On November 29, supervisors in San Francisco, California voted to give city police the ability to use potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations.
Currently, the San Francisco Police Department said it does not have pre-armed robots and has no plans to arm robots with guns, though a spokesperson said that the department could deploy robots equipped with explosive charges.
On November 28, the San Francisco Public Defender’s office sent a letter to the board cautioning against granting police “the ability to kill community members remotely.”
It is probably worth specifying that this is not the first episode of culture utilizing advanced robots to execute a loss of human life in non-battlefield use. In 2016, a robot was used for the first time to deliver explosives in the U.S. when police in Dallas, Texas sent in an armed robot that killed a holed-up sniper who had killed five officers in an ambush.
But things are moving more quickly now, in accordance with the pace of technological change.
Indeed, for San Francisco’s willingness to put the technology to greater use is only the latest notable occurrence.
Surely, one would be on firm footing in suggesting that those who see value in cogitating on technology’s consequences are now outnumbered by those who will subscribe to any and all forms of technological enhancement without restraint.
John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead are some of the few who seem to have given the matter extensive reflection.
The Whitehead’s, in their article “Make Way for the Killer Robots: The Government Is Expanding Its Power to Kill,” say, “A last-minute amendment to the SFPD policy limits the decision-making authority for deploying robots as a deadly force option to high-ranking officers, and only after using alternative force or de-escalation tactics, or concluding they would not be able to subdue the suspect through those alternative means. In other words, police now have the power to kill with immunity using remote-controlled robots. These robots, often acquired by local police departments through federal grants and military surplus programs, signal a tipping point in the final shift from a Mayberry style of community policing to a technologically-driven version of law enforcement dominated by artificial intelligence, surveillance, and militarization.”
The Whitehead’s also make note of interesting parallels between killer robots and the history of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams in America.
“It’s only a matter of time before these killer robots intended for use as a last resort become as common as SWAT teams. Frequently justified as vital tools necessary to combat terrorism and deal with rare but extremely dangerous criminal situations, such as those involving hostages, SWAT teams—which first appeared on the scene in California in the 1960s—have now become intrinsic parts of local law enforcement operations, thanks in large part to substantial federal assistance and the Pentagon’s military surplus recycling program, which allows the transfer of military equipment, weapons and training to local police for free or at sharp discounts.”
They add: “Consider this: In 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT team-style raids in the U.S. By 2014, that number had grown to more than 80,000 SWAT team raids per year. Given the widespread use of these SWAT teams and the eagerness with which police agencies have embraced them, it’s likely those raids number upwards of 120,000 by now. There are few communities without a SWAT team today. No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly deployed for relatively routine police matters, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day.”
The Rutherford Institute article further details, “Mind you, SWAT teams originated as specialized units that were supposed to be dedicated to defusing extremely sensitive, dangerous situations (that language is almost identical to the language being used to rationalize adding armed robots to local police agencies). They were never meant to be used for routine police work such as serving a warrant. As the role of paramilitary forces has expanded, however, to include involvement in nondescript police work targeting nonviolent suspects, the mere presence of SWAT units has actually injected a level of danger and violence into police-citizen interactions that was not present as long as these interactions were handled by traditional civilian officers…Americans are now eight times more likely to die in a police confrontation than they are to be killed by a terrorist. The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is ‘not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.’”
They also say that, “Now add killer robots into that scenario. How long before these armed, militarized robots, authorized to use lethal force against American citizens, become as commonplace as SWAT teams and just as deadly? Likewise, how long before mistakes are made, technology gets hacked or goes haywire, robots are deployed based on false or erroneous information, and innocent individuals get killed in the line of fire? And who will shoulder the blame and the liability for rogue killer robots? Given the government’s track record when it comes to sidestepping accountability for official misconduct through the use of qualified immunity, it’s completely feasible that they’d get a free pass here, too. In the absence of any federal regulations or guidelines to protect Americans against what could eventually become autonomous robotic SWAT teams equipped with artificial intelligence, surveillance and lethal weapons, ‘we the people’ are left defenseless.”
The Whitehead’s add, “Some within the robotics industry have warned against weaponizing general-purpose robots, which could be used ‘to invade civil rights or to threaten, harm, or intimidate others.’ Yet it may already be too late for that…There are thousands of police robots across the country, and those numbers are growing exponentially. It won’t take much in the way of weaponry and programming to convert these robots to killer robots, and it’s coming.”
They conclude, “It’s the boiling frog analogy all over again, and yet there’s more at play than just militarization or suppressing dissent. There’s a philosophical underpinning to this debate over killer robots that we can’t afford to overlook, and that is the government’s expansion of its power to kill the citizenry…Having claimed the power to kill through the use of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later, SWAT team raids, no-knock raids, capital punishment, targeted drone attacks, grisly secret experiments on prisoners and unsuspecting communities, weapons of mass destruction, endless wars, etc., the government has come to view “we the people” as collateral damage in its pursuit of absolute power.”
Of course, the tocsin coming out of San Francisco is merely the most recent pass of charging advanced machinery with being able to kill civilians.
In October, it was reported that the city of Oakland has debated whether or not law enforcement officers should be permitted to, in the words of The Intercept’s Sam Biddle, “kill people with shotgun-armed robots.” Here too we are told that the precarious technology would only be deployed during so-called “emergencies.”
It is an unlucky truth that declaring an “emergency” time and time again to serve as an excuse to slowly and systematically attenuate Americans’ constitutional freedoms, such as what we have already seen come to pass through the Covid public health “emergency” and the 9/11 terrorist attack “emergency,” seems to have been overlooked by much of the general public.
It is worth recalling that similar reasoning was given for the widespread adoption of tasers, the electroshock weapon used by police. To be sure, for though assurances were given at the time that tasers would only be used in emergency circumstances, it is widely recognized that it is not uncommon for one to be at risk of being tased for sundry reasons.
In his article titled “Oakland Cops Hope To Arm Robots With Lethal Shotguns, Biddle notes, “It soon became clear the Oakland Police Department was saying what nearly every security agency says when it asks the public to trust it with an alarming new power: We’ll only use it in emergencies — but we get to decide what’s an emergency. The question of whether robots originally designed for defusing bombs should be converted into remote-controlled guns taps into several topics at the center of national debates: police using lethal force, the militarization of American life, and, not least of all, killer robots.”
The technology journalist adds, “Once a technology is feasible and permitted, it tends to linger. Just as drones, mine-proof trucks, and Stingray devices drifted from Middle Eastern battlefields to American towns, critics…say the Oakland police’s claims that lethal robots would only be used in one-in-a-million public emergencies isn’t borne out by history. The recent past is littered with instances of technologies originally intended for warfare mustered instead against, say, constitutionally protected speech…”
One can at least take solace in the certain knowledge that killer robots appear to remain under the control of humans, though how long this is to be so, no one knows.
For those who seek to understand the price of technological change, or to know more about machines bestowed with the capability of slaying humans outside of the battlefield, or what all this is leading towards, will do well to look at the subject of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, or LAWS.
The culmination of this longstanding project to roboticize our nation’s police forces appears to consist of a specialized robot outfitted with artificial intelligence that, we are told, is to be able to competently decide on its own when it is appropriate to take a human life.
One report from the Dutch peace organization Pax surveyed major tech players on their position on LAWS, finding that Amazon, Intel and Microsoft are among the leading companies putting the world at risk through killer robot development.
Should a movement rise that aims to seek answers to the question, Are there consequences to culture authorizing killer robots?, perhaps then will America’s current path be looked at with wise circumspection.
As author Texe Marrs observed, “…humankind today cannot forsee the unintended consequences of his frenzied campaign to construct the intelligent robot. Neither did the hapless Dr. Victor Frankenstein consider the consequences of building a new creature out of deceased body parts, a human corpuscle ‘robot,’ if you will. As the sign read over the band saw machine in my high school shop class, Think before you turn on the machine.”1
Texe Marrs, Robot Alchemy