Ford Could Make Robot Police Cars In The Future, Reckless Drivers Beware

Law enforcement is an incredibly important and often dangerous job, which is why a lot of police officers and federal authorities face a lot of pressure at work. This pressure leads to anxiety, mistakes, and a whole host of issues. In a recent patent filing, Ford hints at plans that could lead to the production of autonomous police cars with onboard artificial intelligence. This could fix many of the problems that law enforcement officials face on a regular basis.

For the most part, a patent filing is meaningless until a company actually produces products that can hit the market. As such, Ford could simply be trying to get ahead of the curve and call dibs on robot cop cars. Even so, the simple fact that the company made such a move is already sparking debates about how well machines could justly uphold the law.

As to how it would even work, the police cars would basically be able to detect traffic violations committed by vehicles either in its immediate surroundings or wherever there is a traffic camera. From there, the vehicle would make chase with the AI controlling the wheel.

The prospect of getting chased by a driverless police vehicle might be unnerving enough to a lot of people, but it gets even creepier than that. After discovering who the car belongs to, the robot police car could actually contact the driver of the vehicle and alert them to the traffic rules they just violated, TechCrunch reports.

This is the kind of stuff that gives paranoid conspiracy theorists rambling about police states and Big Brother nightmares. If it does end up coming true, however, there’s a good chance that it will simply be accepted as yet another sign of progress in the tech industry. After all, people are already voluntarily giving away their personal information to social networks.