What would you think of a robot Police force?(details )

I’m not a huge fan..

But luckily we appear to be a long way from this becoming a reality.

Robots would at least be able to gunplay correctly.

What would you think of a robot Police force?
Even more foolish and less possible to do without horrible problems than AI cars.

Would they make less mistakes?
LOL! They’d make different mistakes.

Would they be effective?
At some things and not at others.

Should human judgement, always be a part of law enforcement?
Of course.

How do you think it would affect crime rates?
Hopefully it would lead to rebellion. (Of course, my hope and faith in our refusal to take horrible situations has been repeatedly disappointed over the last few decades.)

Would more people be imprisoned, as the robots would be strict?
That really depends on other things than whether there are AI police units or not, now doesn’t it?

We already sort of have it to a degree, anywhere this city can put up a redlight camera they do it.

Not if they are armed. That would just mean more dead bodies of innocent people.

Not here please, perhaps in some foreign land where life is cheap; Afghanistan maybe, or Iraq, or Syria or the Yemen but not here.

Robocops would never be practical. Donut shops would suffer greatly. And consider the massive expense to the taxpayers in WD-40 alone.

Of course, I liked bowling alleys better when they had ‘pin-setters’, so maybe my opinion shouldn’t count for much here….

I hate to say it but we are perhaps 20–30 years out from robots being commonplace. They’ll be like appliances we all have to a degree. No getting around it.

They would have to do all the kinds of things computers are bad at.

With today’s technology a computer can’t even reliably detect whether something it’s seeing is a human. Computer vision would be a major obstacle to making this a reality.

We’ve yet to program any kind of AI that understands ethics, which seems important too.

Machines (robots) are only as good as their programming and software.

All software can be hacked; software reflects the biases of the programmer.

Bad idea.

I’d rather train the human police we have to diffuse situations and not to act in robotic ways.

@ARE_you_kidding_me Not to mention all the hidden license plate readers feeding info to a database of where all the cars have been going. And all the “smart” phones and GPS devices that report where they are.

A lot of that tech is further along than many people think. Some of it like voice and facial recognition we are using all the time right now. Just ten years ago we were nowhere near it.

@ARE_you_kidding_me Yeah, I don’t think many people realize that all that handy real-time traffic data on Google Maps is there because they have data on the exact location and speed etc of so many devices.

Maybe robo police dogs, save the police dogs.

When all this tech starts to converge it will happen so fast that it will seem as if it happened overnight.

Does a robot understand ethics? Does it understand compassion? Can it comfort a frightened child? Can it calm a person in distress? Does it understand how to listen and relate to people? Can it defuse a situation with understanding and by addressing concerns? Or are ultimatums and punishment all it can do?

There’s a lot more to being a police officer than mere enforcement of codified law.

^ Agreed.

“Does a robot understand ethics? Does it understand compassion? Can it comfort a frightened child? Can it calm a person in distress? Does it understand how to listen and relate to people? Can it defuse a situation with understanding and by addressing concerns?”
If the answer to all of those question is “no”, then nothing will change compared to the current status quo, except that you will not have to feel guilty for bashing a robot’s head in.

I expect there will always be a place for human police, for as long as we need police at all, for the reasons @Darth_Algar mentioned. I do suspect there will be more automated enforcement of certain infractions that don’t require much thought, and automated patrolling, (aka surveillance) will become commonplace.

Not all officers work in enforcement, however. Some push paper, some are middle management, some probably do less than that, and I suspect their jobs will be as vulnerable as anyone else’s to the coming robot invasion.

@Zaku . I love that scene from RoboCop.

As far as more people imprisoned, I meant that the robot would probably go for the full extent of the law. Like, sometimes a cop will write you a ticket for going 44 mph, in a 35 mph zone. But you were caught going 53 mph. Or a cop might let you pour out a beer ,rather than give you an open container ticket (where I live, you can’t just walk around with an alcoholic beverage. )

@Darth_Algar . Ethics, and compassion can be what turns some situations ugly. A human responding to a domestic violence call can get angry when they see a badly beaten female, or child. Causing the officer to use more force than necessary.

Or, a human might overlook some crimes, because they feel sorry for the perpetrator…

A human might take a bribe…

The fuckers would rust over here with all our infamous rain

Is it easier to hack a robot or bribe a person? Hmm.. I wonder…

Based on all of the movies about robots taking over, I think that would be a bad idea haha!

@MrGrimm888 Yes, as in the automatic speed cameras in school zones, auto-sending tickets for 21mph in a 20mph school zone, with no kids present. Racked up a truly embarrassing number of tickets, almost all of it having nothing to do with any case of child endangerment whatsoever.

@Zaku I hear you on the automated ticket thing. It is so much easier to automatically ticket than to have a national conversation about how “limits” aren’t really the speeds that we are actually expected to limit ourselves to. 5 to 15 over, depending, is what society really expects as a limit. In many places, the so called limit is really the minimum speed you can safely drive. Eventually, the robots will figure that out, but it’s going to cost some people in the meantime.