A Night Watchman With Wheels

"We founded Knightscope after what happened at Sandy Hook," said William Santana Li, a co-founder of that technology company, now based in Sunnyvale, Calif. "You are never going to have an armed officer in every school." But what is for some a technology-laden route to safer communities and schools is to others an entry point to a post-Orwellian , post-privacy world.?

"This is like R2-D 2's evil twin," said Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, a privacy rights group based in Washington. And the addition of such a machine to the labour market could force David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, to rethink his theory about how technology wrecks the middle class.

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The minimum wage in the United States is $7.25, and $8 in California. Coming in substantially under those costs, Knightscope's robot watchman service raises questions about whether artificial intelligence and robotics technologies are beginning to assault both the top and the bottom of the work force as well.?

It will also have a limited amount of autonomy, such as the ability to follow a preplanned route. It will not, at least for now, include advanced features like facial recognition, which is still being perfected. Knightscope settled in Silicon Valley because it was hoping for a warm reception from technology companies that employ large security forces to protect their sprawling campuses.