This week in the dystopian Brave New World techno-hell, Oakland, California police publicly lobbied for legal permission to arm robots with shotguns for civilian law enforcement purposes:
“The controversy began at the September 21 meeting of an Oakland Police Commission subcommittee, a civilian oversight council addressing what rules should govern the use of the city’s arsenal of military-grade police equipment.”
Extrajudicial robot executions were on the agenda:
“The back-and-forth between the Oakland Police Department and a civilian oversight body concluded with the police relinquishing their push for official language that would have allowed them to kill humans with robots under certain circumstances. It was a concession to the civilian committee, which pushed to bar arming robots with firearms — but a concession only for the time being. The department said it will continue to pursue lethal options.”
Specifically, the Oakland police expressed interest in potentially using for this purpose the “gun-shaped” “percussion actuated nonelectric disruptor” that shoots blank shotgun shells and pressurized water – described imaginatively as “a shotgun barrel secured to an 800-pound Roomba on tank treads.”
“Does the department plan on using a live round in the robot PAN disruptor?” asked Commissioner Jesse Hsieh.
Lt. Omar Daza-Quiroz waffled and settled on the fence with an uninspiring equivocation: “No… I mean, is it possible we have an active shooter in a place we can’t get to? And he’s fortified inside a house? Or we’re trying to get to a person.”
So Daza-Quiroz’s initial “no” actually meant “yes, we would like state permission to kill citizens with shotgun-armed robots when we decide it’s justified due to an emergency situation — a determination, incidentally, that we are empowered to make on an ad hoc basis.”
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The robots-with-guns moral dilemma is classic slippery slope stuff. We’re on top of the slope for now – armed robots don’t yet have the legal authorities and hardware to conduct summary executions for jaywalking – but that slope is all lubed up and ready to pull us into oblivion.