While some may fear that the rise of AI and the sudden advancement of robotics are going to propel us toward a future where RoboCop-like law enforcement patrols our streets, ruling with an iron fist and filling us all with fear of the mechanized state, the truth is that real-life robot cops are still a long way from patrolling the streets of that dystopian future. As reported by WOSU Public Media and The Columbus Dispatch, an Ohio police department’s experiment with a robotic cop ended after less than a year on the job and was a spectacularly miserable failure.
The City of Dublin, Ohio, pulled the plug on “DubBot,” an autonomous security robot manufactured by Knightscope, on May 12 after it failed to do… well, anything really. DubBot spent nearly 10 months patrolling the Rock Cress Parking Garage, equipped with 360-degree cameras, two-way emergency communication capabilities, and an emergency call button designed to connect citizens with dispatchers… and it somehow didn’t rack up a single arrest or even issue a ticket of any kind.
DubBot, which, for Star Trek fans out there, looks like the life-support chamber/wheelchair former captain of the Enterprise, Christopher Pike, rolled around in, did a shocking amount of nothing in this one-year reign. City officials say it did so little, in fact, that it didn’t even spot an event that required a police response during its entire deployment. It just rolled around, bleeping and blooping the day away. If you’re the type to think cops are generally pretty useless, it’s incredible that they somehow built a robot cop that is even more useless.
The original plan for Dublin was to deploy such robots over a two-year period at a cost of $238,448. Those plans are now abandoned. Dublin’s final cost for the pilot program came out to about $67,500.
To be fair, the program was never intended to replace police officers, though you have to imagine that if somehow, someway, it actually did its job instead of doing absolutely nothing, you would be able to draw a line between its success today and a not-so-distant future where it replaces at least a few cops. For now, it seems like we may never see another DubBot patrolling the mean streets of Dublin, Ohio again, or at least for the foreseeable future.
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