No Justice, No Robots: From the Dispositions of Policing to an Abolitionist Robotics

Revised

May 19, 2023

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examine the risks posed by roboticists’ collaboration with law enforcement agencies in the U.S. Using Trust frameworks from AI Ethics, we argue that collaborations with law enforcement present not only risks of technology misuse, but also risks of legitimizing bad actors, and of exacerbating our field’s challenges of representation. We discuss evidence of bad dispositions justifying these risks, grounded in the behavior, origins, and incentivization of American policing, and suggest courses of action for American roboticists seeking to pursue research projects that currently require collaboration with law enforcement agencies, closing with a call for abolitionist robotics.

Citation:

Tom Williams and Kerstin Sophie Haring. 2023. No Justice, No Robots: From the Dispositions of Policing to an Abolitionist Robotics. In Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 566–575. https://doi.org/10.1145/3600211.3604663