Robotic Nation Evidence

That depends on who is in charge of the police robots' manufacture and programming. Consider the movie "Robocop," in which the title character was ostensibly programmed to protect the public and uphold the law, but in fact contained secret programming that forced him to look out for the manufacturing corporation's interests.

Ideally, the source code for a police robot's programming would be made public (though ensuring that the same code was actually installed on the robots would be problematic). Unfortunately, the same is true of the robots that count our votes, and we've seen where that's getting us.

-- Shig
 

When all the police are robots, it will be part of the Joint Stewardship of Earth, where humans and robots rule the planet together. The robocops will be less brutal than human police, for various reasons. All actions taken by the robocops will be on the record and available for judicial scrutiny. The cyborg police will be less subject to erratic emotions.
 

I have always thought that the more useful applications of robotics were in telepresence applications, rather than deployment of autonomous machines. If that's the case, human police will still be controlling remote devices - be they anthropomorphic, small mobile surveillance devices, or some less familiar form invented expressly for crowd control.

Whether or not police become more or less brutal will depend mostly on judicial oversight. That's pretty much all they respond to. Technology doesn't have much bearing on it.
 

I hope they fire the entire department of fascist thugs. The Mayor is afraid of the police, and the sheeple are too stupid to know they are being prepped for the slaughter.
 

Police should be repspected but in turn they have to have a higher standard of conduct. You don't get one without the other.

The police video is damning. At a bare minimum no cop in the video should get a raise for two years.

If you have to protect a trade summit that extensively then you have admitted that the fallout is harmfull.

What good is a minimum wage when bad trade deals undercut our jobs?

It is that simple.
 

I tihnk autonomous robots are more likely, as telepresence robots seem more suceptable to hacking. The main problem is that the police departments seem to feel like they need to encourage the use of force and overdisipline. There's evidence that suggests police are reprimanded for not giving out enough tickets, and that might only be the tip of the iceburg when it comes to bad culture withen the police.

If we want to improve the police, we should replace the higher ups, who use policy to influence police culture. If only police would be hired for their ability to help old ladies across the street instead of their tendency to create revenue in the form of tickets and fines.
 

The police have become little more than armed gangs. I find this to be true even in sunny Southern California. It's the natural evolution of groupthink. They need more powerful "civilian" oversight to keep them in check every time they grow stronger.
 

Several posters have made the good point that the system will only be as just as the people in control. This problem will only go away when nations trade in their governing bodies (no pun intended) for AI management systems. At that point, what we now consider problems will pretty much disappear.
Even under human control, robo-police brutality will serve nobody's interests; it is just as easy to build a machine that immobilizes suspects harmlessly (airbags, foam, the possibilities are endless) as it is to build one that angers the populace by beating or shooting people. "Robocop" makes a few points but the whole scenario is overblown and designed to provide movie viewers with quantities of gratuitous violence.
 

What happened to free speech. They police aren't allowed to make fun of her, but she can protest anything she wants infront of hundreds of people. Either allow all parties to have free speech or take it away. Doesn't seem right to me. Robotic Police would have taken control of the situation much faster leading to fewer hours of protest. Afterwards, the human cops would still be laughing at how successful their machines are.
-Leon