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Comment by unixhero | Hacker News Reader

I actually wosh they would stop.

Cops will be using these to crush protestors in 10 years.

And the engineers involved will have had no idea such a thing would happen. After all, they only had the best of intentions, right? And if they didn’t do it someone else would have, right?

Cops manage to permanently injure or kill people with rubber bullets. I'm not really sure I can agree that the malice is in the tool and its creator. No matter how benign the tool you create, someone's going to abuse it.

Should fishing companies feel responsible because someone out there used fishing line to strangle people to death?

You don’t actually see no differences between making fishing line, making less-lethal bullets, and making next-gen weapon-hosting kill machines for the military.

Why would they do that when they can just use a horse or a wheeled/tracked vehicle?

Horses need to be trained (usually they don't like trampling people) and have high maintenance cost. As for the wheeled vehicle, it can be prevented access with roadblocks. Also it can't enter houses. Something that can walk over piles of rubble would be clearly very useful.

Because it's utterly terrifying?

Because you need a human to control it. A robot however could just be sent on patrol and its AI would do the rest leaving no one to blame.

Because then suddenly it's a tragical accident caused by a software fault, with no human responsible - just as most data breaches are framed as "cyber attacks" instead of what they actually are: negligence.

And the first “is a robot a human” test case will be when a protestor kills a police bot and they charge them with murdering an officer.

IIRC similar rules apply for some police K9 dog units, as in killing one is akin to killing a human one. I love dogs and all but... I think that's a negative precedent.

So? Better than using tanks!

The solution to police/state violence is political, not (anti-)technological.

> Better than using tanks!

In what way is it better? The results seem identical and processes sufficiently similar to be isomorphic.

Dang unpopular opinion on a tech forum I guess but I'm with you, and if I show the Boston Dynamics stuff to anyone not a tech enthusiast I'm likely to get a "why are they building executioner robots"

It's like Elon's global internet. There's definitely some lives to be improved with video chat deployed anywhere on earth, but I don't take that to be a benefit worth the cost of enabling worldwide real time surveillance and the deployment of remote control killer robots.

How is starlink any more a surveillance tool than existing ISP's? It should be pointed out that their approach won't be able to 'surveil' most in high density population areas, which is most people..

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