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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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How it started: in 2025, the city of dublin, ohio (the latter detail missed by quite a lot of reporting,because there are no other dublins it might get confused with, I guess) gets an autonomous? ai powered police surveillance robot.
How it’s going
On the other hand, I bet it didn’t shoot anyone’s dog, so who’s to say that the $64k was wasted.
What I find most interesting in all this is that none of the coverage I've seen has said that crimes happened in its vicinity that it failed to detect, only that it didn't issue any citations or whatever. Which is wild if you consider that they basically had it doing laps of a parking garage or whatever. You would think that if it was encouraging people to not rob those cars or whatever that it was doing its job, much like how ostensibly a speed camera is supposed to discourage people from speeding rather than just issue fines.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this obelisk-looking-ass robopig was actually succeeding, I just think that the criteria being used to declare it a failure say some really bad things about the state of policing.
I never understand how these things aren't simply stolen and dismantled for parts? Where I come from I bet that would happen within a fortnight. yes there's cameras and GPS locators etc. but there's ways around that, it's not that hard...
I wouldn’t want to do that myself… personally too much tracking gear in there, and it’s easy to make a mistake and not disable it all. Also, you just know that if you get caught, they’ll try and prosecute it like you kidnapped and dismembered a regular officer.
Now, I’m more surprised that they don’t get black bagged and tipped over. Maybe they only ever use them in super thoroughly surveilled areas with nearby human backup, but you’d expect at least one successful tipping to make the news somewhere.
Or somebody talking the bot into driving of stairs/into a river. If it ever freezes enough getting it on ice will also be fun.
10 year olds will have so much fun with these things.
Here’s one from the archives: https://spectrum.ieee.org/children-beating-up-robot
tl;dr: small children have no empathy for your robot and will torture it and hound it to death if they can. The safest thing to do is to head for the nearest adult-sized people, who will hopefully be less inclined to kill it simply because it is a robot.