AI Endgame: Robot Dogs - not your best friend

Newsletter #20

Jan 25, 2025

https://debbiecoffey.substack.com/p/ai-endgame-robot-dogs-not-your-best

January 24, 2025

by Debbie Coffey, AI Endgame

I knew a bit about robot dogs, but I had no idea they’ve rapidly evolved over the past four years into military war machines, now equipped with sniper rifles or rocket launchers. [1] [2]

I also didn’t know robot dogs would be used on the U.S. border.

When I learned this, my next thought was “If robot dogs are used on the U.S. border, how big of a jump would it be for police departments or our government to use robot dogs further inland within the U.S., for example, as crowd control or on protesters?”

This year, China developed a robot dog that can run faster than Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt. [3] (Who’d want to be chased by that?)

In 2023, New York City Mayor Eric Adams “introduced” the NYPD’s new robotic police dog. [4]

Keep in mind that robot dogs could conceivably, and sooner rather than later, be turned on you, the public.

After a little digging, I learned robot dogs were first developed and marketed with security and safety purposes in mind, like detecting chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear threats, or for disabling explosives, to save human lives. [5] Far from nefarious purposes, robot dogs could be used to find signs of life in the rubble after an earthquake, or to enter a burning building. [6]

While robot dogs have positive applications, the military-industrial complex has co-opted the technology, developing lethal uses for them.

In a 2020 test at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, robot dogs provided real-time strike targeting data to USAF operators in Florida using Starlink satellite links.

Robot dogs are now being integrated into military forces around the world. With the arms race, countries will try to top each other and will continually come up with deadlier ideas.

Companies have tried to point out the “good news” by stating that robot dogs are not autonomous.

(Yet.)

So, where is this heading?

Ghost Robotics, the Philadelphia-based company that makes robot dogs for the Department of Homeland Security, has been testing robot dogs on the Mexican border, and is considering developing robot dogs that can walk across the bottom of a lake or giving them gait and motion so they can swim. Ghost Robotics is also considering the use of robot dogs in electronic warfare. [7]

As a dog lover (of real dogs), one thing I find intriguing is that soldiers are becoming emotionally attached to their machines. One report suggested that soldiers treated robots as pets. [8]

My interest in robot dogs was first triggered when I ran across a transcript of a podcast (Your Undivided Attention, hosted by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology), noting that many governments are turning to AI technologies to slow the refugee crisis at their borders. Their guest was Petra Molnar, who talked about the Department of Homeland Security using robot dogs along the U.S. border.

Is the Department of Homeland Security barking up the wrong tree at our border?

A lawyer and anthropologist specializing in migration and human rights, Petra Molnar is the author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, published in 2024.

Molnar described refugee camps and “robo-dogs, drones, different blimps, different types of surveillance cameras, and even really strange sci-fi type projects like sound cannons that are being rolled out to prevent people from even getting close to the border. And even AI lie detectors that the European Union has been testing out, for example.”

In addition to surveillance, within the refugee camps, biometric data, including voice printing, iris scanning, and fingerprinting, is collected. Molnar notes that sometimes this technology “happens behind closed doors where there's very little public scrutiny either by journalists or human rights defenders.”

Basically, borders are testing grounds for intrusive surveillance technologies and their unfettered use strays into a legal gray area, because laws haven’t kept pace with technology.

Molnar points out that her colleague Todd Miller, a journalist in Arizona, has written about the “border industrial complex” for many years, and the vast amounts of money to be made at the border. [9]

Greg Nojeim, co-director of the security and surveillance project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said “’Once the platform becomes accepted, believe me, new uses will be developed. It’s inevitable. And I don’t think we’re ready as a society to say, this use is permissible, this is not. I don’t think that legislatures are ready to say this is permissible, this use is not. … I’m concerned that the technology is getting ahead of the law.’ He says when that happens, civil liberties suffer. And that, he says, should matter to everyone, whether you live near the border or not.”

For now, I recommend avoiding nightmares by skipping “Metalhead,” the episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror where someone is trying to flee from robotic dogs.

Find links to all past AI Endgame newsletters HERE.