“Seen in the wild, robots often appear cute and nonthreatening. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be hostile,” argues a new article in Wired, reporting on what appears to be a pre-meditated kicking of a Knightscope K5 patrol robot in a parking lot in California:

K5’s siblings, it turns out, don’t fare much better. In 2017 a drunk man attacked a K5 in a Mountain View parking lot. A few months later a group of angry protestors in San Francisco covered another one in a tarp, pushed it to the ground, and smeared barbecue sauce on it. Stacey Stephens, Knightscope’s executive vice president, wouldn’t say how many have been seriously damaged. “I don’t want to challenge people,” he says, afraid any number will inspire — perhaps compel — more miscreants to seek out K5s. (Stephens did specify that Knightscope prosecutes “to the fullest extent of the law,” often pursuing felony charges for damaged K5s.)

Hard numbers or not, the assaults will continue — that’s not the question… The question is: Do we care…? [A]s an otherwise law-abiding citizen…all I could think as I watch and rewatch the security video from August 3 is: Way to go, dude. Because K5 is not a friendly robot, even if the cutesy blue lights are meant to telegraph that it is. It’s not there to comfort senior citizens or teach autistic children. It exists to collect data — data about people’s daily habits and routines. While Knightscope owns the robots and leases them to clients, the clients own the data K5 collects. They can store it as long as they want and analyze it however they want. K5 is an unregulated security camera on wheels, a 21st-century panopticon.

The true power of K5 isn’t to watch you — it’s to make you police yourself. It’s designed to be at eye level, to catch your attention. Stephens likens it to a police car sitting on the side of the road: It makes everyone hyperaware of their surroundings. Even if you aren’t speeding, you break, turn down the radio, and put your hands at 10 and 2. The debate over the proper treatment of robots can sometimes sound like the debate over violent videogames. Perhaps acting on violent impulses without hurting real-life humans is healthy, cathartic. Or it might be turning us into a race of psychopaths. Unlike the characters in videogames, though, robots don’t exist virtually. In the case of K5 bots, they intrude, without permission, into the most mundane of activities: walking down the sidewalk, parking your car…

It is a sham, an ersatz impression of power that should be pushed to its limits — right down onto the hard parking lot floor.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Should We Be Allowed To Kick Robots?