Robotics is going to be a major issue in the 21st century, as they will be used for everything from doing daily tasks to enforcing compliance with laws. The latter is the case in San Francisco, where the SPCA is now using robots to harass homeless people near its building premises:
As the homeless crisis on America’s West Coast forces many cities to the financial brink, one innovative animal shelter in San Francisco is using a low cost, high-tech robot security guard to shoo away the homeless outside its facilities, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
The San Francisco branch of the SPCA (the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) contracted Knightscope to provide a k5 robot (the same model which in July commited suicide at a mall fountain) for securing the outdoor spaces of the animal shelter. Knightscope’s business model allows the SPCA to rent the robot for around $7 an hour, which is about $3 less than the minimum wage in California. According to San Francisco Business Times, the robot was deployed as a “way to try dealing with the growing number of needles, car break-ins and crime that seemed to emanate from nearby tent encampments of homeless people.”
The robot, weighing in at 400 pounds and standing over 5 feet tall and 3 feet wide, has been autonomously patrolling the sidewalks of the facility with a top speed of 3 MPH for more than a month, as far as we can tell. Sensors and fancy technology integrated with-in the robot are used to deter the pesky homeless from setting up shop.
Jennifer Scarlett, president of the SPCA told the Business Times: “We weren’t able to use the sidewalks at all when there’s needles and tents and bikes, so from a walking standpoint I find the robot much easier to navigate than an encampment.”
The social media reaction, on the other hand, has been overwhelmingly negative, shaming the SPCA for deploying the robot for targeting the homeless, while some blamed capitalism.
Nevertheless, San Francisco recently voted on a bill to decrease the number of robots on city streets. According to the San Francisco Business Times, the city could charge the SPCA a fine upwards of $1,000 per day for not complying with the new regulations operating on city-owned sidewalks.
In a particularly dystopian move by the SPCA, the autonomous robot purging the homeless from city streets in San Fransico may be a harbinger of what is coming to America’s inner cities as the humans slowly but surely lose the war against robots, first in the labor market and then, everywhere else. (source, source)
Since last year and beginning with the sex robots, I have been warning that the rise of AI and cyborg type machines is already and will become and ever more serious threat to the survival of the human race. I do not exaggerate when I say this, for these robots, having the capacity to replicate all that a man can do with greater accuracy except for the generation of children, the robots will be used as the reason to naturally transition into a period of eugenics that has yet to be compared to in human history. In the name of increasing profits, maximizing efficiency, eliminating waste, and producing more with less cost, humans will be gradually removed from the tasks of daily life until the very people for which the machines were build to serve will be called “useless” and the machines will be used as the tool to destroy them.
One area where robots are going to have a major impact will be in military conflict, for future wars will be won not by he who has the best arms, but he who can build the best robots. Soldiers will be replaced with robots because robots can perform all the tasks better than even the most highly trained soldier, and since robots do not feel pain, do not have families or emotions, do not need to eat food or drink water, cannot be swayed by propaganda or disinformation, and operate solely on efficiency, they are ideal killing tools. Extensive testing has been going on for decades now, and just as the machine gun was for World War I and the atom bomb was for World War II, so will the robot be the next great weapon for World War III.
Robots will eventually be integrated into all aspects of public life over the next ten years. Their presence will have a massive economic and social impact on society, and owing to the legitimate concerns of many people about a machine being hacked, going “rogue,” or simply becoming possessed by an evil spirit, in order to market the rise of robotics and the replacement of humans with robots they will have to be presented as offering more potential benefits than negative consequences.
Historically speaking, when a business or government wants their people to accept and idea that is immoral or at least, morally questionable, they begin by marketing their product as the “solution” to a social problem that all people can agree upon is an issue, or against a group of people that everybody in general does not like. This way the product is presented as THE ANSWER to said issue, even though the answer is just a cover for the greater goal of legitimizing that which is questionable and convincing people to ignore the future problems with a product by focusing on how it solves a problem at the moment in question.
There are many problems and groups in society that could be chosen, and one of those groups that is often used for such experiments is homeless people because, in all honesty, most people do not like homeless people because the reputation of homeless people as dirty, dangerous, unbalanced threats to public order is reinforced by the behaviors of many. I speak as one with experience who has worked with the homeless, seeing and experiencing the dysfunction up close.
Make no mistake, homeless people are people, and as all men are made in the image and likeness of God, they must be treated with dignity and societies do have a responsibility to care for them. Indeed, the greatness of a society is measured by its care of the weakest and most vulnerable, of which the homeless are a part. At the same time, there is a reality of homelessness that must be acknowledged as well, albeit in the context of Christian charity, which I should like to present based on experience.
The homeless people who are homeless because of actual life circumstances are many. Owing to the tremendous economic changes that have taken place, it is a fact of life that for many people, work has become something which is not just hard to find, but an arduous burden undertaken for a wage far less than what the task is actually worth, leaving many Americans tired and just a paycheck away from poverty. This has worsened since the economic crash in 2007 and in spite of all of the talk of “economic recovery” under Obama and now “make America great again” under Trump, the reality is that the quality of life, jobs, and wages for Americans is going down and it is not going to come back up, at least for a long time. Even many seasoned professionals with good careers and lengthy resumes are finding themselves having to take up second jobs working for low wages in order to meet their needs. These are the most serious cases because they are the people who desire to better themselves and their communities that owing to many factors often times beyond their control or lacking the experience to manage them, find themselves impoverished and lost in a society that has turned against them as soon as they fell on hard times. There are countless numbers of these people, and yet at the same time, they are also the minority of homeless cases when considered as an average whole.
The majority of homeless people are homeless because of either an addiction which they refuse to give up or because they have a legitimate medical condition for which they have medication and simply refuse to take it, in either case choosing to be homeless rather than deal with their problems on even a basic level. There is another group of people, and a fairly large one as well, who actively choose homelessness because they see themselves as a kind of “urban survivalist” who would rather live as a “modern native” in the “metropolis jungle” than lead a normal life, and while many of these types have mental problems, there are quite a few who do not. These people, who together make up the unquestioned majority of homeless cases, owing to their lifestyle choices also bring about a series of other serious challenges, of which two are of prime importance: sanitation and violence.
Sanitation is a major safety issue when working with the homeless. Many homeless people are physically dirty owing to the fact they live in public spaces and do not have access to a water source for bathing, and so they routinely have fleas, lice, ticks, and bedbugs, and as such it is the reason that many shelters have a policy that “intakes” must immediately shower after being admitted. An even more serious issue are bloodborne diseases, particularly HIV/AIDS, STDs that can be spread through non-sexual means (such as saliva in food), and other serious illnesses, particularly Tuberculosis and as it has become more common, drug-resistant Tuberculosis.
Since the homeless do not have access to toilets in the same way a person with a home has one, homeless people have to use whatever location they can find to “relieve” themselves. While many times they can find a public toilet, all homeless people at some point will have to do their business in a public area such as a dumpster, in a building corner, behind a plant, or just out on the sidewalk. It is not simply disgusting to see or discover a pile of human feces or urine in a public area, but it is also a health hazard owing to the diseases that many of these people carry. Even if these people do not have a disease- even if none of them did- there are other deadly diseases such as cholera and Hepatitis A that are spread by the widespread presence of human waste in an area with no designated space to put it. The place where this story took place, in San Francisco, is actually going through a Hepatitis A crisis right now owing to this issue, since so many homeless people are defecating and urinating in public it has precipitated a massive outbreak of the disease that the government is now trying to contain.
Unfortunately, a scene all too common
Violence is another major issue with the homeless. Whether it is caused by intoxication from alcohol or drugs, overmedication/undermedication/no medication/wrong medication/mixing medications with alcohol and/or drugs, or a grudge over some small issue that escalates over other small issues into something bigger, life on the streets and in shelters can become violent and fast. It is no fun attempting to break up a fight between grown men throwing chairs at each other over accusations that another man owes him $10, or attempting to talk a large and angry homeless man out of stabbing another man because he thinks that the other man ‘scuffed’ his boots on purpose when he was not looking, or having to spend and hour explaining to a man that one cannot assault another homeless person because the other person does not say “Hello” when he greets the other man.
I could go on with experiences, and I bring these experiences up because there are legitimate issues here in society that must be acknowledged, and to ignore them is immoral. At the same time, one must also acknowledge that while these issues exist and they are evil, it never gives permission for using these people to perpetuate or justify another evil.
As I referred to earlier and as mentioned in the article, the area this robot is dealing with is San Francisco, which has a serious problem with homeless people having been given license to act out in disordered ways to such a point their actions have caused a public health crisis. This must be acknowledged and dealt with, and then steps instituted to see it does not happen again (which will most likely not be done). The bringing of robots into the situation is not actually going to make any meaningful, long-term answer to the problem because a robot deals with people as a machine does- indiscriminately. A robot, lacking a soul and operating as a program, is simply told what to do or not to do based on a series of inputs and outputs. They have the capacity to make calculations, and very advanced calculations, but still a machine is a machine and not a person. It does not care if it is targeting a person doing drugs in public or if it is a person who is legitimately trying to get his life together while going through hard times. All a robots sees and will ever see is an input and and output and will match one to the other regardless of situational nuances.
What this robot is going to do is to resolve certain issues caused by homeless persons such as public loitering, etc. in a generic way that does not actually address the problem but gives the perception that it is being addressed. This in turn will be leveraged by this company as well as other companies and robotics manufacturers to produce more robots for this purpose as well as use in other contexts.
The future of robotics is going to be for use in military situations. What is to say that in the near future- and we know this is coming- that such a “patrol robot” around the homeless will not be given weapons and programmed to make decisions to use them if it ‘detects a threat’? Indeed, owing to the violent tendencies of many homeless persons and since people do not like the homeless, ‘testing’ such a robot on the homeless would be lauded by many, not only as a means of ‘control,’ but if a homeless person were to get killed by such a robot in the testing process, many people would not care at all about the person, and most likely would probably blame him for “provoking” the robot regardless of whether he actually did something or not.
Even if there were many good reasons to use robots for “patrolling” areas where the homeless gather, the very philosophy behind using such a robot is dangerous because it is anti-human and pro-eugenics It is a philosophy which says that some men are ‘lower’ than other men in society to such a point that they can be told what to do not by a human, but by a machine and then be forced to obey the machine rather than a human under penalty of law. It says that instead of man being the master of machines, that the machines are the masters of certain men because they are ‘unworthy’ of a place as a human in society owing to their social or economic state.
As many problems as there are among many of the homeless, man is still a creature made of body and soul in the image and likeness of God. While many homeless will not leave the streets, there are many that do try and many who do success, and I speak not of people who fell on hard times, but of that majority who made poor decisions and perhaps at a later point in life regretted their decisions and attempted to make new ones. People cannot be classified under a philosophy such as that a machine could dictate to them what is socially acceptable and what is not in the same way it must not be done for any man because to take such a view is to reduce man to the level of a social animal whose worth comes from his actions.
In this sense, the situation with the homeless and bringing in robots at the “solution” is similar to the situation with Muslims/refugees in Europe and the rise of nationalism. We have stated that Islam is a problem, that many the ‘refugees’ who were trafficked in by the governments of western Europe are indeed causing major problems and that all of these issues must be acknowledged and dealt with in the context of mercy and justice. However, to this we have also emphasized that the problems caused by these people, which are evil and real, are never a justification for substituting them with another evil as the “solution,” which is the attempts at reviving pagan ethnonationalism that we at Shoebat.com have been meticulously documenting.
Evil can never be overcome by evil because it comes from the same source and will generate the same results. Likewise, one must not be deceived into thinking that a current and potentially real good will supply for the potential of bringing in a long-term evil in the name of solving a problem at a particular time. Such a vision is short-sighted and narrow-minded mistake that can only end in disaster.
Now owing to public outcry, the robot’s use at the location has been discontinued for now. However, this is not the end and will surely return in another location. This is because ultimately, the problem with these robots is the same problem with abortion and the reason people continue to have them. It is because the majority of people in America do not have any respect for human life, and they see man as an animal. They have no problem with eugenics because they do not see themselves as ever being the possible target of eugenics, but simply “those people over there” that they don’t like. Yet it is always by targeting that group or idea that “the majority” does not like is how all of the great evils are ushered into a society, for once they are justified for their “effectiveness” in “dealing with the problem with the (insert group/issue here)”, then can said “solution” be applied to all of society. It is history repeating itself, again.