Europol wants everyone to calm down with their visceral hatred of the humanoid robots poised to take over a variety of industries, including law enforcement, before all of society breaks out into violence.
In a new 48-page report that looks ahead to what crime and policing could look like in 2035, Europe’s police agency foretells a future where automation pushes global society until it snaps.
The report, detailed in The Telegraph, envisions a not-so-distant future where robots are everywhere, doing everything humans used to do, and we’re pissed about it, our resentments over corporations replacing us with machines bubbling over in a variety of ways.
Europol predicts protests, riots, robots in poorer urban areas getting beaten to death, and a series of small robotic failures like a care robot giving the wrong medication, ballooning into national scandals and populist backlash.
The report, which is the policing agency’s version of fanfic, imagines what happens when criminals one day figure out how to get creatively criminal with robots. The report warns that AI-powered social care robots could be hacked to harvest personal data or manipulate vulnerable adults and children. Terrorist groups and organized crime, already using cheap drones, could scale up attacks on power grids, water supplies, or prisons using swarms of AI-guided quadcopters, technology being used right now on Ukrainian battlefields.
Europol says cops around the world would have to adapt fast. Police might have to investigate human suspects of crime, and also their robot co-conspirators. Was it a simple car crash, or was there a glitch? Or maybe it was a cyberattack? If you thought cops today were militarized, wait until you see cops of the future using anti-drone weapons, freeze rays (which the report drops in there with no warning, like it thinks a Mr. Freeze-style villain is right around the corner), and it even imagines cops using “nano-net grenades that bloom like dandelions to snare a rogue rotorcraft.”
At the same time, some human officers may be replaced in routine roles, creating resentment within police ranks themselves.
It all sounds so distant, so futuristic, yet the warning signs are already here, what with instances already reported of, say, drones smuggling drugs (and crab legs), autonomous vehicles breaking traffic laws, and remember the time a chess-playing robot broke a child’s finger? The robotic dystopia is here, but it’s just taking its baby steps.
Are some of these scenarios wildly exaggerated? Absolutely. The report envisions a world largely unregulated, where corporations run amok. It’s a worst-case-scenario type of write-up. But it doesn’t mean it’s going to be entirely incorrect, and it’s easy to envision some of its wilder scenarios playing out in real time within the next few years. But one thing is for sure: the corporate world will absolutely try to replace as many of us as they can, and a lot of us are not going to take it lying down.
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