• chumbalumber
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    8 months ago

    I’m gonna say the dog did a good job this time. If there’s someone unstable in a building with a gun, I’d rather a robot go in and either negotiate or use non-lethal force than a person do it, since a remote operator is much less likely to overreact than someone in person.

    The issue for me isn’t with the technology, and more with who is applying it and why. It should be explicitly for harm reduction purposes, and they shouldn’t be equipped with lethal force.

    • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      This I can agree with. Despite my general unease with ANYTHING that can be reasonably called a police robot, even the cops seem to realize they’ll probably kill less people this way.

      “In addition to providing critically important room clearance and situational awareness capabilities, the insertion of Roscoe into the suspect residence prevented the need, at that stage of response, from inserting human operators, and may have prevented a police officer from being involved in an exchange of gunfire.”

      At least it doesn’t matter when the operator of the unarmed robot thinks the phone (or sandwich, or wallet) you are holding is a gun - it probably doesn’t cost you your life.