This runaway Russian robot got arrested at a political rally

Authorities even tried to handcuff this sneaky bot.

(Image credit: iStock)

published 16 September 2016

A robot was arrested in Moscow this week while working the crowd at a campaign rally for Russian Parliamentary candidate Valery Kalachev.

Promobot, a sales robot prototype that has a history of escaping its lab and causing traffic jams when its batteries die mid-crosswalk, was being used by the campaign to interview supporters on key political issues and record their responses "for further processing and analysis by the candidate's team." Evidently Kalachev's supporters don't like him enough to have a conversation with a robot, because someone called the cops.

When local police showed up, they arrested Promobot and even attempted to handcuff its arms. "According to eyewitnesses, the robot did not put up any resistance," a representative of the company developing Promobot told Inverse Magazine — which perhaps is a comforting sign the robot overlords aren't quite ready to take over. Less comforting: Promobot can remember every person it encounters, so those police officers might be advised to lock their doors at night.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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