• The big idea: should robots take over fighting crime?

    The big idea: should robots take over fighting crime?
    Could artificial intelligence offer a fairer and more efficient way of policing?San Francisco’s board of supervisors recently voted to let their police deploy robots equipped with lethal explosives – before backtracking several weeks later. In America, the vote sparked a fierce debate on the militarisation of the police, but it raises fundamental questions for us all about the role of robots and AI in fighting crime, how policing decisions are made and, indeed, the very purpose of ou