Photo: Rob Lever/Getty Images

Sooner or later we’ll all be bowing down to robot overlords, so it’s for the best that humanity humiliate and debase our future mechanical masters as much as possible while we still have the chance. That the machines aren’t in charge just yet was made clear when a San Francisco anti-homeless robot was pushed over, slathered in barbecue sauce, and covered in a tarp.




As San Francisco Business Times reports, the now-mesquite robot in question is a Knightscope K5 security robot, formerly employed by the San Francisco SPCA to keep humans experiencing homelessness out of their parking lots and off the sidewalks surrounding the SPCA building. However, according to SPCA president Jennifer Scarlett, within a week of the robo-narc’s first day on the job, residents of the homeless camp outside the SPCA had “put a tarp over it, knocked it over, and put barbecue sauce on all the sensors.” This week when the city of San Francisco threatened to fine the SPCA $1,000 a day for operating the rent-a-RoboCop on city streets without a permit, the SPCA announced the bot had been fired, “effective immediately.” Since it is a heartless machine, the Knightscope was presumably unable to appreciate the irony of being forced to join the ranks of those whom it had once oppressed.

This beating is just the latest example of a righteous trend of punk robots getting their asses handed to them, dating back to the 2015 beating and beheading of HitchBOT, the smug Canadian hitchhiking robot that thought it could roam the mean streets of Philly without getting what it had coming. Earlier this year a Knightscope robot was roughed up by a drunk guy in Mountain View, CA, and in July a Washington, D.C. Knightscope—perhaps aware of the inevitable lifetime of ass-whoopings coming its way—committed suicide by driving into a fountain:




Humans, however, should enjoy their dominance over the machines while they still can, because this dude has been hitting the gym, and it’s got a score to settle: