The Shawshank Contraption (redux): Reuters on South Korean prison robots

Jealous that the Associated Press gets to pretend they're the KCNA, Reuters has decided to pretend they're Arirang. They're reporting on the Great South Korean Prison Robot Test with a video that looks like it was put together by the Media Club at my high school.

Monster Island readers are already familiar with the prison robots (see here and then here), so they know the robots' capabilities and skill set: they can detect suicides and violence, for example, but not spelling errors...

Emerjency? Really?! Were there no pot-smoking English teachers in the foreigners' wing of the prison to run that by before you sent it off to the CG animators? (Oh, wait... maybe they did run it by pot-smoking English teachers.)

Man, that's just plain embarrassing. This is Reuters, dude. That means it will be seen by at least a dozen or so British people.

Anyway, I just noticed that Reuters's music at the start of each video segment sounds a lot like the Onion's. 

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Shawshank Contraption

As part of its move to become the world leader in replacing job-seeking humans with cold, soulless machines, South Korea is reportedly planning to use robots as prison guards. A month-long test is being conducted in Pohang:

The robots are designed to patrol the corridors of corrective institutions, monitoring conditions inside the cells. If they detect sudden or unusual activity such as violent behavior they alert human guards.

“Unlike CCTV that just monitors cells through screens, the robots are programmed to analyze various activities of those in prison and identify abnormal behavior,” Prof. Lee Baik-chul of Kyonggi University, who is in charge of the 1 billion-won ($863,000) project, told the Journal.

I think this is a capital idea! Absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan, especially if they patrol the international wing of the jail where the robots' programming would never ever interpret foreigner behavior as abnormal.

By the way, this is what they're actually supposed to look like. Frankly, if this pilot study were being conducted in an American prison, I'd give it about 700 nanoseconds before K-prisonbot 3000 is made someone's bitch.

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