New York's Police Robot in the Doghouse
Every appearance of "Digidog" triggers outrage. Now the Mayor has pledged to look into it.
I would not bet on the New York City Police Department getting to keep "Digidog," its four-legged robot. Earlier this week Mayor Bill de Blasio said "if in any way it’s unsettling to people we should rethink the equation," and at least two candidates in June’s election for his office issued anti-robot statements that were factually ridiculous but rhetorically potent. Both said “Digidog” (the NYPD name for the device, called Spot by its builder, Boston Dynamics) shouldn't be used.
Keep an eye on this controversy. There are going to be more robot-politics fights like it (as there should be, in a democracy). And this one offers lessons for future disputes. The most important by far, is this: Robots don't just do the physical tasks they were engineered to perform. People also use the machines for symbolic purposes. They use robots to signal who they are, what they care about, and who they stand with. Those "off-label" uses aren't incidental fluff. They're going to determine which robots people accept, or whether they accept any.
For an example of a robot as a social-signaling tool, consider this study performed by Matt I. Beane, an assistant professor in the Technology Management program at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His subject was a robot purchased by a hospital for use in telemedicine. As a device for treating patients, the thing was a bust. Doctors and staff didn't want to use it, for a variety of reasons from lack of familiarity to fears about being sued for malpractice. But the administration, stuck with the machines, kept them rolling around. They ended up serving as a show that the place was a with-it, technologically sophisticated, future-ready organization. That paid off in fundraising, branding, attracting patients and impressing both staff and the public. The robot’s useful work wasn’t helping doctors; it was the effect it was creating in the minds of people who saw it. It was a success, even though it didn't produce the gains it was engineered to create.
Spot, on the other hand, seems to be on a different trajectory. Increasingly, it's looking like it's symbolically more useful to critics of the police.
On paper, Spot is a platform designed to carry instruments in places where a human might not be safe (like a dark apartment with a gunman hiding in it) and where a cheaper, simpler wheeled robot can't go (say, when the apartment has a staircase). But, as I’ve mentioned, Digidog, the NYPD's version of Spot, doesn't just carry lights, cameras and microphones on its back. It also carries multiple meanings — the ones the cops intend, the ones that people see they first notice the robot, and (most important) the ones they see after they've heard what others are saying.
Most ordinary people have only seen robots in movies and TV shows. For them, the meaning of a real-life robot is a blank space. Some day it will be filled in by experience, conversation and guidance from people they trust, but for now, it’s unsettled territory. You can see this in reporting about Spot this year. In one video, for example, people watching the robot say both "that thing is creepy” and "where can we get one of those?" In this story, an adult who said she was "horrified" by Spot was also upset that children were not — "kids are going to the dog, like it’s cute." People’s attitudes are variable and changeable. The struggle has begun to persuade people to see the robot in whatever light the persuader favors. The Mayor's statement suggests the anti-robot interpretations are gaining ground.
I imagine this has left some heads spinning at the Police Department. They quietly introduced Spot last year, with only a bit of gee-whiz, lookit-that TV coverage. The robot was then used in some hostage situations without exciting much reaction. As the months passed, it might have looked as if the public was going to see Spot as the department does: As a sign that the NYPD is a cutting-edge, tech-savvy organization that's always finding new ways to keep cops and the public safe.
But seeing the robot that way depends on seeing the police department as an agent of justice and safety. And for many of us, that's not a tenable view of policing in 2021. The nationwide reckoning with police abuses has opened some mental space for other interpretations of a police robot — for example, as a sinister means of giving more power to an organization that shouldn't be trusted.
That’s a general problem for any shiny new police tech. There are other anti-robot influences, too, that are a particular problem for Spot. One is an episode of Black Mirror that features four-legged robots bent on slaughtering any and all of God's creatures, including people. That the real Spot is nothing like this TV monster is irrelevant. The episode gave people an image, concrete and specific, of four-legged robot horror. It made it easy to summon up fear of such robots, and to slap those fears onto the cops' machine. So, when a City Councilman introduced a bill this month to ban weaponizing police robots, he mentioned the episode.
I don't mean here to say we shouldn't consider weaponized robots as a political issue. I think we should! My point is rather that fictional killer robots make it easier to imagine real ones, and that ease makes it easier to get people to attend to your (I hope completely rational and well-argued) case against such machines.
In retrospect, then, it shouldn't have been a surprise that a lot of people would not go along with the meanings that the police attach to Spot. All the negative perceptions and feelings needed was a focus. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, that focus appeared last winter, when a video of Spot walking down a Bronx street went viral. Now, to judge by Mihir Zaveri's April 14 story in The New York Times, it seems that every future Spot appearance on city streets is going to spur fear, outrage and statements from politicians.
Again, I don't mean to discount those fears or disparage the statements (well, some of the statements are dumb. So, OK, I mean to disparage dumb statements about robots, but not anything else). My point is that each report of fear and outrage, each set of statements about why Spot is bad, make those interpretations more available to people. It is easier to fear Spot if you have read that others fear Spot, and that politicians are on its case. It is easier to resent that money is spent on Spot if you have seen on the news that this is an issue others have raised.
So, here are the competing interpretations of Spot as I see them:
First, there is the NYPD's, using the robot to demonstrate that it is powerful and capable, tech-savvy and modern.
Second, there is the critique of activists, politicians and regular folk who are using Spot as an emblem of oppression. For instance, Scott Stringer, a candidate for Mayor, denounced the police "coming up with new and more sophisticated ways to harass the poor and people of color." Maya Wiley, another candidate, said the robot “creates another danger for Black & Latino residents.” If you consider the robot only as a machine, these are nonsense: Should Spot bother you, you can simply walk away from it, because you can fast-walk faster than its top speed. Moreover, it seems the robot has only been used in hostage situations, which means the only people it has harassed or endangered are kidnappers.
Ah, but the thing is, Spot isn’t just a machine that does the work its designers planned. As “Digidog,” it's also a machine that symbolizes police power. When you consider the work it does as a symbol, Wiley and Stringer's statements have bite. Cops do harass poor people and people of color. This new tool expands their power. So even if Spot literally doesn't hassle anyone, it can be made into a potent symbol of excess police power.
Third, there is Spot as a symbol of misplaced priorities. Being a robot no one has seen before, it reads as high-tech — in other words, expensive and experimental. Maybe you can’t begrudge the cops necessities like cars, radioes and even bomb-disposal robots. But a fancy new robot? The department got along fine without one, all those years before Spot became available in 2019. Even before you know it costs about $75,000, Spot is thus a signal that the city spent money it needn't have. That's a potent symbol indeed, when the budget is in crisis and so many needs are unmet, as Congressman Jamaal Bowman describes in this tweet:
The NYPD brass might have expected that Spot could just slip into the mix of its tools, and we’d all be persuaded to see it as the cops do. But that didn’t fly, in a city anxious about cops abusing their power, and about automation, and about money. Now we'll see if the robot survive that miscalculation.