San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, the city’s legislative body, has suspended plans to equip the police with killing robots. The project was contained in a law already approved by the local government and by the board of supervisors itself, which however had to be expressed in a second vote: normally the second vote by the board is a formality, and it is very rare that it reverses the decision taken previously, also because the same 11 members always vote.
The previous approval of the standard, last week, however, had raised a lot of criticism and caused big ones protests, both from the population and from local politicians: a fact that probably prompted the council to change its judgment on the matter. However, the standard will have to face a further revision, at the end of which it will be decided whether to approve it with some modifications – perhaps imposing more severe limits on the use of robots – or whether to abandon it altogether.
