Massachusetts state police have been testing out Boston Dynamics' robot dog
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In seconds, dozens, maybe even hundreds of these mechanical beasts gallop towards the protestors and begin a herding process not unlike a sheep dog. The attack is swift and chaotic to the humans but highly organized and planned by an AI system controlling them as a flock. Pepper spray and tear gas fills the air as people are chased and intimidated by the mechanical creatures. Protesters who dare attack the "dogs" are recorded by the dogs as they are all equipped with real time video and charged with destruction of police property after arrest. Facial recognition is used to locate high value targets such as political figures or organizers. The terrorfied humans are quickly disoriented, broken up and herded into groups. Surrounded on all sides by robot dogs, their arms raised with their tear gas/pepper spray nozzles at the ready. Finally the human police force rolls up in full riot gear and enough plasticuffs to wrap around the earth.
The protestors are quietly arrested, no one was badly hurt, and not a single officer was scratched in the roundup. Suddenly, a scared protestor bolts past the line, prompting two dogs to instantly give chase and taser the offender. Easy peasy. It's not even noon yet and the protest is fully quelled. The same scene repeats itself all over the world. A man looks down from his ivory tower on the scene below, smiles, and sips coffee from his alphabet security branded mug. I weep for the future.
I’m sympathetic - I guess - to your general point, but conflicts are dynamic.
For China Once your getting to the point of a riot its cheaper to bus in police / paramilitary from a distant province and have them kick some peoples heads in
Isn't that just wild? Who needs ED-209 terrorizing the streets when you could have a robotic 'dog' that could just shove its way through a crowd and start emitting an ear-slitting cacophony of disruptive sounds to encourage a crowd to disperse them. Imagine, a line of them directing sound in one direction, creating a disorienting and potentially painful 'wall of sound' slowly pushing the crowd away from them.
If that fails they fan out into the crowd, lower to the ground and and bring their limbs in to protect them and start puffing out a mist of pepper spray straight up into the air while its 'packmates' are similarly spread out throughout the crowd.
If an officer goes down, or a citizen, you can move the dogs to their location and have them start a circle around them to create a defensive deterrent from violent protesters or a stampeding crowd while using a speaker to reassure the wounded person (if conscious) that help is on the way. As help approaches you can even have them create a corridor, nudging people to make a hole in the crowd or again, using a painful sound, to encourage people to move out of the way. You could also use one or more to ferry out body armor, additional ammunition or weapons systems, medical supplies etc. Depending on the situation a drone might not be usable (weight, too conspicuous, low clearance) and these would be more practical.
You could probably slightly modify and use these dogs in a combat/shooting situation as well. Have one run out and hook a clip to the drag handle on an injured person's carrier (body armor) and either use a winch back at a safe location to pull them to safety or simply send enough of these units out to pull them back under the power of the dogs.
For that matter you could arm one of these too with less than lethal or a more traditional round. Send a couple into a building under remote control just ahead of people when clearing a building.
You could also equip these with any number of sensor packages and send them into areas that might be dangerous to humans not wearing a considerable amount of PPE. They could probably cover more distance, and go faster, than tracked robots (that often have wires running back to the operator). They could go in under radio control sending back live video or go in 'roomba' style and explore for x amount of time before returning with whatever data they capture.
>But there’s something different about Spot. Calo, the professor, acknowledged there’s not a big operational difference between the robot dog and something like a more typically robot-looking PackBot. But, he said, Spot feels different. He pointed to a statement animal-rights group PETA put out, saying that it’s not cruel to kick Spot, because it’s not a real dog.
The main difference seems to be that it looks like a dog instead of a miniature tank. This may give it some advantages in rough terrain, navigating stairs, etc.
Otherwise, it is just another remotely controlled vehicle.
Probably not cost-effective, but at least it's getting used.
Tasers were heralded as a way to reduce casualties because they were a less-than-lethal replacement for guns, but now cops are still shooting unarmed people dead and using tasers as legal torture devices.
US police doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to the equation "problems + more equipment = less problems".
The problem of law enforcement killing people also has little to do with gun ownership. The frequent (or at least frequent enough to be concerning) shootings of unarmed black men for example are generally excused with police officers saying they were "afraid for their lives". This can only either be explained with terrible training or plain old racism (i.e. black men seem more threatening by default to the extent that an unarmed black man is considered more threatening than an armed white man), or most likely a mixture of both.
There's a lot wrong with how police in the US is trained and held accountable. Gun ownership is the smallest contributor to that problem.
Police officers only ever say that to lay the groundwork for a legal self-defense argument.
>Gun ownership is the smallest contributor to that problem
On the one hand, maybe, but on the other hand, it's difficult to stab someone from a distance, so the effect of guns as a force multiplier is relevant.
Or on the other hand, being afraid for your life is one of the motivators for resorting to deadly force.
> On the one hand, maybe, but on the other hand, it's difficult to stab someone from a distance, so the effect of guns as a force multiplier is relevant.
It's a good thing that human beings are not equipped with appendages on their lower body that enable locomotion.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/08/a-closer-lo...
The idea that they are at particular risk from random people with weapons is not supported by statistics.
The current level of violence pretty clearly (to me) justifies police having access to weapons. It doesn't justify using them quickly.
This may be true (I don't know), however one thing is the risk and the perceived risk, and as humans, they're different.
Because telephones and loudspeakers already exist, and law enforcement clearly doesn't want to replace no-knock raids, because they could already do so if they chose.
This is just a land-based drone, expect law enforcement to put it to the same use as military drones - surveillance and violence. Maybe bomb disposal/retrieval.
Don't forget bomb placement.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-texas-crime/no-charges-fo...
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/8/8/20747198/philadel...
>Tasers were heralded as a way to reduce casualties because they were a less-than-lethal replacement for guns, but now cops are still shooting unarmed people dead and using tasers as legal torture devices.
>US police doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to the equation "problems + more equipment = less problems".
As much as I hate the entrenched corruption the MA state police stands for they seem to be content to waste taxpayer money on useless toys and enriching themselves (recurring falsified time-card scandal anyone?). It is thankfully very rare for them to kill people under questionable circumstances so I can't complain too much about them wasting a little more on a cool toy. This is kind of how the deal works, the state is basically buying their good behavior and letting them have toys a reasonable parent would say no to is part of that.
I generally agree with you about giving additional hardware to police not turning out well for the people being policed though.
Tasers are routinely used to attempt to deescalate situations.
The problem is though they just aren't terrible effective and often fail. Simply wearing thick clothing can't prevent penetration, distance and wind can prevent them from even making contact, batteries age, etc. An enraged suspect, such as one on drugs or drunk, can also rip them out of their skin or outright not be deterred.
Here's one study that backs up what I've said above
> A total of 2,395 use-of-force reports indicated conflict ended at the first “iteration” (the officers’ first application of force). In the first iteration, TASER’s were deployed 2,113 times. Out of these deployments, 1,459 ended the conflict at the first TASER application (69-percent success rate); chemical agents had a 65-percent success rate; impact weapons had a 45-percent success rate at the first iteration; takedown had a 42-percent success rate; and compliance holds had a 16-percent success rate.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=2460...
69% on the first attempt, when the officer's life is potentially in risk (and anyone else at the scene), is a pretty lousy success rate.
You can find more data (just be vigilant as the manufacturers like to muddy the waters with their own claims) if you'd wish to continue looking.
TBH the problem seems to be that US police is often trained to "deescalate situations" by shutting them down quickly and forcefully rather than actually deescalating, i.e. carefully defusing the situation.
Tasers are violent, less-than-lethal (i.e. potentially fatal) weapons. If they're ineffective at reducing casualties and decreasing the overall use of violent force, they need to be removed.
Less than lethal options exist because in some scenarios the fact of the matter is you have to deploy a less than lethal option, shoot them or get hurt/dead.
While you might be able to talk your best friend down when he's mad that they put lettuce on his sandwich, that doesn't work when you're talking to someone that doesn't have respect for authority and is drunk/high/mad/mentally unwell and wants their way.
- Pepper spray/mace, despite spraying in a stream, are NOT targeted devices. They will immediately spread to the surrounding the environment and while the intended target may take the brunt of it, everyone in the immediate area will feel it to some degree
- Less than lethal rounds, like a rubber bullet, can be considerably more lethal than a taser
- Tasers can miss, fail to seat, and yes can cause death in some circumstances
- Bullets, at best, are going to cause permanent damage and at worst are instantly fatal.
I urge you to see if your local law enforcement has a community outreach program and if they do to actually attempt to talk to some officers about the sort of things they deal with daily and how they personally feel about their various offensive tools.
I come from a law enforcement family, I have many friends in local, state and federal law enforcement roles. The extreme majority of law enforcement officers hope they NEVER have to draw their firearm or even need to deploy a taser or spray someone but the fact of the matter is when police are called to deal with someone that is being disruptive, or actively attempting to harm others, they've already thrown reason out the window and there is a realistic chance they're going to attempt to harm the officer(s).
A taser is a deescalation tool. Simply drawing it can be enough to back some people down although as the study I linked shows You've got roughly a 1 in 3 chance that even sending electricity into someone isn't enough to get them to comply after the first round. That alone should tell you something "shocking 1 out of 3 people causes them to continue to resist" is exactly why law enforcement carry firearms (again, that they hope they never have to draw and certainly never use).
You didn't even have to say that, it was obvious from the lengths you go to in order to excuse the murders and brutality committed by police officers in the US.
You can talk about "but what if a polar bear attacks you" all day but that won't ever excuse why it is literally every week that new video evidence of US police officers brutalising or murdering people comes out and barely any of the officers involved ever are seriously punished for it.
If this violence was inevitable because of the gun ownership, you would see similar events in Canada or Switzerland. If this violence was necessary to protect officers from civilians, you would see vastly more stories about injured or killed police officers in the UK.
That you think your scenario of the muscular angry brute looking for "targets" is even remotely plausible should tell you something. Suspects are suspects, perps are perps, not enemy soldiers or wild animals.
Police officers in other countries are trained to deal with these situations without shooting unarmed people. How little do you think about your friends and family that you think they're incapable of learning how to do that?
Instead your peers get dehumanising pseudo-intellectualism like this: https://www.policeone.com/police-products/training-products/...
Yes, all cops.
992 people were shot and killed by police in 2018 [1] with 686,665 sworn officers [2] in the country. For a little comparison to killings by civilians - Chicago alone had 530 murders that year [3].
In 2018, there were an estimated 1,206,836 violent crimes [2].
106 law enforcement officers were killed in line-of-duty incidents in 2018. Of these, 55 officers died as a result of felonious acts [4]
So 'the lengths I go' are simply basing my opinion in facts and not emotion.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...
[2] https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...
[3] https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/12/30/18314619/chicago-s-2...
[4] https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...
When our backgrounds are distant from each other, we need to connect across those distances, not become aggressive. There are two options: conversation or war. Here we want conversation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we had to ask you about this another time recently too. Would you please review the guidelines and use this site in the intended spirit? It's not always easy, but it's work everyone here needs to put in, if we are to prevent the commons from burning.
HN seriously needs a way to hide (mute/block) specific users' comments rather than just relying on moderators or mob voting/flagging to decide what's "appropriate".
> the effective politics you produce by what content you do police
People tend to overinterpret that. Politically, HN is pluralistic (all major positions are represented, as you'd expect in any large population sample), but it turns out that pluralism is experienced by each side as bias in favor of the other side.
This is mostly an artifact of HN being a non-siloed community site. Nearly every other place where people encounter political views on the internet has already been pre-filtered (by subreddits, follow lists, friend lists, etc.) That's what everyone's used to, so when they walk into a place that doesn't work that way, they quickly encounter a much higher frequency of opposing if not offensive viewpoints. This is painful; it feels a bit like getting smacked in the face. Because this painful experience doesn't come with any explanation, people reach for the handiest and in a way most comforting explanation—not, "oh, this is about what you'd expect from a statistical distribution", but rather "this place is a (SJW|alt-right) cesspool". Even if the distribution were more in your favor, you'd still feel this way, because we're so primed to notice the things we dislike and to weight them more strongly.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(I know you said you didn't want to engage about this, but it comes up so often that every now and then I feel like writing out my latest take on the topic.)
You know how a lot of people is upset with companies like google for the lack of humanity of their moderation policies? like when a youtube channel is unfairly demonetised because an algorithm incorrectly flagged it?
Imagine that, but with the choice to maim or kill.
I don't think I'm being naïve - at the very least it means that BD doesn't want the bad PR from being a robotic armaments company at the moment, which affords time for various groups to raise concerns, awareness, and petition for legislation guarding against it - also as mentioned in the article - on the other side of the agreement, i.e. disallow police forces from buying or using weapons that are not in the direct control of a human, or whatever the wording might be.
They don't "fear for their life", and don't need to react in seconds.
Just don't go taking over any aircraft carriers.
Sci-Fi seems to be a key factor in the inspiration of engineers. I'm left astounded at how quickly things proceed from "mm... feasible" to "on the market".
Say someone is trying to create a glowing plant (there are numerous companies and individuals attempting to make these that glow bright enough to be commercially viable) and they accidentally encourage some mutation that can spread in the wild that ultimately results in creating a dead end in the species with a bunch of plants that can only be cloned and you end up with a precarious situation cough like we have with Cavendish bananas cough.
Or what if someone is trying to cure their own disease and uses some bacteria or virus to deliver the gene edit to themselves and it also happened to pick up a mutation that makes it highly contagious to certain individuals and causes some unintended issue.
Or someone wants to help sequester carbon so they try and engineer some incredibly fast growing tree (I know of people actively looking into this) and go plant some in the wild and create the next terrible invasive species like kudzu.
Or someone actually sits there trying to intentionally create some super-bacteria or super-virus because they are mentally unwell and hate the world and creates something that makes the Spanish Flu's death count look like amateur hour.
Also If you had a power source that small for that amount of power aircraft caries would be as obsolete as a pre dreadnought battle ship.
You would be well into in the SF sense "Panzers" if not actual a "Gunship" (SSTO) armed with CREWS (Beam weapons) of various types.