Meet The Drone Dog That's Going To Hunt You Down And Kill You For Jaywalking

It's a cool tech toy until they slap a gun on it. And they absolutely will.

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Back in the distant past of 2009, when I was but a wee little Ogre first starting to pay attention to politics, I spent a lot of time on Bob Cesca’s blog. One of the recurring columns at the time was “Creepy Robot of the Day” in which Bob would highlight the early efforts to build robots that could walk and, later, run.

The not-exactly-a-joke was that these were the precursors to the Terminators that would rise up and destroy humanity and/or eat the medicine of old people (they use it for fuel, you see).

I didn’t really pay it any mind because LOL the robots/drones from 2010 were hilariously slow and clunky. They were about as dangerous as a chihuahua with three teeth. I didn’t pay much attention to drones at all until a few years ago when I wrote a sort-of review of the movie “Outside the Wire” for The Banter.

While I was writing that article, I had a moment of clarity in which I realized that drones presented an imminent threat. Partly because it makes war cheap and “bloodless,” as in, we don’t have to send in our people to die.¹ But mainly because military tech inevitably makes its way into the hands of our highly militarized police and they cannot be trusted with that kind of power.

They already abuse drones to spy on us without warrants. They keep trying to put drones in our communities to “protect” us. That will lead to drones with tasers, then guns. But that’s not a big deal, right? Robot dogs are kind of awkward and easy to get away from, yeah?

Not so much.

This is advertised as an “industrial” tool that can be used for search and rescue and construction but let’s not kid ourselves, this thing is a weapon. It’s made by the Chinese but just knowing it exists means American arms manufacturers will be making their own soon enough. Or we’ll just buy them from the Chinese, paint an American flag on it, and send it out loaded with guns to kill terrorists in the Middle East.

A decade after that, it will be rolling around the streets of New York and Los Angeles, keeping us “safe.” How “safe” you’ll be will depend on who programmed it.

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There’s a scene in Robocop 2 where Officier Murphy has been reprogrammed and he’s a hot mess. He can barely function. It was played for laughs but imagine the robot dog from the video programmed to treat Black people as more dangerous just because they’re Black. Or the mentally ill as hostile if they’re having an episode in public, regardless if they’re actually hostile or not. Police academies “program” flesh and blood cops to behave this way now. Silicon Valley programmers, today, are overwhelmingly white men who can’t seem to keep their racism out of their programming.

Are these the people you want plugging the parameters of what they consider “the public safety” into a machine that can run you down in seconds? And that’s assuming they’re actually TRYING to do this in good faith and not going for straight-up drone-enforced fascism.

Each generation of these machines will be more lethal, less expensive, and much more attractive to both the military and police. One of the things I try to do with my writing is look ahead and see where we are going. Sometimes it’s not super obvious. This, though? This may as well be a giant neon warning sign in the sky.

If we don’t want these things on our streets, killing us (and stealing our medicine for fuel), we need to start putting up a stink with our elected officials now because once the lobbyists start pouring their bribes into re-election coffers, that’s going to be the end of that.

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1. I wrote that article shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine turned into the first drone war and showed us the horrible future.