Ford Is Planning Automated Police Cars And Skynet Is Coming For Us

Ford is designing systems that would permit fully-automated police cars that could, with all the coldness of science, dish out arbitrary punishments to law-breaking drivers.

Patent applications from Ford reveal the company’s plans to automate police cars so that they could send warning messages direct to your car, issue fines and points penalties over the airwaves, chase offenders down or even take direct control of your car’s steering, brakes and throttle against your will.

Officers could sit on board if they wished, but they wouldn’t be needed. On-board artificial intelligence, described as ‘deep neural networks,’ would let the crafty car seek out the best places to hide in order to catch rule-benders and breakers in the act.

It would also be linked via the Internet to CCTV, number plate recognition cameras and static speed cameras, which could all help PC Ford zero in on its targets. The idea is to ‘free’ police staff to catch crims that computers never could. But… we can’t be the only ones who find this deeply unsettling, right?

Take this quote from The Times:

“Mark Skilton, of Warwick Business School, said that Ford’s patent was realistic. Autonomous police cars could also have the ability to take over the controls of suspect vehicles, he said.”

Intriguingly, the documents describe the future Robocop(car) as dealing with infractions made not just by human-driven cars, but by automated ones as well. How would automated cars break the law without outright consciousness, and how could you possibly punish anyone for it if they did? A fine for the manufacturer, maybe? A slapped bumper for the car?

This one raises more questions than answers, and, frankly, for the sake of steering Earth clear of a The Terminator scenario, we kind of hope it doesn’t get built at all.

Source: The Times