China demonstrates new anti-riot robot

US govt takes that line. Remember to take care.

Sounds a lot like drone warfare, which is working perfectly in the US's short-term and long-term best interests. /s

Last year while waiting at a bus stop in Hangzhou in front of an intra-immigration office, I saw a Chinese police officer (shove, kick, or throw (it was a year ago)) a protester from behind. She was part of a crowd of other protesters. It looked like the protester bumped into him seconds before, while being herded away from the office by the police.

The woman was already in front of him and walking away, but the officer's facial expression made it clear he was very agitated. It seemed like he just wanted to 'get back' at her for bumping into him beforehand. His impact made her lose her balance and she nearly fell to the ground.

Maybe having someone physically and emotionally detached from a physical setting could have positive benefits in some situations. I am still not sure whether the remote controlled cop is a good thing though.

As an aside, the broken internet in China is crippling entire generations of people into ignorant irrelevance. I don't think enough people appreciate the magnanimous ramifications of making an entire country deliberately ignorant.

It's not just Google and Facebook that are blocked, it's Chinese Wikipedia, Wordpress, and the free press in general. You need a license to publish anything. Corruption and blatant scandals can't get published without approval from the Party. All the state-owned enterprises, including the public universities, are run by the Party. The Party will not often allow anything to be published that exposes anything related to itself or its co-conspirators.

All foreign-hosted websites have soft blocks, where they will randomly not load, with no explanation given, subconsciously driving people to only use domestic websites that always work.

People have no way of protesting any of this without getting destroyed by the state, professionally or literally. Unless of course, they apply and successfully get permission from the state to do so.

It depends who you are, and what your definition of "a problem" is. If an angry crowd of people protesting against your oppressive government policies is a problem, these robots are a great solution. The robot never questions the order to fire on the crowd no matter how offensive, illegal, or unconstitutional the issue being protested is. How many of these semi-autonomous robots can be controlled by one person or a small group of people? At some point dictators, despots, and other out of control governments won't even need the consent of the military and the police to rule by force.

Probably weighs hundreds of pounds and is bottom heavy. I doubt even tipping it would be easy.

That's ok, they come equipped with an egg beater and plunger as well.

By that point, it's too late; most of the populace will side with the police anyway, via their inaction.

I'd invest in political resistance and intelligence gathering instead. The first to prevent falling deeper into fascism than we already are, and you can figure out why the second would be useful on your own.

There are much simpler solutions to fighting the robots in the article. One could also score a sensor kill by draping a big plastic garbage bag over it. If one uses a space blanket or something that absorbs RF, one would disable it too. The robots in the article can only handle flat terrain. So putting down rocks and debris will severely limit their mobility. Entanglement is also a nice option to limit mobility. Simply tipping the robot over will pretty much disable it.

A lasso is a particularly entertaining option in the last two regards. One could lasso up said robot and pull it over.

Now if one really wants to get high tech we can do stuff like jam the lidars(flashing some LEDs) and sonar(making some noise). Without obstacle sensors like these, said robots are gonna be much harder to teleoperate.

Here in Britain we use them to prevent people jumping queues at the post office.

The parallel development of these globally does suggest we will be seeing a lot more drone-based policing in the future, and will be gleefully cracking open the inevitable can of worms when some of the accountability is removed from high pressure flashpoints and/or they have the ability to deploy lethal force.