Saturday, December 16, 2017

San Francisco Using ROBOTS to Clear Streets of Homeless


Since November, San Francisco has seen a technological solution to rid the homeless from their streets.

Shoo them away with robots.

San Francisco Business Times reports:

For the SPCA, the security robot, which they’ve dubbed K9, was 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 along the sidewalks.

“We weren’t able to use the sidewalks at all when there’s needles and tents and bikes, so from a walking standpoint I find the robot much easier to navigate than an encampment,” Jennifer Scarlett, the S.F. SPCA’s president, told the Business Times.

Once the SPCA started using the robot on the sidewalks around its campus in early November, Scarlett said, there were no more homeless encampments. There were also fewer break-ins to cars in the campus parking lot. It’s not clear that the robot was the cause of the decreases, Scarlett added, but they were correlated.

The SPCA, by the way, is the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

So why is an animal shelter using robots to rid the streets of San Francisco of encampments? Because it’s cheap.

Zero Hedge noted this summer that renting a “k5 robot” for security at malls saved money on employment costs:

It’s a good deal for any place that wants something patrolling an area on the cheap. It’ll roll around malls or parking lots, with rental prices starting at $7 per hour — 25 cents less than the federal minimum wage.

Since the city can’t seem to do anything about needles, car break-ins, and homeless encampments, the city’s SPCA offered the cheapest method for solving the problem.

Knightscope was contracted by the SPCA, and it rents out the homeless shooing robots for the same price as its security rental: a cheap $7 per hour.

Zero Hedge reports:

The robot, weighing in at 400 pounds and standing over 5 feet tall and 3 feet wide, has been autonomously patrolling the sidewalks of the facility with a top speed of 3 MPH for more than a month, as far as we can tell. Sensors and fancy technology integrated with-in the robot are used to deter the pesky homeless from setting up shop […]

Nevertheless, San Francisco recently voted on a bill to decrease the number of robots on city streets. According to the San Francisco Business Times, the city could charge the SPCA a fine upwards of $1,000 per day for not complying with the new regulations operating on city-owned sidewalks.

In a particularly dystopian move by the SPCA, the autonomous robot purging the homeless from city streets in San Fransico may be a harbinger of what is coming to America’s inner cities as the humans slowly but surely lose the war against robots, first in the labor market and then, everywhere else.

The robots seemed to actually work, according to the SPCA, but not without its critics.

Twitter user Ben Norton manages to get just about everything wrong in one tweet.

San Francisco doesn’t provide homes for people? The city has plenty of shelters, government housing projects, section 8 housing, and charitable programs.

The “exorbitant sums of money” spent for the robots isn’t the expensive solution. It’s the cheap one. It happens that “providing homes” is the expensive route.

Beeping robots shooing homeless people from one are to another isn’t the solution. And because of the city’s new fines, the effort won’t get very far anyway.

The problem isn’t capitalism, as some of San Francisco’s finest liberals suggest. San Francisco, under decades of Democratic leadership, created its homeless woes itself.



from The Federalist Papers http://bitly.com/2BiwD4p
via IFTTT San Francisco Using ROBOTS to Clear Streets of Homeless http://bitly.com/2BiwD4p
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