Robots a threat to your future
A promotional composite image from Knightscope showing the K5 Autonomous Data Machine.
Think you don’t need a union to protect your pay and benefits? Guess again. Your association leaders have been busy fighting off the people who want to privatize your job and turn you into a minimum wage security guard. Now there’s a new threat to your job – robots – and your union leaders will be hard at work fighting this battle too.
Here’s the lead line from today’s story from The New York Times about your newest competition – a robot.
“The night watchman of the future is five feet tall, weighs 300 pounds and looks a lot like R2D2 — without the whimsy. And will work for $6.25 an hour. A company in California has developed a mobile robot, known as the K5 Autonomous Data Machine, as a safety and security tool for corporations, as well as for schools and neighborhoods.
“We founded Knightscope after what happened at Sandy Hook,” said William Santana Li, a co-founder of that technology company, now based in Sunnyvale, Calif. “You are never going to have an armed officer in every school.”
But what is for some a technology-laden route to safer communities and schools is to others an entry point to a post-Orwellian, post-privacy world.
“This is like R2D2’s evil twin,” said Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, a privacy rights group based in Washington.
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