When robots run amok

Everyone has spent the past year constantly scaring you about how crazy AI is gonna escape and ruin everything and infect the internet and blah. Oh, scary crap.

Actually, network AI is not such a problem. When everyone finally starts taking security normally, it won’t be. The physical robots, though, will be.

You have new wildlife now

So essentially you would see a lot of personal robots and other drones and similar things malfunction, run away, or turn hostile, accidentally or intentionally. So that’s gonna be as common an occurrence as petty crime is today.

So, everyone: every police department or other municipality, I would say, should get themselves a new branch dedicated to fighting the new threats.

Okay, let’s go memey! And name it. Right. So it is both a meme and a warning. And I am being fully serious.

Faro Plague Response Team.

FPRT! Sounds like a cat sneeze. A noise of a robot shutting down…

(origin: Faro Plague, SPOILER WARNING!)

But it is also a reminder of the damage a swarm of autonomous self-replicating robots could cause if you don’t have such a team. I don’t want to go into spoilers here, but imagine if they had something like that in the game, and they would just go and nuke their source of problems straight away.

Firefighters, not soldiers

But their purpose would be like firefighters. Not really a military force, but really more like firefighters, because runaway robots are more like a force of nature than a human factor.

A human factor is, of course, possible, because that’s how we arrived in this situation in the first place.
But human intent can’t account for all the malfunctions in the world. So essentially you’d have robots that are just stupid, programmed badly, and that just misunderstood the assignment. Like the thousands of occurrences we already suffer through in agentic coding anyway.

This service is useful for many purposes. So first of all, there is just the search: your robot disappeared, ran away, or is gone, or was maybe stolen, and you still want help locating it. But most commonly, somebody calls when runaway robots are causing trouble, meaning running away uncontrollably because the operator has lost control over them, or because of some other factors.

Again, this is not an invitation to oppress any kind of freedom. Everything is very clear. You can run and operate any hardware you want, however you want, running any software you want. Not an invitation for some authority to be managing all your robots or something like that. It is just a necessity. The accidents are gonna occur anyway.

I equate those events with fire. That’s why I call these services neighbors to the firefighters. They serve the common good indiscriminately and just come to solve the issue. Or you could equate it to the wildlife services that occasionally come and catch some forest dweller who is running around the city and scaring everyone.

Why not just the police?

You might ask: why should this not just be police responsibility? Why something special?

First of all, the frequency: these calls would be everyday occurrences. And second, the typical police officer trains the way they do because they ultimately deal with people. They have to know all the rules, they have to know all the ethics, they have to train for high-risk situations where lives are at stake.

While this robot-catching job is more simple: just find and immobilize a hunk of metal. Far less of our tricky cases here. Their responsibility is literally quite simple. This is not the police, who have to navigate who and this and why, or the ambulance crew, who have to deal with people. Their job is simple: find it and make the trouble stop.

The line is simple too. Somebody runs amok, the civil team comes, they catch it, done. But when it is elevated danger: a strong robot clearly acting hostile, identified as a human threat with guns, for example, then the job is for the police or a SWAT team you already have. They arrive with guns anyway, already dealing with it as if it is a human danger. And that police force would have the same specialists, just high grade. Like a regular hacker on the job who deals with similar stuff. Just specifically one or two persons trained to deal with this other threat.

Tools and expertise

Okay, what do you think? What should the expertise be?

I guess, first, they are to be equipped with the same tools as the wildlife catchers. Like, they have snares, hooks, and similar to quickly immobilize the entity. And potentially they would have just the stronger tools. And possibly these tools are more hardcore, caring less about life, because there is no life to be cared about: it is just property. But of course it is gonna be damaged in the process.

I am thinking almost industry level: hydraulic wrappers, cables, what? And similar stuff that cops are already using today to catch cars.

Next, potentially the range of tools would include, I guess, EMP pulse weapons or similar that would be used and developed later.

And also because all of these robots are gonna have a power source, even a harmless stray robot is still a problem. It still has a battery, and a battery is big bad chemistry. So the team should also have the capacity to do basic firefighting and isolate an about-to-explode battery. So we would need fire isolation containers or blankets or similar, and also fire extinguishers designed specifically against chemical-based fire.

And of course, potentially many of those robots would be cheap and not military grade, so you would expect the team to be equipped with basic AI to do hacking right on the spot, checking what variety of channels are still available and answering them.

And of course, they would be expected to have robots of their own. From small drones for quick scouting to dogs to sweep the place for search and rescue. Or if the threat is military grade, like a literal fucking almost-terminator with a big 100-kilo frame going around and punching people, that is where this team’s job ends: then it belongs to the police or a SWAT team, and you would expect them to have something of their own.

Same problem in industry

So you see how the range of expertise is about wildlife control plus a mini bomb squad plus a hacker one plus special weaponry designed to combat electronic devices.

And well, while your local municipal service would be funded from taxes, I also expect that many heavy industry sites where you operate thousands of robots would have the next level of security guard, haha.

Just as with dark factories, you would have something going faulty eventually.
And it is interesting that in a factory with no humans, you expect robots to be fighting robots. Really? Huh. As if anyone would risk going inside. You would rather have like a robot butler with a reinforced frame that can just punch away your faulty colleagues.

Sound crazy? Someone would consider that practical. Ideally the site is operated remotely by humans and does not even try to do stupid shit. And it is more effective.

It is already happening

Huh, sounds way out of place, ain’t it? Consider the current state of the Russia-Ukraine war, where the majority of fighting already happens with drones, and they have developed quite a lot of techniques for capture, interception, search for faulty drones, rescue and repair. So they are already dealing with these situations on a massive scale, with thousands of drones being used every day.

In the next year, expect some chunk of the army to get replaced with remote-controlled mini tanks or dogs. Or just a simple dog with an AK-47 strapped on top of it.

That would be plenty, and a clear signal that your civil department should think about this.

Wanna have more fun? Expect the police to quickly pick up all of those fancy robots to augment themselves, and consider how there would be quite a lot of protests for the "right to be beaten by an actual human instead".
"I’d rather be beaten by a human who’s THERE, not one hiding in a van three blocks away with a joystick"