At least the death robots don’t have guns
Conn Carroll
First presented in his 1942 short story Runaround, Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics include: 1.) “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,” 2.) “a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law,” and 3.) “a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors just rewrote that first law.
In 2021, California passed a law requiring every city to list and define the authorized uses of every piece of military-grade equipment. For the San Francisco Police Department, this includes 12 robots that the department uses to defuse bombs and aid in hostage negotiations.
An original draft of the city’s use-of-force document read, “Robots shall not be used as a use of force against any person.” But by the final draft, that had changed to “robots will only be used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers are imminent and outweigh any other force option available to the SFPD.”
Unlike Asimov’s robots, the SFPD’s robots are remotely controlled by humans — for now. But even then, some question whether the introduction of robots armed to kill is something we’ve properly thought out.
“It becomes very difficult to disentangle who is responsible,” University of Washington professor Ryan Calo said to NPR regarding situations where the technology fails and a person is accidentally killed. “Is it the people using the technology, or is it the people that design the technology?”
Faced with public backlash against the proposal to give robots a license to kill, the SFPD stressed that while it might equip its robots with explosives, “the Department has no plans to outfit robots with any type of firearm.”
So at least the robots won’t have guns, which is nice.
But even without gun-toting robots, Calo says we must ask, “Do we want to be in a society where police kill people with robots? It feels so deeply dehumanizing and militaristic.”