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Comment by whoknowswhat11 | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

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