AI incident #207 ·
Hawaii Police Deployed Robot Dog to Patrol a Homeless Encampment
What happened
Honolulu Police Department spent federal pandemic relief funds on a robot dog to take body temperatures and patrol a homeless quarantine encampment which local civil rights advocates criticized as dehumanizing.
Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.
News reports (4)
Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Honolulu Police Department
- Alleged developer
- Boston Dynamics
- Alleged harmed party
- Honolulu Homeless People
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Risk subdomain
- 5.2 Loss of human agency and autonomy
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 5.2.
- Autonomy
"Autonomy - Loss of or restrictions to the ability or rights of an individual, group or entity to make decisions and control their identity and/or output."
- Personality rights loss
"Personality rights loss - Loss of or restrictions to the rights of an individual to control the commercial use of their identity, such as name, image, likeness, or other unequivocal identifiers."
- Autonomy/agency loss
"Autonomy/agency loss - Loss of an individual, group or organisation’s ability to make informed decisions or pursue goals."
- Gradual loss of control
"Gradual or accumulative loss of control risks can be described as risks resulting from the accumulation of less severe disruptions that gradually weakens systemic resilience until a critical event triggers a catastrophe...
- AI enables automation of military decision-making
"One concern here is humans not remaining in the loop for some military decisions, creating the possibility of unintentional escalation because of: • Automated tactical decision-making, by ‘in-theatre’ AI systems (e.g. b...
- AI-induced strategic instability
"For example, AI could undermine nuclear strategic stability by making it easier to discover and destroy previously secure nuclear launch facilities [30, 46, 49]. AI may also offer more extreme first-strike advantages or...
- Humans might increasingly hand over control to misaligned AI systems
"Organisations around the world are already deploying misaligned AI systems that are causing harm in unexpected ways.250 Recommendation algorithms increase the consumption of extremist content.251 Medical algorithms have...
- -
"Humans may increasingly hand over control of important decisions to AI systems, due to economic and geopolitical incentives. Some experts are concerned that future advanced AI systems will seek to increase their own inf...
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
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- Waymo Driverless Taxi Allegedly Stalled During Pedestrian Harassment Incident in San Francisco
- California Police Turned on Music to Allegedly Trigger Instagram’s DCMA to Avoid Being Live-Streamed