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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t the entire point of officers being allowed to use lethal force that their lives are in danger?

Killing people remotely when you are completely safe just seems like straight up murder.

Yes, these robots are pretty slow and relatively difficult to deploy. It is extremely difficult to imagine a scenario where "loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent", but police still somehow have time to deploy and pilot this thing into a crime scene from a safe distance. If they had time to do that, then there wasn't really an imminent danger.

Realistically, this will be used when someone has barricaded themselves in a house or something and is having a standoff with police, and they've gotten tired of standing around outside and would rather send their robot in to shoot the person so they can go home.

Shooting the person so they can go home. Best reason ever.

It's kind of predictable though. Let's look at another profession where lives are at stake: Doctors. One would think their ethics would prevent them from pushing C-sections and induction on women in labour for selfish reasons but birth rates on weekends have been steadily falling in western countries.

Yeah this happened in the Dallas police shooting a few years back. The suspect was holed up in a parking structure so they sent a bomb disposal robot with a bomb attached and blew the dude up.

Technically, wasn't it just doing its normal job? It disposed of a bomb, and the suspect was just some convenient collateral.

Haha interesting perspective.

Or in the defense of another. It wouldn’t make sense for a robot to take a life to save its own, but it might make sense for it to take a life to save your mother’s.

What happens when you fake danger to get robots to murder people for you. Or when the robot has “bugs” that kill demographics you don’t like more often.

This is a horrifically terrible idea.

It is imperative that a human always be a decision maker about lethal force so proper judgement can be made and someone can be held accountable if it is made badly.

The article is about remote controlled robots, not AI. (If I understand correctly.)

You are not the only person to think of this. Obviously this is a huge reason we don’t have police drones yet.

I don't know why people are downvoting this. Where I live the police union boss was a known white supremacist for a decade. The police department was known to have members who tallied their kill counts competitively. For dogs and for people.

We have serious problems with accountability of law enforcement in the US.

i not sure if this completely applies here but i think police forces should not be allowed to hire ex military into general beat cops. goon squad yes, but the headset of a soldier, and the headset of a cop are very different philosophies, though both have crept close together in the years.

> What happens when you fake danger

So what, you go up to a bank, with a fake gun, and then say "lul, I was just robbing you as a prank bro?"

Probably the same thing will happen to you, as would happen to you right now, if you pointed a fake gun at someone.

In the case of the bank, or the fake gun, the prankster might get shot. In the case of the robot, the pranked person might be shot. Doesn’t quite seem the same.

No actually, the pranker would get shot in both cases.

The person pointing a fake gun at someone, would be the one shot either way, even if a robot did the shooting.

I don’t think you understand what GP meant. They meant faking you (as the prankster) being in danger, so the robot kills someone else (the prankee) for you.

swatting, but with drones now.

What does that mean though? The whole 'suspect is holding a hostage as a human shield so you shoot the suspect before they kill the hostage' is a fun trope for TV and movies, but that's not how things work in real life.

Also, criminals will know the robots have these capabilities, too. If a barricaded suspect hears or sees a robot rummaging around, that could be interpreted as force escalation. Which may cause the criminal to react in unpredictable ways that increase risk to the public and police officers.

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/do-the-polic...

Its a preemptive measure, against what the ukraine war will spill into the civil sphere. If drug gangs get explosive suicide drones, and stack them up on some roof, callable as service, flashing the red and blue will not do.

Welcome, to the hell, that is a unchanged humanity with 300 years of tech for everyone. And it was pretty forseeable, hell drones are cheaper then guns now.

This is what we worked for, this is what we fought for. We destroyed humanitys ability to keep the peace.

What a interesting war of all against all this will be, once the planets ceeiling comes down.

What a fitting, ironic place to start it off, then Los Angeles.

Any apologist, wanna take the lead and "This is actually a good thing.."wing it?

Do we get religous as defense, believing in the new human being?

Here's a half hearted attempt... this is actually a good thing, because then there will be less people on the planet and less garbage, pollution, destruction of ecosystems, and everyone will be richer.

Presumably, few people will try to unleash drones on nature, and even if they do, they will only have minimal effect given the enormity of the planet. On the other hand, currently we have factory farming where billions of animals are brought up in abysmal conditions to feed the population meat, they live on an ecological credit card, and it's probably far more destructive in the end through famines or just general ecosystem collapse.

Seeing what's coming from that, you might actually consider the threat nuclear war to be comforting...?

By every measurable metric - the world is substantially better today than 300 years ago.

If you seek, you shall find.

If you're looking for reasons why the world is burning down - you'll find them in every headline.

> What a fitting, ironic place to start it off, then Los Angeles

Not an apologist, but you could have at least gotten the city correct in your cynical diatribe.

> unchanged humanity

Adapt or die.

Evolution is a thing.

Your complaint reminds me of a bacteria complaining about all the oxygen.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event )

Or someone else's life is at risk.

this is a misconception. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...

I never said that cops have to to pull the trigger. Just that another person's life being at risk is justification for lethal force.

To be clear though, that's all I'm saying. I'm not making a statement about my overall thoughts on the US's police system.

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