Use of Police Robot to Kill Dallas Shooting Suspect Believed to Be First in US History

Peter Singer was quoted in the Guardian about the first robot used to kill a human being: 

Peter Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation who writes about the technology of warfare, said he believed this was a first. “There may be some story that comes along, but I’d think I’d have heard of it,” he said.

Others concurred. “As far as I know, it appears to be the first intentional use of a lethally armed robot by the police in the United States,” said Elizabeth Joh, law professor at the University of California at Davis

This is not the first time a robot designed with other functions in mind has been used as a weapon, but this kind of repurposing has until now been limited to the military. Singer said that in the early 2000s, a solider he interviewed repurposed a surveillance robot called a Marcbot with a bomb. These robots aren’t autonomous, Singer emphasized – the Marcbot “is like a toy truck with a sensor and camera mount they’d use to drive up to a checkpoint”. But this soldier had improvised: “They duct-taped an explosive and you can figure out the rest. You can see the parallels here.”

Singer also said that he was “in no way, shape or form condemning” the DPD’s decision. Brown said the decision protected police officers on a night when their lives were at greater risk than usual. “Other options would have exposed our officers in grave danger,” Singer said.

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On the military side, such improvisations are both the solution and, increasingly, the problem. “We’ve seen insurgents improvise,” Singer said. “Literally this week, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Agency [an agency within the Department of Defense whose purpose is to develop better ways for the military to respond to IEDs] got a $20m grant to defeat drone IEDs, not for missiles but for small commercial drones that you and I could buy, which are used by Isis for both surveillance and for explosive delivery.

“Technology is a tool,” Singer said. “Tools are used the way they’re designed, and then people improvise and find new uses for them.”