[Ed. – What had the suspect done? If he was threatening to detonate a bomb that would kill hundreds, it would seem that the police action was justified.]
“Bomb squad” robots are marketed as tools for safely disposing of bombs, not for delivering them to targets. (In 2018, police offers in Dixmont, Maine, ended a shootout in a similar manner.). Their profession had supplied the police with a new form of lethal weapon, and in its first use as such, it had killed a Black man.
“A key facet of the case is the man happened to be African-American,” Ayanna Howard, a robotics researcher at Georgia Tech, and Jason Borenstein, a colleague in the university’s school of public policy, wrote in a 2017 paper titled “The Ugly Truth About Ourselves and Our Robot Creations.”…
Like almost all police robots in use today, the Dallas device was a straightforward remote-control platform. But more sophisticated robots are being developed in labs around the world, and they will use artificial intelligence to do much more.
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