Jon: Welcome to Episode 164 of the Digital Life. A show about our insights into the future of design and technology. I am your host Jon Follett and with me is founder and co-host Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Hello Jon.

Jon: Hello Dirk. For our podcast this week, we are gonna talk a little bit about the police in Dallas using a robot to kill the sniper in the wake of some fatal shootings of five police officers tragically last week. As you pointed out off the air, the Twitters and the social media are all kerfuffle about this use of the robot for a couple of different reasons. Of course let's set up the scenario that this robot, which was a bomb disposal robot, was actually used to deliver an explosive.

The police used it to deliver the explosive and kill the sniper. This bomb disposal robot is used by both police and military, and this is really the first time that domestic police have used a robot in this deliberately lethal way. In that sense, it does play a bit into the debate about so-called "killer robots" right? Which is being discussed right now, so do the autonomous, lethal robot war scenarios that are being discussed and debated in the UN and elsewhere because of course we need rules for battlefield robots, but unlike those debates just to be very clear, this robot was not autonomous.

It was a remote-controlled bomb disposal unit, and it wasn't designed to have a weapons system as part of it. This bomb was attached to it. Then this is also importantly this is not part of a larger tactical use of robots in this way. This is not like a new approach to policing. This was sort of in the moment, ad hoc problem solving by people who were in a combat, by police who were in a combat situation. In this particular case, the robot was basically used to protect human life insofar as there wasn't a policeman or a police sniper trying to get rid of this bad actor.

There are lots of intertwining pieces that we can discuss. First I just wanted to get an idea of your general sense of this debate and of robots being used in this way.

Dirk: Sure. There's lots of interesting things to talk about here, but let me profess with something else. This obviously isn't a political show, so I don't want to overly politicize this episode, but I do want to just a few things because the context of this happening is meaningful to us here in the United States. First I want to say that I'm saddened for the continued senseless death of people of color by their interaction with the law enforcement system, and I'm similarly saddened by the recent spate of basically assassinations of law enforcement individuals by disaffected people.

Second I'd to like to say I'm deeply disturbed, and really in alignment and unison with the idea that people of color today cannot in this country live and work and function in the same way that I can as a white person. I'm very aware of that difference, how that difference is manifesting in death in some of these situations that we have here, and without getting into the specific political movements, I'm very much aligned with the people who are outraged by this and aren't willing to tolerate it anymore. The third thing I want to say is and what I'm going to say here in no way is excusing or condoning the deaths that have happened, but I think something that's not talked about as much but is an important nuance to the conversation.

I think that's really fucking hard to be a police officer, to have a job where any time that a call could lead to your death or your being harmed in some really significant way. That doesn't excuse the things that have happened, which in many cases are clearly criminal, but I think that this big social thing we are grappling with, like people just pound their fist on racism as this oblique thing. I think it is much more complicated in the context of policing, in the context of authority, in the context of peacekeeping. Then how the society manifests those things.