Over 25 years ago, sardonic filmmaker Paul Verhoeven imagined a future in which justice was served by the cold steel of humanoid robots. Thankfully, in the real world, we've yet to see fleets of Robocop-like robots telling pedestrians that they "have 20 seconds to comply," but even the tongue-in-cheek Verhoeven couldn't have imagined that his guesses about futuristic security would emerge in the form of the Knightscope K5.

After being teased in a profile in last week's MIT Technology Review, Knightscope's patrolling robot product received a public video unveiling on San Francisco CBS affiliate KPIX on Tuesday. The squat K5 model, shown wheeling around the company's Mountain View, CA parking lot, looked more like a Dalek or a Star Wars droid than Robocop's Peter Weller. The five-foot-tall K5 comes equipped with four cameras spread at 90 degree angles from each other, along with a weather sensor, a microphone array, a separate "license plate camera," a GPS sensor, and a Wi-Fi-enabled system to transmit live video and keep track of other nearby K5s.

In the KPIX video, the 300-pound behemoth appeared to move at a rate of no more than five miles per hour, and it was even shown noticing and side-stepping any nearby humans in its patrol path. Knightscope co-founder Stacy Stephens confirmed that the K5 is not equipped with weapons or any other means of dispatching crooks; instead, he described this robot as a crime deterrent (while simultaneously suggesting that people think it looks "cute" and want to hug it). We struggle to agree with its usefulness as a deterrent; having played our fair share of stealthy video games, we can't help but feel like we've trained for years to dodge and avoid exactly this kind of slow, awkward-looking artificial intelligence.

Should anybody choose to attack the K5, as opposed to walking briskly away, the unit can react with a shrieking alarm that Stephens described as like "a car alarm but much more intense." That will probably happen shortly after the K5 falls to the ground, unable to right itself, which actually happened during Knightscope's MIT robot demo. The company wouldn't disclose exactly which Silicon Valley company had already ordered their own K5 fleet to work security detail, but it insisted to KPIX that "four dozen companies" were on a waiting list to buy K5s of their own.

We have sent questions about the impending K5-ization of the rent-a-cop industry to the writers of Paul Blart: Mall Cop and will update this report with any response.