Robots Could Groom Children and Trigger War with Humans
By Max Stephens – International Crime Correspondent
From rioting ‘displaced workers’ to hacked social-care machines, Europol sketches risks that come with automation
Angry mobs of unemployed citizens riot in the streets against the hordes of service robots that have stolen their jobs.
Police officers armed with “robo freezer guns” and “nano net grenades” shoot down swarms of drones deployed by terrorists to attack electricity and water supplies.
This is not the plot of a new sci-fi film but what may await Europe in the next 10 years, according to a report from the EU’s police agency.
The 48-page Europol document details how law enforcement will need to tackle robots and unmanned systems (drones, satellites and remote-controlled boats) in a dystopian vision of the future.
Experts have dismissed the predictions as fanciful but the EU believes its report outlines “plausible future scenarios”.
The Europol researchers describe a society where robots are a “fixture of daily life across Europe, gliding silently though shopping centres, delivering parcels to fifth-floor flats and cleaning public transport platforms by night”.
“Displaced workers” in deprived areas of cities then take to the streets in protest and vent their frustration by “bot bashing”.
“In this uneasy climate, even minor malfunctions, such as a hospital care robot administering the wrong medication, are magnified into national scandals, fuelling populist calls to ‘put people first’,” the report reads.
In one of the most worrying predictions, cyber criminals may hack into AI-powered social care robots tasked with looking after vulnerable adults and children. The robots could then be programmed to harvest information from their victim and even groom them for nefarious purposes.
“The empathetic capabilities of social robots might, in the future, be abused by criminal and terrorist actors for a variety of malicious activities,” the report says.
Terrorists, using technology scavenged from the Ukraine war, may also field hundreds of “pocket-sized” AI-powered “quadcopters” to launch attacks on electricity and water supplies in cities or spring criminals free from prison.
Mexican cartels and Islamist groups are already learning to use cheap, easily available drones. Experts have warned that governments must prepare for terrorists to adopt the technology for terror attacks.
Human-robot collaboration is “expected to become a crucial aspect of law enforcement operations” with officers and robots working side by side “to respond to emergencies, conduct searches and gather evidence together,” the report claims.
Officers tasked with more mundane responsibilities such as “patrolling” or “traffic management” may find themselves replaced by robots, leading to resentment in the rank and file, it adds.
Chinese police forces are already using robot technologies
The report also warns how robots seized in investigations, either as evidence or as suspects, could break free from custody.
An “info-box” in the report explains the difficulties in “questioning a robot”, saying it will prove difficult to work out if a driverless car involved in a minor accident crashed into something intentionally or by chance.
Researchers from the Europol Innovation Lab cited real-world examples of robots going haywire or being co-opted by criminals to substantiate its analysis.
In July 2022, a chess-playing robot broke the finger of its seven-year-old Russian opponent during a tournament.
In September, Californian police pulled over a car in a DUI stop after it performed an illegal U-turn only to find it was driverless.
Drone pilots are increasingly advertising their services online to gang leaders.
Denis Niezgoda, chief commercial officer at Locus Robotics, a company that manufactures AI-powered robots to work in warehouses, described the prospect of a real-life Robocop in the next 10 years as unrealistic.
“There are not only technical barriers but regulatory barriers to some of those very extreme scenarios becoming a reality by 2035,” he told The Telegraph.
“I don’t see Robocop crossing our streets and policing, I simply don’t believe that robots will erase work.”
Indonesian police are also integrating artificial intelligence into their operations
He said law enforcement adopting drones fitted with sensors and high-resolution to recreate 3D images of crime scenes and the use of robots in hazardous search and rescue missions was practical but that the envisaged future scenarios were “very extreme”.
Mr Niezgoda said the fears that workers will see their jobs outsourced were misplaced.
“The natural question that always comes up is ‘is this going to take my job’.
“But the reality is we don’t get enough people to do this job, a) because most European countries have an ageing demographic, there’s less labour available, b) at the same time people don’t want to do it, it’s not a very pleasant environment and we look to automate that.
“You take away the dust, dull and dangerousness away from people.”
Mr Niezgoda said that in policing, human command will not be removed but inter-drone warfare between criminal gangs and officers could be possible because of the cheapness and ease of using drones from the Ukraine war.
A spokesman for Europol said the agency “can’t predict the future” and that the report’s intention was to “anticipate plausible future scenarios that enable us to make more informed decisions today”.
