Robot police dog that scans homeless people sparks debate | Hacker News Reader

Robot police dog that scans homeless people sparks debate

euronews.com

51 pointsunderscore_ku60 comments

Probably worth noting that “scans homeless people” means "scanning people’s body temperatures at a shelter where they could quarantine and get tested for COVID-19” and that the robot "is also used to remotely interview individuals who have tested positive for the virus”. Still out of the ordinary but a little less dystopian in tone.

Agreed, this isn't a robot used for intimidation or as a police-presence replacement, its used in the same way a disease-resistant social-worker would have been used, if such a person exists.

They do exist now.

Wait until someone argues that they need to not be disease resistant to have empathy.

> isn't a robot used for intimidation or as a police-presence replacement

Not _yet_

I don't trust the police either, but a two-foot-tall mobile camera with a top speed of less than 4MPH is not a slippery slope to sinister murderbots, any more than letting police drive cars is a slippery slope to them buying giant spiked steamrollers to crush homeless people with.

And at least the AUP prohibits "weaponization of the robot", so we should all be safe.

Either that, or departments have already asked for that, hence why it is called out.

I don't think adding a pandemic makes it less dystopian.

Going around scanning for body temperature definitely makes it less dystopian than going around scanning for people's identities, which was the impression I got from the title.

A $75k surveillance weapon decked out with cameras, sensors, lasers, onboard compute, and hooked up to the network is "just" going around playing School Nurse.

Keep dreaming.

The text is confusing. They are scanning temperature. They are scanning eyes? Are they scanning temperature in the eyes?

In Afghanistan, it was common to scan eyes for identification just as it is being done upon air arrival to the U.S.

I understand why reactions here are mixed or even mostly hostile.

At the same time, the headline is quite suggestive and borderline misleading.

The bigger question for me is why the police spends 75k on this. That's a yearly salary for 1-2 social workers, and could provide a lot of quarantine space for infected homeless people. While the Boston Dynamics robodog is quite advanced for what it is, it is still basically a toy, and if I was a US citizen, I'd be really annoyed with public funds being spent on this.

>The bigger question for me is why the police spends 75k on this. That's a yearly salary for 1-2 social workers

That $75k number quickly balloons up to quote exorbitant amounts if health of those social workers gets put in danger due to such interactions (whether due to getting infected or due to violence inflicted upon them).

Given that we are trying to reduce infections in the overall population by any means possible, this seems like a rather cheap and non-invasive (aka no restrictions imposed on the population) way of achieving that. Sure, masks help, but if you are surrounded by tons of infected people on a daily basis in a confined environment, you have a rather notable risk (as evident by all the cases coming from doctors who got infected after working with covid patients during the first two waves).

Why should we put lives of 1-2 social workers at risk and deal with them potentially costing way over $75k, instead of spending those $75k on a solution that has none of those risks?

Because the dog isn’t a solution.

If the person has symptoms, they need a swab. If they don’t have symptoms and you’re suspicious of infection (eg they are a close contact), they need a swab. The robot can’t do that.

Also, does the dog cost $75k and that’s it? Or is there ongoing costs, upgrades and running repairs? It might not need sick days, weekends or vacations, but it can’t do a fraction of the work a human can.

I would expect it to also require operator training and authorization mechanisms. Then there are use policy development and maintenance. Plus there would be coding costs since this seems to be a specialized use case.

Bringing in a semi-autonomous robot to work amongst the public probably doesn't and shouldn't happen in a financial void.

Perhaps it's being evaluated for other purposes by the company that developed it and/or the local police department. They should really make that clear if so.

That's a bit of a spin. The "shelter" is a homeless "tent city" that is "state run" - by "state run" they mean there are porta potties and garbage collection. The quarantine facility is entirely separate.

It was also used in NYC in public housing areas, already overly policed, and in a response to some domestic violence incidents, to what end is unsure.

Boston Dynamics:

"It’s basically a camera on a mobile device," he said.

And it costs $75,000 or more.

What a fantastic use of federal relief funds or police budgets.

Yes, getting your temperature checked by a yellow robot dog is much worse than getting it checked by a man with a mask and a gun. What the heck even is this complaint?

A gun?

Of course, in case some citizen has a negative reaction to police presence for some unknown reason. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is the continued, ever-present threat of violence.

American police carry guns.

This raises an interesting question - why are the police doing this in the first place? It seems more appropriate to have healthcare workers monitoring peoples' health than the police department.

Because the Health Dept. doesn't have ~$100,000 to drop on a robot dog, the sales literature for Spot is slanted to appeal to a macho law enforcement mindset, and the police realize that the optics of "robot police dog" need at least token camouflage.

I think the questions are "why are the police using covid relief funds to buy this?" and "would they use this on the general population, or just the homeless population?"

The second question is very important because it is a leap down the slippery slope towards having a robust and officially sanctioned caste system.

At least they sent Spot, not Atlas.[1]

Robotic mask enforcement in China: [2]

[1] https://www.bostondynamics.com/atlas

[2] https://twitter.com/i/status/1422781790259929090

Some other interesting tidbits about uses in other situations I hadn't heard about.

This was about New York - they returned theirs.

"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 widely circulated twitter post on how to safely pull their kill switches possibly also had something to do with it.

I think use was more about having them poke around corners for safety.

ie, rather than go around corner with a gun drawn / risk of shooting someone / getting shot - you'd have spot walking 5 feet ahead, stick that weird neck thing around corner. Give folks more time to eval etc vs having to be ready to blast folks away.

So not really a concern around kill switch etc. If someone is around the corner pulling kill switches - you probably already have imagery to work from.

i missed that! do you have a link?

i managed to find https://mashable.com/article/how-to-shut-down-boston-dynamic... :

> Could one pull the battery out while Spot was in use? We asked Boston Dynamics this, as well as what would happen both to Spot and to the person doing the pulling, but received no immediate response.

> In addition to the removable battery, there are two buttons located on the "back" of the robot that may be of (again) theoretical interest: the power button and motor lockout button.

I probably thought of https://twitter.com/lenkusov/status/1364640007101775872?lang... .

I always found it very silly that that post was so widely circulated with the phrase "if you find yourself being brutalized by one of these". Yes, Spot Mini, the brutal enforcer. That's the best application of a $75k+ platform that takes 20 seconds to open a door.

Or a general objection to the concept of a robot controlled remote camera just adding to surveillance. Of course deployed equally across the city - oh, no, wait, in predominantly black neighborhoods and public housing.

Was that the one that described how to remove the battery it's not locked (which it is), in case someone is being "brutalized" by the two-foot-tall, 4MPH robot that has no way of hurting a human being? Unless they're dumb enough to, say, stick their fingers into its leg joints while trying to remove its locked battery pack.

That was so embarrassing.

Got to love "news" reporting - always finding the most fair / neutral description of the situation :)

I might try putting in alternative titles

"Robot dog takes temperatures of homeless to help screen for Covid-19".

edited per suggestion to

"Police robot dog takes temperatures of homeless to help screen for Covid-19".

I totally agree but I also think the headline needs to include Police Robot Dog. I think in this case this is a great use for a tool like BD's Spot. But I also agree with the ACLU employee, Jongwook Kim, when he says “At some point it will come out again for some different use after the pandemic is over".

I would like some upfront thought put into how we, as a society, will use technology like this now and in the future. We obviously can't predict everything but I don't see a problem with trying to come up with some common sense legislation now that cuts off potentially privacy invasive or dangerous uses of this type of tech in the future.

> I don't see a problem with trying to come up with some common sense legislation now that cuts off potentially privacy invasive or dangerous uses of this type of tech in the future.

We seem to have a problem doing that for existing tech that the police have been using, so I'm not so optimistic about this.

I thought about that. And I ask, how so? A lot of the examples I could think of are about current law being applied to technology that not only did not exist when the law was written but, in a lot of cases, the people writing the law could never have even imagined the tech/situations the law was being applied to now.

I'm certainly not saying bad laws haven't been written to address tech and the police but I don't think that means we can't keep trying.

As another poster said, I think the bigger question here isn't about whether or not a robot dog is doing this, it's why are the police handling health issues at a homeless shelter? Why aren't social/healthcare workers doing it?

The article doesn't say so maybe the police just loaned them the dog to do this but that's not the impression I get from the article.

Bottom line, I do get your pessimism, I generally share it these days. But I think it's also important to not just give in and hopefully we learn from past mistakes and can do better.

The problem here is that the police are buying $75k robot dogs. Sure, this one is being used to sniff out COVID. What’s the next version doing? It’s a slippery slope, and given the history of the police in America becoming increasingly militarized, it’s worrisome the direction we are going.

Were the homeless asked if they consented to medical assessments. Why do police not conduct random pedestrian "stop and temperature take"?

Who was asking for this screening?

Why would you expose a human to potentially infected people if it could be avoided?

Well, the “potentially infected people” are humans, too, and probably prefer to interact with other humans, not robots.

Besides, homeless people aren’t some strange foreign species that is uniquely dangerous to talk to. When you single them 0ut for the robot treatment, while other, even high-risk, groups, such as those presenting at hospitals with symptoms, it raises some questions.

> homeless people aren’t some strange foreign species that is uniquely dangerous to talk to.

You forgot the part where those homeless people are infected with covid. Anyone infected with it is dangerous, regardless of whether they are homeless or not.

Robot dogs can carry viruses on them as well. This seems like overkill when gloves/N95 could do as well.

Robot dogs can carry viruses, but it is much easier to "sanitize" them, as opposed to humans. And robot dogs cannot get infected themselves either, unlike social workers who would be normally performing that duty instead of robot dogs.

Gloves and N95 are cool, but they still carry a significant risk of infection if the person with gloves and N95 is surrounded by infected people in a confined environment on a regular basis. Look at all those cases of infected doctors in hospitals working with covid patients.

So you'd approve of this dog coming through your neighborhood and assessing you anb your children's temperature without your agreement or consent then, too, presumably?

I am perfectly fine with that. If I am infected, I want to know. Scan away.

I'm not sure this is much worse than already prevalent CCTV coverage, but the robot dog sure does add a dystopian vibe.

"In some countries secret intelligence is used to control their people. In ours, it only exists to protect their freedoms."

This reads like an Onion article.

The wild thing is it's claimed they use pandemic relief funds to buy this! That's the best they could come up with?

I'd like to see a cost justification on buying an extremely expensive robot to lumber over to homeless people and ask them about Covid, instead of just having a social worker with a clipboard walk over there?

Yeah, my biggest concern with this is that it just sounds like they spent funds on a toy and are trying to find justification for its use.

Replace robot dog with robot spider and you've got a scene from minority report.

Implementation issues aside, I'd say they'd get a lot further with a less creepy appearance.

'Robot police killer insect dog' is not a great look. Maybe it just needs a nice little crocheted jacket.

right? reminds me of those Half Life head-jumping crabs...

Where does a police department get 70k+ for a toy?

They used their covid relief funds for this. Also some ATVs and personal vehicles for retired chiefs.

"They abused their covid relief funds for this."

Fixed it.

Law enforcement is the second largest allocation of local government money outside of education.

Source: https://usafacts.org/articles/police-funding-local-governmen...

Honolulu apparently got it from COVID relief funds, according to the article.

Theft.

I for one welcome our new robot overdogs!

(SCNR)

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