Zero Hedge
December 15, 2017
Earlier today, we mentioned the bizarre story of a San Francisco animal shelter which was using a low cost, high-tech robot security guard to purge homeless people outside its facilities.
The San Francisco SPCA branch had contracted Knightscope to provide a K5 robot (the same model which in July committed suicide at a mall fountain) for securing the outdoor spaces of the animal shelter.
Why use a robot to chase away humans? Simple: money – it costs the SPCA $7/hour to rent the robot, about $3 less than the minimum wage in California, and according to San Francisco Business Times, the robot was deployed as a “way to try dealing with the growing number of needles, car break-ins and crime that seemed to emanate from nearby tent encampments of homeless people.”
Everything was going great – and very cost-efficiently too – until the local humans fought back, knocked the robot over, and smearing it with feces before eventually forcing the robotic guardian to be purged itself.
But first, the local community’s anger at the unwelcomed K5’s presence manifested itself in the way anger and outrage always seem to emerge these days: on twitter.
Dear San Francisco,
It is your duty to destroy these things if you see them. https://t.co/VZ1vWe5KyM
— Leslie Lee III (@leslieleeiii) December 12, 2017
Yes, 2017 was the first time I saw robots used to prevent encampments in SF. Hard to believe but it’s real. https://t.co/Xo41veNfPN
— Sam Dodge (@samueldodge) December 9, 2017
Capitalism: instead of providing homes for homeless people, spend exorbitant sums of money creating robots that will prevent homeless people from making homes for themselveshttps://t.co/FowyreaUTV
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 13, 2017
What happened then is straight out of Terminator: according to reports, a group of anti-robot vigilantes doused the K5’s sensors with…