Imagine... a robocop with a battery power system and an electronic till rather than a heart and brain. Will there be justice?
Ullo, ullo, ullo, what?s all this then ? whirr, rattle, beep, bzzt.
It might sound like a science fiction dream — or more likely nightmare — but experts are predicting that one day robocops will be patrolling the streets.
Professor Noel Sharkey, who sports the chief white coat and pocket protector in the artificial intelligence bunker of Britain’s Sheffield University, has completed a study that concluded robots will be doing most of the crime fighting and traffic duties within 30 years.
As they should, the roborozzers will have superhuman strength, be unable to feel pain, and will apparently all be hooked into the rafts of databases that contain all our bank accounts, tax files, criminal records and even shopping history and movements. Although it’s not clear why they would want to know that you spend half the night looking for old comic books and collectible beer bottles on ebay.
The learned professor spent a couple of months on the study, funded — you won’t be surprised to hear — by a film company about to unleash a boxed set of desperate cash-calf sequels titled something like Son (or great-great-grandson) of Terminator.
He delved into all the latest research from around the world, in addition to apparently doing some assiduous study into future trends and ideas, as developed by the eminent rocket scientists in Hollywood.
And according to his findings, the robots will be joined by autonomous police cars that can detect a speeding car, recognise its number plates and automatically add demerit points to the owner’s license — in addition to deducting fines from their bank account on the spot.
This will raise some problems if your car has just been stolen and is speeding away with the thief at the wheel. But doubtless there will some sort of system where you can appeal an unfair charge and fine swiftly and easily, and be listened to with sympathetic understanding. Just like today.
The robocars will also be able to administer random alcohol and drug tests, and presumably cart you off the street and down to the watch-house if they consider you’re over the limit.
Professor Sharkey doesn’t venture what the robotic police cars might look like, but you can imagine some kind of misalliance between Knight Rider — for those of us old enough to remember David Hasselhoff’s launching role, but not old enough for the mercies of senility to have erased the horror from our grey matter — and the Sheriff from the Cars animation (for the rest of you).
But he thinks the mechanised officers themselves will look pretty much like us, with human-like features concealing a construction of inanimate materials with a battery power system and an electronic till rather than a heart and brain. Much like parking Nazis, really.
