“Quadrupedal Robots as Extensions of Canine Racial Violence” presented by DePriest

The purpose of this paper is to explore the social and political implications of emerging quadrupedal robot models designed for use by the military and police in connection to the historical use of biological police dogs as tools of state sanctioned racial oppression. The intent is not to reinforce conceptual parallels between biological dogs and technology which merely imitates the quadrupedal motility found in the canine form, but to critically analyse the rampant zoomorphism found in rhetorical efforts which seek to induce both fear and empathy in the public’s perception of autonomous robots engineered to extend neoliberal state power. This paper aims to undress the conflation of biological dogs with biomimetic autonomous robots in the context of the bio/techno epistemic procedures used to condition these inhuman agents to perpetuate discriminatory racist practices among others. I argue that the endeavour to assimilate quadrupedal robots into police forces through their perceptual alignment with biological K9 units positions them in a historical continuum of racist state violence that they cannot be dissociated from. I will delineate the converging ideological and material circumstances encompassing the neoliberal motivation to develop quadrupedal robots in addition to training biological canines to be instruments of state oppression.