A company in California has developed a mobile robot, known as the K5 Autonomous Data Machine, as a safety and security tool for corporations, as well as for schools and neighborhoods.
"We founded Knightscope after what happened at Sandy Hook," said William Santana Li, a co-founder of that technology company, now based in Sunnyvale, California. "You are never going to have an armed officer in every school." But what is for some a technology-laden route to safer communities and schools is to others an entry point to a post-Orwellian, post-privacy world.
"This is like R2-D2's evil twin," said Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, a privacy rights group based in Washington.
And the addition of such a machine to the labour market could force David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, to rethink his theory about how technology wrecks the middle class.
The minimum wage in the United States is $7.25, and $8 in California. Coming in substantially under those costs, Knightscope's robot watchman service raises questions about whether artificial intelligence and robotics technologies are beginning to assault both the top and the bottom of the workforce as well.
The K5 is the work of Li, a former Ford Motor Company executive, and Stacy Dean Stephens, a former police officer in Texas. Knightscope plans to trot out K5 at a news event on Thursday — a debut that is certain to touch off a new round of debate, not just about the impact of automation, but also about how a new generation of mobile robots affects privacy.
The co-founders have chosen to position their robot not as a job killer, but as a system that will upgrade the role of security guard, even if fewer humans are employed.
"We want to give the humans the ability to do the strategic work," said Li in a recent telephone interview, describing a highly skilled analyst who might control a herd of security robots.
The robot, which can be seen in a promotional video, is still very much a work in progress. The system will have a video camera, thermal imaging sensors, a laser range finder, radar , air quality sensors and a microphone . It will also have a limited amount of autonomy, such as the ability to follow a preplanned route. It will not, at least for now, include advanced features like facial recognition, which is still being perfected.
Knightscope settled in Silicon Valley because it was hoping for a warm reception from technology companies that employ large security forces to protect their sprawling campuses.
Over all, there are about 1.3 million private security guards in the United States, and they are low paid for the most part, averaging about $23,000 a year, according to the Service Employees International Union. Most are not unionized, so they are vulnerable to low-cost automation alternatives.
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