July 6th, 2007
Birth of RoboCop? iRobot sells taser-wielding robots to police, Pentagon
Although RoboCops aren’t walking the neighborhood beat yet, one vacuum cleaner manufacturer has joined forced with a stun-gun manufacturer to develop robots for police forces and the Pentagon, reports the Associated Press
Robot Corp. is hoping that soldiers and law enforcement will embrace the idea of a taser-wielding robot as a non-lethal, defense tool. But critics fear that it is a slippery step from non-lethal bots to true RoboCops - machines that are capable of deciding on their own when to shoot and kill.
“It’s one more step in that direction,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va., military research organization. “It is not the first step in that direction, but I think at some point toward the end of the next decade, you’re going to start seeing RoboCops, or a Terminator,” Pike said, referring to a pair of 1980s robot-themed sci-fi films. “We may see autonomous robots capable of inflicting lethal force.”
But Jim Rymarcsuk, vice president for business development at iRobot, joining with Taser International doesn’t mean that they are interested in developing armed robots who act on their own.
“Right now, we have no plans to take any robot with a lethal-weapon approach to the market,” Rymarcsuk said. “For this system, and all systems we have looked at, there is a human in the loop making the decisions. This in no way is giving the robot the capability to use force on its own.”
