What Do Socially Intelligent Robots Mean For The Future Of Crime?

Monday morning started with an early sprint from Baker St to Marylebone train station in London, passing close to 221b Baker St, the fabled home of Sherlock Holmes. However, Holmes was not on my mind, but rather his nemesis, Professor James Moriarty. I was on my way to a seminar on the future of crime (especially as it concerned robots and social robots) organized by the excellent team at UCL’s Dawes Centre for Future Crime.

The rumour is that Conan Doyle based the character of Moriarty on George Boole, Professor of Maths at University College Cork from 1849 until 1864 (disappointingly his former home on Grenville Place is in a state of dereliction). Boole, one of the great mathematicians, created Boolean algebra which laid the foundations for computer language and is this the structure around which scientists use machines to mimic and ‘improve’ on human behaviour. To that end, Moriarty and the idea of the ‘future of crime’ should be of all the more interest to us in an AI driven world.

Whilst many serious crimes are in abeyance – murder rates in small open democracies (Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Ireland for instance) are very low, and those in the large EU economies – France, Germany, the UK and Italy trend below 1 per 100,000 (the USA is seven times higher), new forms of crime are on the rise, many of them driven by technology.

Mobile phones and social media have become an entirely new vector for crime in terms of the theft of passwords, online bank details, identity theft and the harassment and abuse of people online. Similarly, crypto currencies are the conduit for much criminal activity, and it is believed that confiscations have made the FBI the biggest holder of bitcoin. In addition, the metaverse has opened up an entirely new legal space, where injuries and attacks carried out in an apparently unreal world can have consequences in the real world.

In this context, the issue at stake at the Dawe’s Centre seminar was whether socially intelligent robots can create new forms of crime, that are not yet covered by legal frameworks and for which countermeasures have not been conceived.

It is a terrifying prospect – robots could not only be primed to deliver drugs or explosives but imagine the consequences of robot bodyguards and guard-dogs who take it upon themselves to attack specific targets. In many cases, the prosecution of an assault by a robot would likely follow the logic of charging the owner of a dog (Britain’s Princess Anne was famously prosecuted when her pitbull ‘Dotty’, bit two children). On a more mundane basis, robots increasingly interact with vulnerable humans – the lonely, the elderly and for instance autistic children, and while these interactions are very helpful, they also open up scope for abuse. In time the growing prevalence of sex robots will cause all sorts of controversies.

However, in cases where the robot acts intelligently and autonomously, the law is not clear and frameworks on AI offer only meagre guidance. Robert Harris’ book ‘The Fear Index’ is a good illustration of what might occur when an intelligence ‘bot’ takes over a critical infrastructure, and the use of AI on the battlefield is chilling in its ruthlessness.

Heavy duty robots also permit the exploration, surveillance and protection of faraway places (the deep sea, space and remote parts of the earth) though at the same time they permit mischief by various actors such as attacks on critical marine infrastructure.

It may well be that, as in the case of driverless cars, socially intelligent robots are less dangerous than humans, though the notion itself of criminal robots is cause for concern. For the time being, many of the impetuses to the ‘future of crime’ are human factors. Some of them relate to changes in wealth – such as the rise of powerful oligarchs, and a rich ultra-high net worth class of people who on one hand are targets for crime and on the other hand have the means to dominate others and push their own visions of what society should look like. We may see more of this type of behaviour in coming years.

Then, we really get into ‘Moriarty’ territory when states begin to collaborate with individuals and gangs, as is the case with Russia for instance. States have access to intelligent and often lethal robots and can enable organized criminals to use them – it is not impossible that gangs might start to use drones in contract killings. The other, related area that is increasingly relevant here is corporate intelligence and security (Lewis Sage-Passant’s book on this topic is very good) where many corporate security teams have to combat hacking and other attacks by robots, from criminal gangs, and as was sadly demonstrated in New York last week, assassins.

If Moriarty existed today, and perhaps he does, corporates as well as governments might be his preferred targets, and he would very likely equip himself with robotic henchmen (and women) who could subvert the human world.

The question is, what would Sherlock do?

Have a great week ahead,

Mike