Axon wants to make taser drones for schools despite ethics board’s concerns
vice.com
vice.com
And it's not that such a drone would literally be effective against unruly students but because it will normalize the idea of pervasive surveillance, the students will internalize that it's absolutely normal and inescapable to be controlled and have all rules enforced on them at all times.
They will get the occasional "bread and circus", they will be sold the illusion that they have freedoms, democracy, rights, and when those are routinely taken away from some people, none of the others will object because of all the points above.
That said, continuing to expose myself to systems and situations like that can easily diverge the path of becoming a "well adjusted adult". It is possible they could be broken and made subservient, but I think it's more likely you'll see even further rejection of the system, and rejection of it's future influence.
You stated a problem but failed to show how a taser drone is the only solution or even a solution. You also didn't say which part you actually disagree with. Because you didn't understand that what I'm saying is that the taser drone lurks over the shoulder of every child, it buries itself deep in all of their subconsciouses. Even the best and the brightest. It forces all of them to internalize the idea that they're always going to be kept under surveillance and threat of extreme punishment.
You blame "systemic abuse from a source a kid" for becoming a certain way but completely ignore that this would be dwarfed by the fantastically traumatizing thought that a dystopian robot will come after you if you do something wrong.
I find it absolutely baffling that anyone could have any words for this that aren't an absolute rejection of the idea. This is obviously a cash grab by the company proposing this, a boon for the country's leaders who get to shape a new "obedient" generation, and something traumatizing on an inconceivable scale for any child.
If you want to solve school shootings and genuinely think that this is the only or best way to do it then you were failed by every support system that should have been there for you ever, and now you're doing the same to the next generation. You can't replace education and proper human support systems with explosive collars which will eliminate threats as they occur at the low cost of some blood spray.
I don't think this is a useful tool for stopping school shootings and I wasn't endorsing the idea.
On what metric?
Chalking it up to "now the boomers are having kids" is weak social analysis. Not only is the rise in school violence probably a confluence of all those factors, the moral fiber of their parents or whatever specious argument you're making here is likely a small or even negligible factor.
Blaming the 2008 recession is odd, because other indicators of crime continued to decrease during that time. Homicides also decreased from 1929-1939 as the Great Depression wore on, so there is no basis for the theory that recessions cause violence.
It’s also probably not guns. Since 1975, the share of households with a gun has fallen from half to about a third. Childhood poverty has fallen dramatically over that time as well when you account for social safety net transfers. America was a less violent place in the 1950s, before the social safety net and when many more households had a gun.
People really don’t want to believe that culture matters. But blaming poverty instead is just inconsistent with the facts. Many poor countries don’t have the social dysfunction America has. And it’s not the combination of guns and poverty either. Countries like Pakistan and Yemen have many guns and homicide rates lower than the US, despite being very poor.
School shootings started in earnest in the 70s and really got going the 80s. Look it up.
> Blaming the 2008 recession is odd, because other indicators of crime continued to decrease during that time.
I didn't blame it, I named it as a factor. There are other factors at play. I also didn't just blame poverty - there's clearly something happening in the United States that isn't occurring in other societies and its likely a confluence of many factors. But to just say "oh, it's a cultural thing" is extraordinarily reductionist and shallow.
The stats on Wikipedia are from 2017, so they might be a bit out of date. AFAIK, Americans rush out to buy more guns whenever there's a big mass shooting and since 2017, there's been Stoneman Douglas, Santa Fe, Pittsburgh synagogue, Thousand Oaks, Virginia Beach, El Paso, Boulder, Buffalo and Uvalde.
Number of households with guns is a more sensible measure. A household with 100 guns is probably not 100x the risk.
Yes and no. In the 1960s, over 60% of American households owned a gun. Today, less than a third of households own a gun. Back when America was more rural, it was much more common for kids to have access to a gun because they were more widely owned. But mass shootings were rare to non-existent back when more households had a gun.
The trend of decreasing gun ownership is international. Our percentage of households with a gun today in the US is similar to what it was in Canada, France, or Norway in the mid to late 20th century. But homicide rates in the U.S. are still vastly higher than what they were in those countries decades ago. In fact, homicide rates in the U.S. have always been vastly higher than those in Western Europe, since long before the advent of modern gun laws.
Raising red herrings about “core issues” is a refusal to engage with the problem. It’s not “poverty” that causes these behavioral problems, because many poor countries manage to control their kids. You’ve actually got it backward. Misbehaved kids and tolerance for classroom disruption deprives poor kids of a good education and perpetuates poverty.
I'm surprised at the resistance rayiner is getting. I'm thinking it is likely due to folks here having been brought up in suburban bubbles and being completely ignorant of how bad the situation is in a lot of inner city schools.
*edit: I suspect folks here will interpret the term "troubled kid" in their own cute ways, like not following directions on how to do a math problem because the little Euler-streaked student found a *better* way and he'll not listen to the authority on how to do the problem the conventional way, don't you suppress his creativity! No, I'm talking about students like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpDFBxKcOXY where in the back of your mind the calculation taking place is 'is he going to hit me? If I hit him first, can I get away without being physically hurt? I have a PhD in physics, what am I doing here babysitting these hellspawn clowns? But if I hit first, what kind of administrative bullshit fallout do I have to deal with?'
Same story here. Indeed, I was raised in a pretty westernized way (my dad worked for US companies even back in Bangladesh, and read the Dr. Spock book that was the rage back in the 1980s). And frankly I was a little shit compared to my cousins who were raised in a more traditional Bangladeshi way.
Technology does not solve problems, it transforms problems. What this drone would do is transform the problem of police response time into a problem of financing.
My prediction is that this technology will end up in richer school districts first, then trickle down into less wealthy districts. When it arrives there it will be used more commonly as a tool to control students more than anything else.
Why limit it to a taser? They could start killing people with robots.
That's even more important than moral considerations and irony on what future we heading to...
Transmitting a signal before you’re ready to act is a rookie mistake and will just get you caught.
[This dramatization][^1] focuses on full autonomy, but I'd argue it applies just as much to the steps leading up to it. All the more reason to take this threat seriously now.
The development of the gun made it so that you could strike your enemy from a safer distance, but you'd still need to be within line of sight. A small, weaponized drone removes that last requirement. You could be miles away.
I'm not saying that making them illegal will prevent someone with the right skills from building one on their own. Indeed, we will likely see the first high-profile assassination using a small weaponized drone in our lifetime. However, mass production of that technology would mean anyone can kill without risk.
And that's a terrifying prospect.
https://www.engadget.com/robot-dog-gun-ghost-robotics-sword-...
USA: 933 * 10^-10
Rest of World: 7 * 10^-10
Having a pretty good statistical significance comparing both buckets, school security and police armament for sure does not seem to have a positive relation with a reduction of shootings.
Nobody wants to hear the solution, but it's pretty clear: If you want to reduce the number of gun fatalities in schools, you need to stop sending people there.
(/s)
This proposal seems awfully dystopian, but US schools apparently conduct surprise active shooter drills with simulated gunshots, so it feels like a choice between evils at this point.
Proper ethical oversight would needed though, and I'm worried that mission creep is inevitable (remember e.g. tasers themselves were originally intended as "less lethal" and an alternative to a firearm, but are now used routinely to simply get compliance.)
I thought this must be hyperbole, but holy crap. There's a story of an Oregon teacher who sued her school district when she was "shot" in 2013 in a surprise drill [1]. In 2021, Texas introduced but failed to pass a law requiring advance notice of simulated shooting drills [2].
That's craaaaaaazy to me. If the "arm the teachers" faction gets their way, do they stop doing these drills, or just accept a few more dead people from drills gone wrong?
[1]: https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2015/04/te...
I didn't know that. It reminds me of this joke / supposition from the late comedian Trevor Moore:
"What if governments learned from the MKUltra experiments in the 50's that trauma allows you to control people, so they purposely orchestrate disastrous events to keep their citizens afraid + dependent on them, and that's one of the reasons that mental illness has been rising? lol"
This looks like a naked money grab.
Instead of making schools safer, pretty soon we'll just have a bunch of defense companies lined up to sell snake-oil bandaid solutions to schools for millions of dollars, and meanwhile nothing will change.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/04/1103066205/taser-armed-drones...
What happens when some kid breaks the end off a mechanical pencil, attaches a gum band, tapes that sucker up, and starts shooting BBs into the thing like they used to and it crashes onto some teacher's head and kills them[1]?
I don't know if making literal zip guns during recess was a 90s Catholic school thing, but maybe don't do this.
(Especially since I can remember when the teacher's union would shit the bed about sharp scissors or a single non lock blade less than 3 inch Swiss Army knife.)
If you're that scared of your children, maybe you should rethink whether an arms race is the correct solution, especially since traumatized teens end up being anxious adults unsuited to be caregivers.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/nyregion/remote-controlle...
They're basically harmless, I don't see what the trouble is except for the 'distracted from class' angle. I don't think you could even shoot somebody's eye out with one, they're about as powerful as throwing a pebble by hand. I don't think you could crash a drone with one either.
They got you expelled and sent to a place that would make you need stitches if you stayed on the computer too long where I grew up.
It's a weapon AND a tool, make no mistake.
Treating these as real weapons, let alone zip-guns, is an absolute farce. Zero tolerance means zero thought.
Agreed, but unfortunately no one ever gave me a stable job where I could post stuff like that from. I've bounced from precarious role to precarious role for over a decade.
That's a folk belief. If you throw a pencil like that in my left eye, I might use the right one to aim the shot that kills you, and in Pennsylvania I'd be legally in the right under stand your ground, as well as several other states.
Please don't confuse your opinions about ethics with very well tested facts about how the world works, you could get yourself killed, and if I didn't care about that I'd let you continue on your dangerous path of thinking.
No one is obligated to tolerate violence, and I worry that those who refuse to understand that are a danger to themselves AND others via the chaos they induce.
It's an improvised weapon... a zip gun like they taught us about in middle school English class would be more like if I used a mousetrap to trigger a .22 magnum shell down a short shaped piece of pipe into someone's skull from a range of under five yards, since the unrifled barrel causes whatever comes out to tumble and thus not fly straight very long.
> “proud” that the ethics advisory board disagreed with his decision to move ahead with the taser drone.
Productwise, they have some interesting challenges like storing all of the police body cam video, making it searchable, and preparing it for court.
I felt like I was watching a bunch of 12 year olds having fun building the security/surveillance state. But now I understand how they came up with the taser drone idea.
Not surprising, his company was originally named after an old science fiction story Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle; which he initialized to Taser.
Rick's been pretty consistent over the years that he believes that technology can solve societal issues and that he sees things like Sci-Fi as something we need to invent. Rick's a Star Wars fan and there were several Star Wars oriented things in the past.
The engineering culture within the company itself is pretty open and a lot of things are debated quite openly. Perhaps too openly for some; not that it's something to complain about. The bigger challenge they face isn't new hardware ideas. It's their software offering that need to do well. They pivoted from TASERs to Bodycams and now are investing heavily in software. If they get that right, then it's going to be a bigger impact on policing quality/consistency/standards than just the Hardware.
Overall, I can say that it's been a good place to work. While not perfect (no company is), it's definitely pretty open to ideas and change.
This problem won't end until you repeal or reinterpret the 2nd or amend the constitution. Everything else is a band aid.
The other way of reading it is that this is about well regulated militias, that the government cannot stop organized shooting practise. Anything beyond that is up to state or federal law.
The final way of looking at it is that with standing armies of the US this is no longer needed, and perhaps slave owners from before 1800 perhaps did not have all the answers.
Until Americans realise that fetishising and religiously following the words of slaveowners from the 18th century isn't necessarily the best idea, nothing will change. It's weird how the "Constitution" is taken as the words of a deity that cannot be touched and cannot be wrong by some.
Especially a bad and extremely ambiguous constitution like the American one, where the Supreme court has decided tons of things based on weird interpretations, instead of, you know, actually enacting laws and amending the constitution to add those things.
Heh, I guess they thought Minority Report was an instructional video. "Keep your hands raised at all times to avoid accidental tasing".
Does anybody know how well tasers handle such material?
Also probably beating their spouses, statistics on that are through the roof.
Edit: forgot the important sarcasm symbol
Would a kill-chip in the neck (cfr Nikita and something other series) be better then?
Or even better (cfr Hanna TV series) with the exceptional profiling and overpopulation directly hit all potential shooters following minority report, sorry, the hyper-score?