Unfortunately, I do love you now that you can dance
ok, but honestly, it is unfortunate. you know how we’re always passing around that ‘you are not immune to propaganda’ meme? this is the propaganda it’s talking about.
it’s cute dancing robots! they have a cute robot dog! it’s cute! it’s 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 ‘deployed’ the cute dog friend. both departments say that the robots are being used as ‘observation devices’, sent into buildings with lights and a camera that sends a videofeed back to the cops.
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 there’s a clause that the robots can’t be used in a way that would ‘physically harm or intimidate people’. i don’t know about you, but if i were at, say, a protest, or honestly literally anywhere, and a robot dog started running towards me, i’d be pretty fucking intimidated. i’d assume that it was going to hurt me. if one of the humanoid robots were running towards me, i’d assume it was straight-up about to kill me.
but these videos do a lot of work to erode that assumption. how can anyone claim that they’re 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, it’s 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 whatever—and i don’t doubt that they’ll be used for security, etc—they 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 it’s a remarkably short step to autonomous, mobile cctv—that can also detain you if it doesn’t like what you’re doing, or if there was a crime and you’re in the area, or if your face looks like someone from a database, or—
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 ‘nonlethal’ crowd control.
i’m not arguing that the robots are inherently bad, or that there’s 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 it’s still propaganda, and we should acknowledge it for what it is.