{"id":312450,"date":"2021-07-30T21:21:23","date_gmt":"2021-07-30T18:21:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/useful-hounds-or-dehumanizing-machines\/"},"modified":"2021-07-30T21:21:23","modified_gmt":"2021-07-30T18:21:23","slug":"useful-hounds-or-dehumanizing-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/useful-hounds-or-dehumanizing-machines\/","title":{"rendered":"#Useful hounds or dehumanizing machines?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Useful hounds or dehumanizing machines?<\/strong>”
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HONOLULU \u2014 If you\u2019re homeless and looking for temporary shelter in Hawaii\u2019s capital, expect a visit from a robotic police dog that will scan your eye to make sure you don\u2019t have a fever.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s just one of the ways public safety agencies are starting to use Spot, the best-known of a new commercial category of robots that trot around with animal-like agility.<\/p>\n

The handful of police officials experimenting with the four-legged machines say they\u2019re just another tool, like existing drones and simple wheeled robots, to keep emergency responders out of harm\u2019s way as they scout for dangers. But privacy watchdogs \u2014 the human kind \u2014 warn that police are secretly rushing to buy the robots without setting safeguards against aggressive, invasive or dehumanizing uses.<\/p>\n

In Honolulu, the police department spent about $150,000 in federal pandemic relief money to buy their Spot from robotics firm Boston Dynamics for use at a government-run tent city near the airport.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause these people are houseless it\u2019s considered OK to do that,\u201d said Jongwook Kim, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii. \u201cAt some point it will come out again for some different use after the pandemic is over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Acting Lt. Joseph O\u2019Neal of the Honolulu Police Department\u2019s community outreach unit defended the robot\u2019s use in a media<\/a> demonstration earlier this year. He said it has protected officers, shelter staff and residents by scanning body temperatures between meal times at a shelter where homeless people could quarantine and get tested for COVID-19. The robot is also used to remotely interview individuals who have tested positive.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have not had a single person out there that said, \u2018That\u2019s scary, that\u2019s worrisome,\u2019\u201d O\u2019Neal said. \u201cWe don\u2019t just walk around and arbitrarily scan people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Police use of such robots is still rare and largely untested \u2014 and hasn\u2019t always gone over well with the public. Honolulu officials faced a backlash when a local news<\/a> organization, Honolulu Civil Beat, revealed that the Spot purchase was\u00a0made with federal relief money<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Late last year, the New York Police Department starting using Spot after painting it blue and renaming it \u201cDigidog.\u201d It went mostly unnoticed until New Yorkers starting spotting it in the wild and posting videos to social media. Spot quickly became a sensation, drawing a public outcry that led the police department to abruptly return Digidog to its maker.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is some Robocop stuff, this is crazy,\u201d was the reaction in April from Democratic US Rep. Jamaal Bowman. He was one of several New York politicians to speak out after a widely shared video showed the robot strutting with police officers responding to a domestic-violence report at a high-rise public housing building in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

Days later, after further scrutiny from elected city officials, the department said it was terminating its lease and returning the robot. The expensive machine arrived with little public notice or explanation, public officials said and was deployed to already over-policed public housing. Use of the high-tech canine also clashed with Black Lives Matter calls to defund police operations and reinvest in other priorities.<\/p>\n

The company that makes the robots, Boston Dynamics, says it\u2019s learned from the New York fiasco and is trying to do a better job of explaining to the public \u2014 and its customers \u2014 what Spot can and cannot do. That\u2019s become increasingly important as Boston Dynamics becomes part of South Korean carmaker Hyundai Motor Company, which in June closed an $880 million deal for a controlling stake in the robotics firm.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the big challenges is accurately describing the state of the technology<\/a> to people who have never had personal experience with it,\u201d Michael Perry, vice president of business development at Boston Dynamics, said in an interview. \u201cMost people are app<\/a>lying notions from science<\/a> fiction to what the robot\u2019s doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

For one of its customers, the Dutch national police, explaining the technology includes emphasizing that Spot is a very good robot \u2014 well-behaved and not so smart after all.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t think for itself,\u201d Marjolein Smit, director of the special operations unit of the Dutch national police, said of the remote-controlled robot. \u201cIf you tell it to go to the left, it will go to the left. If you tell it to stop, it will stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, her police division sent its Spot into the site of a deadly drug lab explosion near the Belgian border to check for dangerous chemicals and other hazards.<\/p>\n

Perry said the company\u2019s acceptable use guidelines prohibit Spot\u2019s weaponization or anything that would violate privacy or civil rights laws, which he said puts the Honolulu police in the clear. It\u2019s all part of a year-long effort by Boston Dynamics, which for decades\u00a0relied on military research grants<\/a>, to make its robots seem friendlier and thus more palatable to local governments and consumer-oriented businesses.<\/p>\n

By contrast, a lesser-known rival, Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics, has no qualms about weaponization and supplies its dog-like robots to several branches of the US military and its allies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just plug and play, anything you want,\u201d said Ghost Robotics CEO Jiren Parikh, who was critical of Boston Dynamics\u2019 stated ethical principles as \u201cselective morality\u201d because of the company\u2019s past involvement with the military.<\/p>\n

Parikh added that his company doesn\u2019t market its four-legged robots to police departments, though he said it would make sense for police to use them. \u201cIt\u2019s basically a camera on a mobile device,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

There are roughly 500 Spot robots now in the wild. Perry said they\u2019re commonly used by utility companies to inspect high-voltage zones and other hazardous areas. Spot is also used to monitor construction sites, mines and factories, equipped with whatever sensor is needed for the job.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s still mostly controlled by humans, though all they have to do is tell it which direction to go and it can intuitively climb stairs or cross over rough terrain. It can also operate autonomously, but only if it\u2019s already memorized an assigned route and there aren\u2019t too many surprise obstacles.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first value that most people see in the robot is taking a person out of a hazardous situation,\u201d Perry said.<\/p>\n

Kim, of the ACLU in Hawaii, acknowledged that there might be many legitimate uses for such machines, but said opening the door for police robots that interact with people is probably not a good idea. He pointed to how Dallas police in 2016\u00a0stuck explosives on a wheeled robot<\/a>\u00a0to kill a sniper, fueling an ongoing debate about \u201ckiller robots\u201d in policing and warfighting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s the potential for these robots to increase the militarization of police departments and use it in ways that are unacceptable,\u201d Kim said. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s not something we even want to let law enforcement have.\u201d\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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“#Useful hounds or dehumanizing machines?” HONOLULU \u2014 If you\u2019re homeless and looking for temporary shelter in Hawaii\u2019s capital, expect a visit from a robotic police dog that will scan your eye to make sure you don\u2019t have a fever. That\u2019s just one of the ways public safety agencies are starting to use Spot, the best-known…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":312451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/07\/AP21210835533593-1.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[113094,73624,70363,73823,12115,82198,5049,4965],"class_list":["post-312450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-7-30-21","tag-civil-liberties","tag-civil-rights","tag-human-rights","tag-police","tag-public-safety","tag-robots","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}