Lori Falce: Are we ready for killer robots?

I am OK with robots.

Hey, I’m a product of my time. I grew up with R2-D2 and C3PO. My siblings and I were just sharing pictures of Johnny 5 from “Short Circuit” in our chat group this week. I married a sci-fi nerd who adored the various metal monsters of “Doctor Who,” and I’m raising one who likes to build his own mechanized creatures on my dining room table.

And I want an iRobot vacuum desperately. Yes, I am willing to subjugate a robot to clean under that same dining room table.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m willing to just hand over the reins of everything in society to artificial intelligence. Come on. I’ve seen “The Terminator.” “Battlestar Galactica.” Hal from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There are definitely limits to consider.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors agreed to the use of potentially lethal robots armed with explosives in extreme police situations. It made me wonder exactly what movies the supervisors had been watching to have such a shortfall of imagination when it comes to how badly this could go.

Let me be clear: I’m not blaming the robots or the AI.

Sure, the things that have been done with technology to bring us to the point where robots perform surgery and AI creates art is nothing short of astonishing. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells would be amazed.

But these inventions can only implement what their human counterparts can do — perhaps more precisely but in the same vein. They fulfill programming. They take what they have been built to do and execute it with specificity.

And that’s the problem with robots — us.

We can’t expect robots to perform tasks we haven’t perfected. Can they get the crumbs (and random robot pieces) under my table? Absolutely. Vacuuming is a task we seem to have mastered. Well, some of us.

Policing, on the other hand, is very much not. It’s something we struggle to do correctly with people making the executive decisions about when to use lethal force and when to find another way. How do we program artificial intelligence to do what human intelligence can’t?

Is there still a place for robots in policing? Sure. They can do the jobs that are inherently dangerous — providing remote viewing of hostage situations or bomb disposal — without being called upon to make very human judgment calls humans still can’t reliably handle.

Much of the question in those sci-fi worlds is about the ethics of using technology as a servant caste that really was a thinly veiled conversation about class and race. This is different than that robot apocalypse dystopia. It’s a question of whether we are ready for this responsibility, not whether the androids can be trusted.

San Francisco walked back its plan. It still will use tech in those nonlethal capacities but has yielded to the people unhappy with the idea of “killer robots” in the police arsenal. That’s good. Let’s work on perfecting the human side of the equation and maybe focus on making “killer anything” unnecessary.

In the meantime, I’d still like a robot vacuum.