4 ms·
The answer is that false positives are a thing, and a test sufficiently specific to run a dozen times probably doesn't scale to a million times. Similarly, you
by SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
The answer is that false positives are a thing, and a test sufficiently specific to run a dozen times probably doesn't scale to a million times.
Similarly, you can hit phase transitions in capability where more of the same isn't just the same any more. That's why we let police look at things by eye from public space, but count it as a search if they use technology to enhance their view (such as IR).
The main concern is that technology is allowing police to expend more policing effort than we want them to. Their powers aren't supposed to be perfect, and pushing their success rate too high is dangerous for society.
Police would get their human staff cut if they sat them down to build a cross correlation database of citizen activity out of photos from all around town. They'd be called the Stasi and worse.
Why is it any different because they use computers instead of humans?
Ed: I think of modern policing in the US as a sort of autoimmune disease, prompted by a combination of natural proclivity and particularly nasty, if brief, shock to the system a decade-and-a-half ago. Policing in the abstract is good for society; policing like we are now is not.
- marchenko 10y agoThe main concern is that technology is allowing police to expend more policing effort than we want them to. Their powers aren't supposed to be perfect, and pushing their success rate too high is dangerous for society. Exactly. Imagine if we had perfect enforcement of laws against sodomy or miscegenation. In addition to the increase in human misery, it would have been impossible for a reservoir of free personally-invested persons to circulate in society, agitating for change. Manual search forces the police to expend energy enforcing the laws, which forces them to prioritize which laws to expend energy enforcing, which (sometimes, when we're lucky) forces them to be responsive to broader societal values. These databases create a vision of the future which is the very same boot stomping on the very same face in the very same quantity, forever.
- SixSigma 10y agoAs Richard Miller noted in SQUED "Show me a man that has never broken the law and I shall show you a man that has never driven a car." https://www.fantasticfiction.com/m/richard-miller/squed.htm https://www.fantasticfiction.com/m/richard-miller/squed.htm