The government of Singapore has deployed a robot dog in a local park to remind visitors of the importance of social distancing during Covid-19, according to CNN.
The four-legged creation from American company Boston Dynamics started its patrol of the park over the weekend, broadcasting a prerecorded message about how to maintain a safe distance from other people, authorities in Singapore said, as CNN reported.
The agile dog has been used in the past to diffuse bombs, inspect oil rigs, and to carry supplies to medical workers fighting the coronavirus, according to Popular Mechanics.
The dog, named Spot, will patrol the city's Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park as part of a two-week trial. It will roam the park during off-peak hours. It is also being used at a local isolation facility where the robot helps bring medicine to patients, according to CNN.
It's outfitted with cameras that will be used to estimate the number of visitors to the park, but Singapore's National Parks Board (NParks) said it will not collect personal data nor use the video to identify individuals, according to The Verge.
"These cameras will not be able to track and/or recognize specific individuals, and no personal data will be collected," the government said in a statement.
The dog is remotely controlled, and has built in sensors to stop it from colliding into park goers, but a guide will accompany Spot as well. According to NParks, if the trial is successful, the robot may be deployed full-time during peak hours in the park, as The Verge reported. It may also be expanded to include other parks and heavily trafficked areas that the government owns.
"Spot will be controlled remotely, reducing the manpower required for park patrols and minimizing physical contact among staff, volunteer safe distancing ambassadors and park visitors," the government noted in its release, as Popular Mechanics reported. "This lowers the risk of exposure to the virus."
Singapore seemed to have tamped down on Covid-19 cases, until an alarming second wave of cases sprang up recently. While Singapore was initially praised for its response to the coronavirus, the second wave revealed clusters that were overlooked in initial testing. Since March 17, Singapore's number of confirmed coronavirus cases grew from 266 to 21,707 cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, as CNN reported.
On social media, people have reacted harshly to the idea of robot patrolling, worrying that a dystopian future has arrived. On Twitter, people shared an image of a poster in the park, asking people not to bother Spot.
Another Twitter user posted a video of Spot's paws clanking on the concrete as he patrolled the park and people scurrying away from the robot dog. "People do not know how to handle this new participant in society," the Twitter user wrote along with the video of Spot.
While another wrote, "This is so scary. Camera-equipped, remote-controlled, four-legged robot is patrolling a park in Singapore to enforce social distancing amid #COVID19 pandemic."
Demand for technology from robot companies has skyrocketed recently as companies and governments look for new ways to deploy the technology, according to The Verge. After all, Spot has been mostly deployed for public safety reasons, such as helping "inspect hazardous packages from afar," according to Boston Dynamics, as CNN reported.
As The Verge noted, "Acting as a loudspeaker-on-legs may only be the beginning for these robot deployments."
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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