.

As for cops being shot up by one of these, I am not sure many criminals would see the value of investing significant amount of money and know-how into one. Especially as it would easily be traced back to a purchaser.

SWAT teams with just the recon implementation is worrisome enough as that's clearly just a stone-throw to a weaponized version once they gain confidence in it.

> bank-heist hostage situation, have it stand on guard and shoot whenever it gets a human verified lock

It's about time someone disrupted the field of killing hostages.

Why can't we do the same thing with a swarm of cheap drones with a single shot zip gun? Navigate to within a couple feet and shot them in the face?

The future is bleak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlO2gcs1YvM

Because then you grab yourself another swarm of the same cheap drones and program them to shoot their zipguns at the enemy drones.

This discussion reminded me of a scene from the movie The Jackal in which an assassin basically mounts a rifle on a three-axis motorized mount, connects a calibrated camera to a mounted scope, and then mounts the thing in a truck/van and parks it near the target and uses it over a laptop w/ wireless connection. I think this was in the 90s and I remember thinking, at the time, video bandwidth and latency would be the biggest obsticle but now days it seems like this setup would be near trivial.

When I just tried to google the scene I saw an ISIS setup of virtually the same thing :/

I can't speak for police, but for military, i could see this being an actual life saver for an infantry rifle platoon or medical emergency. It could run in with extra ammunition or medical supplies enough to stabilize any injured. This same thing could be used for civilian emergency situations or disaster relief for hard to reach areas that a normal vehicle might have trouble reaching.

Why spend money on training and maintaining a human infantry at all??

If one of these things, maybe the more advanced biped version could be bought for $1M it would have to be cheaper and more reliable than a human. No salary, no pension, no health insurance, no time off, no training hours, just pure measurable, reliable killing. I guess there would be a huge crew of maintenance engineers though, but maybe automate the servicing too.

For one, machines haven't (yet) proven as capable as them in dynamic situations. The tech both hardware and software simply isn't there yet. The fact that these Boston Dynamics robots are both loud, and have a relatively short battery life cements this current fact. This problem will likely be overcome in the next 5-10 years or less. That kind of makes it a nonstarter in and of itself. As it stands today, it is the same reason you don't (yet) have machines replacing fast food workers. The economics for most places or the actual tech simply isn't there 100%. Not yet at least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com