Techno Police 21. (Wiki.) |
by Louis Shalako
The future is now.
Robot policing is already here.
“Police are already experimenting with robots, both
armed and unarmed, and it’s only a matter of time before robots become standard
in the surveillance, analysis and enforcement of crimes. They are never tired,
irritable, in need of a break or biased, but neither are they able to take in
the context of any given situation. Police know there is future for robotic law
enforcement in traffic violations (for example, will a car’s onboard computer
simply shut the vehicle down as soon as it starts speeding?), but how far will
this extend? At what point is human instinct and judgment necessary in the
enforcement of law or prevention of crimes? Is it most efficient to build a
supposedly bias-free system of law that is responsible for determining,
adjudicating and punishing crime?” Reilly
Centre, Notre Dame.
I can only imagine how the bourgeoisie would feel if
their $90,000 BMW, capable of 140 mph, shut down unexpectedly and when it was
towed to a garage, they found out there was nothing wrong with it.
So that part is a bit overblown. Traffic chaos is
counterproductive in economic terms, and the economy is the new God.
The most obvious use of robots, one that is already
happening in the U.S. and Canada, is the use of drones or UAVs for police
surveillance. UAVs are increasingly used for domestic police work
in Canada and the United States: a dozen US police forces had applied for
UAV permits by March 2013. Texas politician and commentator Jim
Hightower has warned about potential privacy abuses from
aerial surveillance. In February 2013, Seattle Mayor Michael McGinn
responded to protests by scrapping the Seattle Police Department’s plan to
deploy UAVs. (Wiki.)
***
Driverless
Cop Cars
Google’s driverless car might make a pretty good
adjunct to more mundane domestic policing.
In this scenario, the driverless car simply sets up
on the U-turn provisions that all divided highways have for emergency vehicle
turnaround. Since there is no human driver to look out the window, the
radar-gun is already deployed in the front windshield and with license-plate
recognition software, offending drivers will receive their ticket by mail, and
if they wish to dispute the ticket, they can attend court on the day appointed
and, in Canada, argue it out with the Crown’s robot prosecutor and the
robot-judge, which must sound very attractive to our presently very
conservative government. In some jurisdictions people who run red lights are already subject to
intersection surveillance cameras and ticketing. That one went through some debate locally and was shot down. They are legal in some places. (Trapster.) See also: Rutherford Institute.
Humanoid
Robots sell Movie Tickets
I honestly think that humanoid robots like the sexy
Peter Weller Robocop will definitely not be the norm. They do sell movie tickets. Modern film is geared to the mentality of ten year-olds.
Small, tracked or
six-wheeled autonomous robots are much more likely because bipedal locomotion
will be seen as unnecessary and it takes up a lot of computing power.
The psychological effect of a big red robot Mountie
cannot be overlooked, and there will probably be a few of them
purchased, to stand out in front of the Parliament buildings—tourists will love
getting their pictures taken beside them of course; and in a real emergency,
their memory banks will be downloaded looking for terrorist suspects. The metal
and high-temperature plastic of their bodies will mean that in a fire or
explosion, a human perpetrator taking a hostage, they can intervene
quickly while regular (warm-blooded) police are still in transit.
Here’s some video
of DARPA’s police robot. A humanoid robot is not completely useless, people may
be more inclined to obey orders from something recognizable, as opposed to a
box on wheels or tracks.
In the film ‘Fifth Element’ starring Bruce Willis,
Mila Vovovich and Gary Oldman, there is a scene where a robotic insect
penetrates security, complete with camera and microphone pick-up.
Steve Juvetson. (Wiki.) |
The president smashes it with his hand or something.
But in surveillance, penetrating people’s homes to eavesdrop, or better yet,
clinging to a window and picking up conversations through the vibrations of the
glass, seems a pretty likely scenario.
Here’s Mythbusters' Adam Savage with his new spider robot.
(Youtube.) This one’s pretty big, but with miniaturization and nanotech, the
new police ‘bugs’ would be quite small, and to the human eye, indistinguishable
from a real insect.
When you consider just how murky convenience store
and gas station security camera pictures usually are, and yet when you consider
just how many convictions are obtained with what may be the only piece of
evidence in a particular case, one would think that the camera and microphone
technology would have to be vastly improved. Yet people are shooting some
pretty good pics and videos on their smart-phones, and this is a mass-produced
commercial application.
The cop-bugs will be state of the art where
essentially cost is no object and the middle-class will no doubt support their
use because after all, it’s not their kids doing hard time on evidence that
would have been inadmissible a few short years previously. By the time they
figure out their mistake, it will of course be too late.
Sooner rather than later, robotic snakes will be crawling through the drain pipes and up into the bathroom, and who knows, maybe right up the old wazoo.
Robot
Prison Guards
The Republic of South Korea has already rolled out
their first robotic prison guards. At a cost of $879,000 each, they’re not
exactly cheap, but with mass production and economies of scale, the price will
quickly come down. Here in Canada, a brand-new police officer starts off at
about $78,000 a year in salary. They get other benefits as well, bringing the
total up to about $100,000 a year in costs per officer. Prison guards don’t get
quite that much, but it’s still expensive. It is also easy to see that a robot
with a one-time cost of perhaps $300,000 would, over the life of the product,
result in some real cost savings.
Robot guards can’t be bribed to bring in guns, drugs
or smokes—a pack of smokes is real currency in a jail and I’ve heard some
astronomical prices for two or three smokes in a jail setting, i.e., fifteen
bucks for three smokes. Inmates tear them apart and roll them up in smaller
cigarettes and according to one source, ‘That’s your smoking for the day.’
Robot guards would have no resentment and at least
on some theoretical level, would have no reason to mistreat prisoners, would
have no bigotry in the sense that they wouldn’t care about your skin colour,
the nature of your offence, and all that sort of thing. They would also have no
reason to look the other way, (paperwork being the bane of existence in
bureaucratic systems) and would simply record everything for future reference.
They are also completely incapable of showing
kindness or mercy to an inmate, something often overlooked in the sales
brochures.
In a medical or psychological emergency, all the
robots could do would be to call for human intervention, and in the prison
setting, in the future, warm bodies of an official nature will be in short
supply. Standard prison models in Canada, using modern prison design, use a
minimal two officers per shift to supervise up to 192 inmates. With robot
guards, inmate suicide numbers would probably see an increase in the number of
fatalities.
In the movie, ‘Robocop,’ when two thugs grabbed a
woman for a little ‘rape-party,’
Robocop intervened and the audience cheered. When he shot one of them in the
balls, the audience clapped and applauded.
That’s what the cheerleaders for robotic policing
want you to see, and to think about the coming robotic revolution in policing,
a revolution that has already seen the first shots fired.
But there is a dark side, and that dark side of law
enforcement stems from the current social and political climate, not just in
the U.S., and the U.K., where they also have a Conservative government as we do in
Canada.
Perhaps Bill Moyers said it best:
"The
Unfinished Work of America"
Bill Moyers
“In one way or another, this is the oldest story in
America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact
embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and
manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at
the expense of others.”
“I should make it clear that I don’t harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy. Remember, I worked for Lyndon Johnson. Nor do I romanticize ‘the people.’ You should read my mail and posts on right-wing websites. I understand the politician in Texas who said of the state legislature, “If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents.”
“But there is nothing idealized or romantic about
the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its
citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose
institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the
difference between democracy and plutocracy.”
“Toward the end of Justice Brennan’s tenure on the
Supreme Court, he made a speech that went to the heart of the matter. He
said: ‘We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the
members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced
persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban
masses…Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely
nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.’”
“And so we are. One hundred and fifty years ago,
Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called
Americans to ‘the great task remaining.’ That ‘unfinished work,’ as he
named it, remained the same then as it was when America’s founding generation
began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise
of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have
sacrificed to save is a union worth saving.” Naked
Capitalism.
The
Dark Side of Automated Policing
We are well on the way down that road to the dark
side.
Nowhere in the Constitution, in the U.S. or Canada, does it say that you
have to have employment to have the rights of a citizen. There is no litmus
test in terms of income or property. A lot of people don’t get that, and if
they do, they simply don’t care.
What is disturbing, and this is not just in the
U.S., is the amount of ignorance, prejudice and bigotry still present in the
system.
The loudest mouths, and those with the biggest
war-chest for lobbying, will have their way with society.
The future of law-enforcement is very bright. For
the citizens, the future will be very dark indeed if that is allowed to go on
without some checks and balances in the system.
The right to be left alone is one of the
cornerstones of the U.S. Constitution.
You might as well forget it, that one is long dead.
You Won't Need a Warrant for That
"The core idea behind that amendment, which
prohibits the government from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures,’ is that its
representatives only get to invade people's private space -- their ‘persons,
houses, papers, and effects’ -- after it convinces a judge that they're up to
no good. The technological advances of the last few decades have, however,
seriously undermined this core constitutional protection against overzealous
government agents, because more and more people don't store their private
information in their homes or offices, but on company servers.”
Consider
email.
“In a series of rulings from the 1970's, the Supreme
Court created ‘the
third-party doctrine.’ Simply stated, information shared
with third parties like banks and doctors no longer enjoys protection under the
Fourth Amendment. After all, the court reasoned, if you shared that information
with someone else, you must not have meant to keep it private, right? But
online almost everything is shared with third parties, particularly your
private e-mail.”
Even weirder still: in the future, people who appear
to be doing nothing at all will
become suspicious.
Surely you have something better to do. It's unnatural to be doing nothing at all.
Surely you must be up to something.
Our
world will not be destroyed by terrorism, it will not be destroyed by
socialism, or communism, or any of the other ‘isms’ that we all love to talk
about as if we actually knew something about it.
“We
simply must have order.” This phrase has justified more ignorant laws than any
other single thing I can think of.
In
Canada, fifteen people can successfully lobby the government for a law that
applies to all.
And
if one kid is killed by a drunk driver, new calls for ‘tougher laws’ dominate
the front pages of our newspapers and the letters to the editor, and they are all
nice, well-meaning folks doing all the screaming and the yelling.
Our
world will be destroyed by our own lack of perspective, our own intolerance,
our own strident calls that ‘something must be done about it.’
The
world will be destroyed by our own sanctimony.
And
the meek, and their heavily-armoured and highly-paid protectors, shall inherit the Earth.
And
when that happens, the safest place to be will be behind bars.
END
Author’s
Note. A story like this takes a few hours to
compile and write commentary, as well as reading the material, (research) and
finding suitable pictures, links, etc.
Regarding the image 'Techno Police 21,' according to Wiki the image is too small and such a low resolution that the income potential of the copyright holder is not infringed by its use.
While the internet is a great equalizer, (and money
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Thank you for your time and consideration.
Louis
Shalako.
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