ok, but honestly, it is unfortunate. you know how weâre always passing around that âyou are not immune to propagandaâ meme? this is the propaganda itâs talking about.
itâs cute dancing robots! they have a cute robot dog! itâs cute! itâs friendly!
well, the robot dog friend? cute little jumpy guy, does some careful ballet-esque steps, often between the humanoid robots? so far, both the boston police and the nypd (heads up: autoplaying video, with sound) have âdeployedâ the cute dog friend. both departments say that the robots are being used as âobservation devicesâ, sent into buildings with lights and a camera that sends a videofeed back to the cops.Â
part of why i think this video (and others like it) is so interesting is because boston dynamics has defended police use of the robots, saying that thereâs a clause that the robots canât be used in a way that would âphysically harm or intimidate peopleâ. i donât know about you, but if i were at, say, a protest, or honestly literally anywhere, and a robot dog started running towards me, iâd be pretty fucking intimidated. iâd assume that it was going to hurt me. if one of the humanoid robots were running towards me, iâd assume it was straight-up about to kill me.Â
but these videos do a lot of work to erode that assumption. how can anyone claim that theyâre intimidated by, say, a line of robot dogs at a protest? the robot dogs do funny dances online! the video above has been live for about two months, and it has thirty million views. people love them! they can dance!
so when they start being used as mobile security cameras, or when they start being used to maintain a perimeter or for crowd control or whatever, itâs not really a violation of the contract. the robots are friendly! my bet is that when they start setting them out to do security or whateverâand i donât doubt that theyâll be used for security, etcâthey might even do funny little dances and interact with people who stop to gawk at them. anything to normalize increasingly autonomous roboticized policing. get one of the humanoid ones out in the field, and itâs a remarkably short step to autonomous, mobile cctvâthat can also detain you if it doesnât like what youâre doing, or if there was a crime and youâre in the area, or if your face looks like someone from a database, orâ
and all that assumes, of course, that the no-harm clause stays there forever, and that police departments, so famous for their love of doing things by the book, adhere to it. but just for fun, watch that video again, and imagine even one of those robots weaponized, outfitted with even ânonlethalâ crowd control.Â
iâm not arguing that the robots are inherently bad, or that thereâs no reasonable use for them, even by cops. but the time to get critical of them is now, not in five or ten years when their use has been largely normalized. this is cute propaganda, but itâs still propaganda, and we should acknowledge it for what it is.
