Armless Droid Calls Cops After Being Assaulted By Drunken Man

The future of humanrobot relations is silly and sensible, not sinister.

- Katherine Mangu-ward

IT WAS 8:15 p.m. and Jason Sylvain was drunk. When the 41-year-old man encountered Knightscope’s 300-pound K5 security droid doing laps in the company’s Mountain View parking lot, things didn’t go well—for either of them.

The large, pyramidal robot can’t have been easy to overturn. But Sylvain, whom a police spokesperson later described as “confused, [with] red, glassy eyes and a strong odor of alcohol emit[ting] from him,” persevered.

Upon finding itself topsy-turvy, the unarmed bot did what anyone would do: It called the cops and hollered for help. In response to the K5’s siren, Knightscope’s vice president of marketing, Stacy Stevens, rushed out of the company’s HQ and nabbed the assailant. Stevens later told CNET that the sloshed Sylvain “claimed to be an engineer that wanted to ‘test’ the security robots.” He added, “I guess he now has his answer.”

Knightscope rather insistently compares its weaponless 5-foot-tall robots to the loveable and heroic R2D2. But they really look more like Daleks, the heavily armored aliens best known by their Doctor Who catchphrase “Exterminate!” And there has been one reported incident in which a K5 arguably violated Isaac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics by “injuring a human being or, through inaction, allowing a human being to come to harm.”