Massachusetts: robotic police dog shot and credited with averting bloodshed

Is this the news story that will be pushed to show how useful and effective these robots are after they start strapping guns to them, letting some AI tell them who to shoot? That's what it feels like.

Hello friend. It looks like you made a disparaging comment about our surveillance capabilities and ongoing efforts to introduce AI killer robots. Please report to your nearest police station where one of our members will escort you to our re-education camp.
Thank you Killer robot team.
- P.S., if you fail to report within 4 hours we will release the dogs.
- (two spaces at the end of a line will "force" markdown to respect your single line break/enter)
AI might be an improvement over the humans who open fire on guys armed with nothing but a sandwich.
Ah, who am I kidding, of course machine learning is just racism laundering. The image recognition software will use police data to train and therefore will do the same racist murders, just with hyper accurate gun shots.
- Even before the latest surge in AI capabilities image recognition was already better than human at distinguishing between gun and non-gun. I think it'll be a net positive. I'm looking forward to the humanoid police robots that can just run up to someone and grab their gun away, ignoring being shot at in the process.
Black Mirror Metalhead intensifies
Search AI pushing news stories written by AI about AI autonomous weaponry telling us we'll be safe.
At no point did it talk about arming the robot, let alone any use of AI. Your concerns are valid, just not for this specific story.
- I don't feel like you are parsing that comment correctly.
  Will this feel-good story about a robot dog be used later to make us all a bit more accepting of all the dystopian shit that we know is coming with police robots?
  Well maybe not, but I have to agree with the "that's what it feels like" assessment.

Those things aren't like the K9 unit in the C.O.P.S. cartoon, or even like Goddard in Jimmy Neutron. They're terrestrial drones. Comparing them to dogs is either incredibly generous to them or incredibly insulting to the dogs.

Or incredibly ingratiating to what will likely become a mobile weapons platform.

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.

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.

They instigated him into revealing his position with robots and then gassed him. I guess that’s effective, but I assume it could have been done without the robots too.

I guess that’s effective, but I assume it could have been done without the robots too.
The guy inside was shooting at officers outside and shot at multiple robots inside. Multiple strikes to one that finally made it fail. Zero humans (assailant or officers) were injured in all of this because of the use of robots.
I'm interested in hearing what other non-robot method are you suggesting that would have had the same result with equal safety to humans?
What else are they going to spend that money on? Crap like deescalation training and non-lethal equipment?
- The robots are already non-lethal equipment though
But robots are cool and they need to spend their money on cool new toys for the boysssssssssss omg have some compassion maaahn duude.
If this becomes a common method, there's going to be a lot more police instigated house fires. Tear gas cannisters are basically a smoldering ember
- Well the other option would be to gas the entire home, so no it would actually prevent them by limiting where they use them.
  Also, can you provide the statistics on house fires started by tear gas? It sounds like it’s possible, but it also sounds like you’re being an alarmist since it can be possible, but has probably only also happened once in its history. Which wouldn’t be an issue to bring forward in most other situations…..

until it doesn't enter the terminator soundtrack