EFF Takes a Stance: San Francisco Shouldn’t Arm Robots
eff.org
eff.org
In my area we unelected the sheriff after a botched raid at the house of a middle-aged white man who had a history of incarceration, who was expected to return to prison for a relatively minor offense, but told people "I'd rather die than go back to jail".
He did not show up when he was supposed to show up. Police went to his house to arrest him. He was holed up in his house for more than 48 hours, the SWAT team showed up, they punched holes in the walls so that they could observe him through. Eventually the man shot himself. This man was armed but not immediately dangerous except to himself and to the police. Situations like this result in a lot of recrimination. I am a real fan of this guy
https://www.amazon.com/Hostage-Cop-Captain-Frank-Bolz/dp/089...
who managed to resolve a number of difficult situations just by talking, but tragedies like this are happening and often seem to end badly no matter what they do. I don't know what the answer is, but they are looking for one.
It’s not like society is going to say “ah ok, you said the magic phrase; we didn't realize you didn't want to go, so we’ll just forget all about it; sorry we bothered you…”
Ok, so he was dangerous. Do police officers and neighbors not have family who love them? You're either dangerous or you're not. It sounds like he was dangerous.
Adding it all up it is a "no win" situation for the police. If they use too much force they will get blamed. If they let the situation linger on, they get blamed. As it was the man died by his own hand and people did blame the police for this.
Sometimes barricade situations end up OK. One of my dad's coworkers freaked out in the 1980s over a situation with his ex-wife and was barricaded against the SWAT team, eventually he surrendered. It is sometimes possible to talk somebody like that into giving up their weapons and surrender, it probably happens most of the time. Sometimes it doesn't.
Of course that's debatable, and there will regardless be people who are dangerous for reasons that are irrational. It also doesn't excuse his behavior, the world has all kinds of problems and we can't accept solving them by whipping out a gun. But the topic deserves contemporaneous consideration.
One wonders how many law enforcement have been hurt, citizens hurt, or performing desperate crimes, to avoid incarceration which in the US is so horrible that many people prefer death.
You show bias
How a foreigner could influence our legal system is scary.
How's that soft on crime philosophy working out?
I'm not saying robots can't be abused in this application, but I think you can make the argument that if deployed correctly they would result in fewer people being shot in incidents with police.
Their patent-busting activities are fairly focused on telecom-held patents which are overly stifling of innovation. Their general stance against telecom-enabled broad government surveillance also indirectly harms telecom bottom lines. I could go on, really.
I am genuinely curious if you can provide clear counterexamples which appear motivated by alignment to telecom interests though.
Edit: In the name of playing devil's advocate, I went searching for examples that could be construed as benefiting telecom interests. The only one I can point to from recent history is their initiative to enable "Broadband for All", which includes advocacy for public funds to go into building out fiber infrastructure. While this may benefit telcos, it also seems unambiguously to be in the public interest and particularly benefits rural and underprivileged populations at the cost of wealthy urbanized ones. [1]
I also looked for evidence of meddling in their financials, but found only a transparent 501(c)(3) which has maintained a grassroots funding, with most funds coming from small individual donors. They are also a top scoring non-profit on Charity Navigator for their financials. [2]
1: https://annualreport.eff.org/#broadband 2: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/043091431
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/face...
They've accepted millions of dollars in donations from organizations and their executives' foundations that they're ostensibly a watchdog for. Their being okay with the conflict of interest is reason enough for me not to trust them.
And why is everyone pretending that these are autonomous killer robots, when they actually need to be remotely controlled by human police officers? How is using a gun that a robot is holding any worse than using a gun that you're holding directly?
Isn't the point of the robot to reduce how much they have to worry about this kind of thing, making it less likely they need to preemptively use violence?
Robots will only be used as a deadly force option when [1] risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and [2] officers cannot subdue the threat after using alternative force options or de-escalation tactics options, **or** conclude that they will not be able to subdue the threat after evaluating alternative force options or de-escalation tactics.
Do not give SFPD permission to kill people with robots. There are many alternatives available to police, even in extreme circumstances. Police equipment has a documented history of misuse and mission creep. While the proposed policy would authorize police to use armed robots as deadly force only when the risk of death is imminent, this legal standard has often been under-enforced by courts and criticized by activists. For the sake of your constituents' rights and safety, please vote no.
This is the main issue, right?
Take a gander at drones in the middle east for a more extreme example.
They're machines, but beyond that they're basically sophisticated remote control cars. Outside of perhaps autonomous drone avionic controls, and maybe software and systems that allow some of the machines to climb stairs, they're basically stupid sensor platforms.
The military has been using "robots" in combat for 50 years. Any guided missile can be considered a robot, though I'd argue that those with seeker heads vs the crude mechanics of the V2 are more "robot" than not as they have built in "decision making" capability.
The Navy's "Phalanx" CWIS is, indeed, a very sophisticated robot. It can be turned on, weapons free, to follow through with its "if it flies, it dies" motto. As far as I know, it's never actually been deployed that way. It's always been used with a man in the middle with their finger on the button. But, left to it own devices, it will happily (can robots be happy?) sweep the nearby sky of anything that flies. This includes things like friendly helicopters, which is one of the reasons its kept on a short leash.
There have certainly been tragic mistakes, notably Iran Air Flight 655. A dot on a screen taken out by an autonomous tracking system released by a human hand.
What the police are talking about is none of these.
It's an RC car, with a camera. It's as much a robot as a sharpshooter using a night vision site. It's not an ED-209, by any stretch. It's not even a step toward an ED-209, save for one thing.
That word "robot" again. Robot is too broad. I'd prefer something more specific, "manually remote controlled platform" or something. I don't want the the slippery slope of what is now a fancy RC car sliding down into an ED-209. "It's just a robot, and the legislation says robots are ok!".
And I appreciate the distinction between military and police matters. A remote detonated land mine should fall under this policy, something the military uses all the time. But it's hardly a "robot".
Because what we're talking about is remote controlled lethal force, especially problematic if the authorities don't have clear line of site.
What you really want to avoid is sending in some machine, that has limited scope of the environment, giving the human operators a limited view of the situation. Hard to safely deploy lethal force if they can't see everything in the room.
As long as the machine is under complete human control (outside of things like drones that use software to maintain stability and such), I don't have a problem with these.
We also don't want a repeat of Philadelphia 1985, which is honestly about as close as we have to a Worst Case Scenario of how these might be deployed.
On the opposite side, the robot never gets to fear for its life and end up shooting innocent people. There ought to be high definition recordings proving lethal force was necessary. Freely available to all public for review. Absence of video being immediate summary judgement for misconduct charges to the operators which includes jail time. Police unions thusly aren't getting involved.
So I can see some pros and cons. The big question I have, why is San Fran the first to do this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...
It's remote controlled by a cop. There's no AI.
I'm inclined to agree that violating this is generally a bad idea. I don't know that I would go so far as to make it a law, as I am not a pacifist and would prefer a robot to retain the capability to override the first law exclusively in the interest of obeying the second law, when there is an audit trail of commands given such that someone- whether the robot or the human behind the robot- can be held to account.
The robots have video cameras so those recordings can be used to hold the human operator to account.
Naturally, the current implementation is a long, long way from complying with those concepts.
The real question, for today and now, should be: Should we be focusing on implementing more safety measures (getting us closer to the principles behind the laws) or should we deploy what we have in a situation where they can be used for violence?
Are the video feeds from the robots recorded? Are those recordings accessible to the person manipulating the robot, or their direct superiors? Are there backups in case those "get lost"? Are there on-board backups in case of network loss? Some sort of black-box maybe? Can the robot's weapons be deployed if the recording is not in progress?
Even if the robot itself doesn't have an independent will, it can still be equipped with safeguards. Hell, automatic doors almost always have sensors that prevent the door from crushing something if it is in the way of the door closing. Surely we should be more stringent with weaponized robots than we are with garage doors.
Again, consider the garage door example. You push a button, the garage door closes. If something should trigger a safety sensor, the garage door reverses rather than crushing whatever tripped the sensor.
How many times have police been involved in shootings where the body camera was present but not running, or the recording was "lost"? I think it is perfectly reasonable to insist on more safety measures, such as failsafes against the robot firing its weapons if it isn't recording or detects interference in the recording and backup mechanisms.
This is something I hadn't fully considered when I reviewed the three laws; if you go back to my first comment on the thread, I had initially been of mind to dismiss it.
Secondly, the 'laws' were about behaviour that applies mostly to the AI side of things, the fact they are referred to as laws of robotics is mostly immaterial, they are about behaviour rules for AI.
Definitely a bad idea though, I don't like the idea of a guy in a suit being able to hit a button. You also don't need to convince a robot to violate my rights and put themselves in danger while doing it.
No, these bots are going to be used in a more liberal fashion to justify all the effort being used to arm them.
This wont be for rare situations, this will be used for their ongoing crisis.
When a shooter encounters an invulnerable robot armed with a rifle, they instantly know it’s game over. They either comply or be killed, quickly and accurately. Face recognition can enable instant headshots for minimal threat to bystanders.
A screen and a camera to allow negotiation "facetime" would be helpful as well.