By Teka Lark (October 30, 2019)
The current Bosstown Dynamics video circulating is a parody of the very real Boston Dynamics and you should still be concerned.
The only thing fake about it is that the technology isn’t quite there yet, but it is only a decade off. According to Stars and Stripes (June of 2018), Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert was a former military contractor who got much of his funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Since 1994, Boston Dynamics has received over $150 million in defense funding.
I have talked about this for a decade. The police are tools. And yes, we need to discuss the individuals, but we also need to discuss the unsexy-might-be-longer-than-a-tweet policies, economic and constitutional. What kind of anti-bias and unconscious bias training do you have planned for police robots? What kind of advisory board do you have planned for drones? How long should a robot sit in jail for murdering you?
So you plan on fighting back in hand to hand combat? You are going to do a shootout with a robot? What damage do you think you can do when technology can come at you from above with a drone that never goes to sleep.
As we need to think tactically about the knowledge we have in regards to labor and technology, we also need to start thinking this way when it comes to the criminal injustice system.
The future wealthy won’t need humans to do the killing directly, they will only need the police and a system that enables them to enact those policies.
