Plans To Hunt Down Criminal Clones, Go Undercover In Second Life
Australians can rest a little easier today. While the media and public fret about terror and drug gangs, the Australian Federal Police are getting in early on the supercrimes we will be facing when robots and clones, and cloned-robots, and robot-humans start raising hell in the underground crime worlds.
The Australian Federal Police Commissioner, Mick Keelty, sounds like he's been reading a bit of Philip K Dick recently. Which is never a bad thing. Either that, or the AFP are working secretly to interrupt a Bladerunner/Terminator-like rise of machine men that we haven't even begun to seriously entertain.
Wherever Keelty is getting his information, this is not the sort of Cyborg War talk you usually hear at a parliamentary inquiry :
Technology such as cloned part-robot humans used by organised crime gangs pose the greatest future challenge to police, along with online scamming, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says.No wonder we need to tighten our immigration laws and visa standards. We've got to keep an eye out for "cloned part-person, part-robots". Will we need to introduce empathy tests at airports to determine who is synthetic and who is uniquely human?
Mr Keelty said the police force would have to use experts from the private sector to fight tech-savvy organised criminals, because it lacked the necessary skills.
Technology-enabled crime was "a new area that's growing exponentially", he warned yesterday.
(Keelty) identified the use of robotics and cloning as future challenges.
"Our environmental scanning tells us that even with some of the cloning of human beings - not necessarily in Australia but in those countries that are going to allow it - you could have potentially a cloned part-person, part-robot," he said.
"You could (also) have technology acting at the direction of a human being, but the human being being distanced considerably from the actual crime scene."
The Australian Federal Police are also turning their attention to the world of Second Life. A world that Keelty appears to believe will become a criminal playground, and paedophile wonderland. But Keelty is also concerned that crimes committed in virtual worlds may eventually seep over into our reality :
Mr Keelty said scams had sprung up in online virtual worlds such as Second Life, where people can spend real money via credit cards to buy products such as virtual real estate and gifts.Keelty just admitted that the AFP have got undercover agents wandering around in Second Life, didn't he? Weird.
"Policing that is going to be quite difficult," he said.
Australian and UK police had also noticed a trend of internet pedophiles crossing into real life pedophilia, and were planning a joint operation in developing countries, he said.
"We are watching people in the virtual world convert what they are doing in the virtual world..."
"So this convergence from the virtual to the real world is a new phenomenon and makes evidence-gathering quite difficult. It will be a problem for us into the future."
As far as robot crime waves go, why should all this cause us so much concern? Just get the robopolice to go after the robot criminals. In the US, there's a taser-touting robot that looks set to hit the streets soon :
Ahhh, isn't that the idea? This is why former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was so keen to get robots armed with automatic weapons into the battlezones of Iraq.A move to arm police robots with stun guns has been condemned by weapons researchers.
On 28 June, Taser International of Arizona announced plans to equip robots with stun guns. The US military already uses PackBot, made by iRobot of Massachusetts, to carry lethal weapons, but the new stun-capable robots could be used against civilians.
"The victim would have to receive shocks for longer, or repeatedly, to give police time to reach the scene and restrain them, which carries greater risk to their health," warns non-lethal weapons researcher Neil Davison, of the University of Bradford, UK.
"If someone is severely punished by an autonomous robot, who are you going to take to a tribunal?" asks Steve Wright, a security expert at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK.
Let the robots run wild, and then stand back and laugh as the lawyers and judiciaries try to determine whether a robot can be charged with murder.
But if we let robopolice go after the robocriminals, aren't we drifting into dangerous territory?
What if they find common ground, in the dark alleys of a night city and, you know, team up?
Against us?
And is Keelty actually hinting at a day when we might find ourselves having to deal with cloned humans, stripped of their emotions and brains, stuffed with nanotech, being sent into crowded places to then detonate by remote control?
Or will half-robot-half-humans be jihad-programmed to explosively suicide?
1950s and 1960s science fiction, particularly the work of Philip K Dick, has had a nasty habit of turning into reality, our reality, of late. It looks like we are going to get even more in the not so distant future.
Here’s a smattering of decades old Philip K Dick realities that have become, or are quickly becoming our new reality :
Criminals being tracked by satellites, remote control robot sentries and machine-gunners, synthetic and cloned pets, swipe cards to enter buildings and malls, laptop computers, reality television, hacker anarchists, mega-global corporations that rule entire continents, android babysitters, a military controlled United States divided into police-state zones (post-Hurricane Katrina, this was New Orleans), whole towns as nostalgia amusement parks, a technology-interconnected global humanity and a president who bankrupts his country and creates fictional wars to distract his people from their dark reality.
Philip K Dick's 1980 Top Ten Predictions For The Future That Have (Mostly) Come True
Russian RoboCop Hits The Streets - But Shorts Out In The Rain
Robots Are Now Being Given Emotions
Why We're All Living In A Philip K Dick Novel
Robots Don't Cry - US Has Big Plans For Its Robot Army
