ICE wants robot dogs. Boston Dynamics' workers urge company to 'cancel the sale'
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At least to me, there's a huge difference between working for a defense contractor and expecting your creations to be used in the national interest, and seeing your creations turned against your fellow citizens for depraved political stunts.
And as for what they maybe should have been able to see coming? I'm not going to put them down for their realizations coming a bit late. Doing that is much better than simply doubling down in denial, as if this result had been their intent all along.
(And yeah yeah, forever war. I've personally never worked for a defense contractor, quite deliberately. But I can still understand the perspective of someone who does)
As I said - personally as an engineer who easily could have, I've deliberately never worked for a weapons manufacturer. Mainly because I've seen the tools being used for continual aggression onto other countries (eg "GWOT"), but these days equipment transfer to domestic "law enforcement" would certainly be part of it too.
But I do respect that there is a core of people who differ from my perspective, still believing in institutions like national defense, either not aware of or not concerned about the things I am. If they are just now becoming concerned with misuse of their creations - even if just in a narrow way against US citizens - why should I not view this as common ground we can share? Why would I want to emphasize where we differ and rub it in their face? The only thing I would see that doing is alienating them from the things we do agree on.
But I agree we shouldn't be using robot dogs for this. They should be reserved for tracking down and destroying banned books.
When an organization distances itself from criminals and facilitates justice being served, it can credibly claim to be an institution of civil society. But when an organization not only gives a pass to, but deliberately goes out of its way to protect first and second degree murderers, that's called a criminal conspiracy.
So I’d love to hear from one of those employees about how they imagined those use cases.
Either they have huge cognitive dissonance, or I’m too cynical, because I cannot imagine a situation where a robot designed to remotely spy (sorry, assess) or apply force, lethal or not (aka de-escalate tense situations), wouldn't end up being used for the wrong things.
So just wait until we see jousting RobotWars in our streets with cop-aligned killer K9 troops fighting to the death with the Crips and Bloods remote-control drone dawgz.
* during COVID period Singapore used BD dogs to walk parks and remind people to maintain social distance,
* BD dogs are used to remotely assess bomb threats and structurally dubious / unsafe sites for victims / dangers to rescuers.
As for the closing thought above, it's a sad truth that many many things "end up being used for the wrong things" .. whether that's innuendo or fascist over reach.
if you send in a mobile robot first, then you don't have to send in a human to scout. You can find the suspect and assess the situation without having to put a human at risk (and therefore in a situation where they have to shoot to defend themselves). This helps both the cop and the suspect remain alive.
However, my point is that the technology also enables bad use cases, and you don’t need much analysis to see that.
The difference between a human cop and a robot is scale and a lack of empathy (although it is hard to attribute any empathy to some cops). You can send a swarm of robots to scan a neighborhood, with little human intervention. The purpose of that scan could be to catch terrorists, immigrants, or political dissidents.
The people who designed these things are pretty aware of that, but they do it anyway and now act as if surprised. It's like Lockheed Martin employees complaining about missiles; don’t work for a missile manufacturer in the first place.