Armless droid calls cops after being assaulted by Drunken Man: the future of human-robot relations is silly and sensible, not sinister.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: FUTURE

IT WAS 8:15 p.m. and Jason Sylvain was drunk. When the 41-year-old man encountered Knightscope's 300-pound K5 security droid doing laps in the company's Mountain View parking lot, things didn't go well--for either of them.

The large, pyramidal robot can't have been easy to overturn. But Sylvain, whom a police spokesperson later described as "confused, [with] red, glassy eyes and a strong odor of alcohol emit[ting] from him," persevered.

Upon finding itself topsy-turvy, the unarmed bot did what anyone would do: It called the cops and hollered for help. In response to the K5's siren, Knightscope's vice president of marketing, Stacy Stevens, rushed out of the company's HQ and nabbed the assailant. Stevens later told CNET that the sloshed Sylvain "claimed to be an engineer that wanted to 'test' the security robots." He added, "I guess he now has his answer."

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Knightscope rather insistently compares its weaponless 5-foot-tall robots to the loveable and heroic R2D2. But they really look more like Daleks, the heavily armored aliens best known by their Doctor Who catchphrase "Exterminate!" And there has been one reported incident in which a K5 arguably violated Isaac Asimov's First Law of Robotics by "injuring a human being or, through inaction, allowing a human being to come to harm."

Last year in a Silicon Valley shopping center, a toddler had a run-in with a "K5 Autonomous Data Machine (Machine Identification Number 13)." The 18-month-old boy sustained a boo-boo after an encounter with Paul Bleep, mall cop. Details are unclear, but in hilariously dry technical language, Knightscope's official statement gently suggests that the victim, young Harwin Cheng, may have tripped over his own feet: "The machine's sensors registered no vibration alert and the machine motors did not fault as they would when encountering an obstacle."

Is "the machine's sensors registered no vibration alert" the robot equivalent of "the suspect was resisting arrest"? Maybe. But while body cams on human security agents are not yet universal, the whole point of the K5 droids is that they record and broadcast everything they do, generating meticulous records. Regardless, the company pulled the bots to work on an update, which was undergoing testing when Sylvain stumbled onto the scene.

KNIGHTSCOPE RENTS ITS robots for between $6.25 and $7 per hour--less than minimum wage, a price point that's not coincidental. The K5 is ready and willing to take a job that...