On April 16, Thailand’s Royal Thai police introduced their latest colleague, “AI Police Cyborg 1.0” in a Facebook post, saying the robot was deployed on Tonson Road in Muang District. One picture shows a robot wearing a police uniform, standing on a wheeled metal platform lined by other uniformed officials.
The robot is jointly developed by the Provincial Police Command 7, Nakhon Rathom Propincial Police and Nakhon Nakhon Pathon Municipal Government, and the robot has many frightening features. Visit nearby CCTV cameras, drones and their own 360-degree AI cameras, equipped with facial recognition, behavior analysts, weapon detection and blacklist alerts. Officials say its video analysis is advanced enough to distinguish water guns from real weapons and identify violence.
According to RTP’s Facebook post, AI Police Robot 1.0 is related to “effective incident security management” of the province’s command and control center. On the surface, enhanced public safety is the main purpose of the robot, so the name: Police Colonel Nakhonpathom Plod Phai or “Nakhon Rathom is safe”. A spokesperson told ABP Live: “AI Police Cyborg 1.0 helps us enhance public safety, especially in large events where traditional policing resources can be sparse. It’s a power multiplier that doesn’t mind and stays constantly alert.”
On the surface, this sounds good. But the idea of buying police robots with a range of surveillance capabilities is just for the purpose of conducting activity management, especially when considering the cruel record of activists by Thai police. (Coincidentally, on April 16, Bloomberg reported that Thailand’s Ministry of Security Services is challenging pro-democracy activists on Facebook and X.)
Technologies like AI Police Cyborg 1.0 have serious social and political implications. However, you may not have to be frightened yet. Police robots still have a long way to go before they can go beyond the threat of more developed technologies such as cell surveillance. Instead, they are catastrophes, for ominous reasons: mid-term. For example, New York City abandoned subway robots in an empty storefront after a downturned pilot, a police robot in California once told a woman to leave while trying to use it.
Although Thai police eagerly promote the wide range of AI capabilities of robots, Futurism also points out that no one has actually seen this. Many robots are still struggling with obstacles like sidewalks or toddlers, so it’s not that far away suggests that Thai robots can’t move independently, or that it’s awful to do so. Given this and the global track record of police robots, it is unlikely that Thailand’s robots will now achieve their full, dystopian potential.
