RoboCop

Quora Answer : Who do you think the future police will be, some humanoid robots like in robocop or still humans beings?

Jan 21, 2018

The future police will fall into three categories :

• first will be bots. Not Robocop type humanoid bots. Just software agents crawling and filtering the social networks. I'm sure we're going to start seeing bots running fake personas trying to infiltrate the social networks of terrorists, youth gangs, activists and organized crime. There's an argument to be had about how much of a right the police have to access all our online "data exhaust". But right now, the security services are gradually winning that argument, and convincing politicians that they have a right to it. Or de-facto grabbing it and managing to dodge control. Chances are they'll continue to, so bot cops will eventually be everywhere watching your online behaviour unless you make a determined effort to hide from them.
• second will be drones. I'm sure the police are already using flying cameras. They'll continue to get more ... smaller, faster, flying cameras, crawling cameras, snake-bots that can go through sewers and up pipes. Autonomous road pursuit vehicles which can chase suspects in vans and cars. Etc. There'll be drones that will go into hostage situations and gang hide-outs and defuse bombs etc.
• third will be augmented humans. The police will still have people to go undercover to infiltrate and capture information on groups in order to collect evidence. Such police will be humans but loaded up with more recording facilities, connections to online databases and AIs.

Compared to these three, actual humanoid robots like Boston Dynamics' Atlas or Honda's ASIMO will be rare.

When you need a human-shaped thing, humans are cheaper and more flexible. When you don't, a smaller, non-humanoid drone is probably cheaper and more efficient.