The killer robot drones are coming

[Celerity]

Once this technology proves its efficacy, its proliferation will be unstoppable. So why is California welcoming them?

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/the-killer-robot-drones-are-coming



There’s an obligatory scene in almost every disaster film where someone realizes something very bad is coming. The first astronomer to see a faint comet through their telescope. The first hiker to notice a bit of lava oozing out of the side of a supposedly inactive volcano. The little kid at the beach watching the water receding from the shoreline. Most of the time, this witness to impending doom runs screaming to the nearest group of people. Sometimes they listen, and sometimes they don’t. The disaster almost always occurs anyway. In the ongoing disaster film that is America in the 21st Century, we are now past the running and screaming part and have arrived at the beginning stages of the disaster unfolding. Naturally, California, the state legendary for its natural disasters, is leading the way with a manmade one. ZME Science has the details of this shitty Hulu movie come to horrible life:


What could possibly go wrong? Besides, obviously, everything?

Police + weaponized drones = not good

I wrote about this nightmare last year. Then I wrote about it again. And here we are. 20 years from now, people are going to say, “How did we let it get this bad? When did it all go so wrong?” and assuming I haven’t been mowed down by an autonomous weaponized drone by then, I’ll be waving my walker around yelling, “The closing months of 2022, you stupid idiots!” I’ll end up in the local paper for sure (if they still exist). “Old man yells at drone.” As I’ve said before, drones are just tools but ones with a massive potential for abuse. Putting weaponized drones in the hands of the police is inconceivably dangerous. I cannot think of something stupider we could do short of giving law enforcement carte blanche to kill American citizens, including children, with zero consequences. Oh wait, we did that. How has that worked out so far?

Link to tweet

So…not great. Just to be clear, the police have been using regular drones for years. Departments all over the country have deployed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for surveillance purposes. They’re cheaper and less obtrusive than helicopters. That means they can be used more often and against more targets. It also means they can be abused more easily. You’ll be shocked to know there are little to no regulations in place and even less accountability. We just have to trust them. Good luck with that. Keeping this in mind, the public understandably freaked out when the NYPD tried to put a drone dog on the streets to “patrol.”

As I made abundantly clear, this was not a drone meant for rich white neighborhoods. “Digidog” would be trotting around poor and minority communities, harassing people without the means and resources to resist. Fortunately, that plan was scrapped, for now. And thank Skynet it was because San Francisco, one of the most progressive cities in the country, no less, voting to arm drones shows how easy it will be to turn Digidog into a four-legged Terminator. Sure, it would only be in emergencies where people’s lives are at risk. For now. But that’s how mission creep works—one step at a time.

Mission creep gave us the most militarized police force in the world...............

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related

[betsuni]

1. ...

[Jim__]

2. San Francisco reverses plans to allow police robots to kill suspects - Dec 7 headline.

From TheVerge

This article is from yesterday. It says it is at least a temporary reversal of the previous policy.

San Francisco officials have voted against allowing the police to kill suspects with remote-controlled robots. The city’s board of supervisors reversed the policy it approved last week, following outcry and protests from citizens and civil rights groups. However, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, the new ban is not necessarily permanent, and the issue has been sent “back to a committee for further discussion.”

The board originally approved the policy to let the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) use remote-controlled robots “as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available.”

A spokesperson for the SFPD said that the department’s robots — most of which are large units originally developed to disarm potential bombs in war zones — could be equipped with explosives “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient [a] violent, armed, or dangerous suspect” in “extreme circumstances to save or prevent further loss of innocent lives.” Robots have already been used in this way in the US before. In Dallas in 2016, police used a bomb disposal robot to kill an individual who had shot and killed five police officers at a rally.

Opponents of the policy said allowing police to kill with robots could make killing more likely

The policy was strongly criticized by civil rights groups who said it demonstrated the increasing and worrying militarization of US law enforcement. In one protest letter signed by 44 community groups, critics said the policy would “endanger lives needlessly” and that the public is “naturally uncomfortable with the use of armed robots in any situation.”

more ...

[Amishman]

3. the other concern is security

A drone that is physically capable of harming someone is only as safe as the code running it is secure.

From gangs, drug cartels, RWNJs, and unstable loners; there will in an intense interest in hijacking these drones and using them for a malicious purpose. As someone who has made a career running technology projects, in my opinion no code is perfect enough to have sufficient confidence that these wouldn't be hacked eventually.

I have some of the same concerns over autonomous delivery vehicles (especially large ones).