As longtime readers may know, I’m a booster of robots, drones, and automated vehicles. This vote in San Francisco to allow police to use robots to kill or incapacitate threatening people in extreme circumstances seems commonsensical to me. If we are going to give police guns — and helicopters, armored cars, and all sorts of other matériel — why not give them robots? Of course, bomb squads already use them.
San Francisco progressives inevitably fear that robots will be used to harm non-white people in particular, and there have been the inevitable references to sci-fi movies. But robots will just be another law-enforcement tool among many. I’d expect other jurisdictions to follow suit.