5 ms·

I've wondered before if something like this could be used in a positive way to deter crime rather than harass targets. e.g., if the data suggested youths in a c

by prawn 10y ago

I've wondered before if something like this could be used in a positive way to deter crime rather than harass targets. e.g., if the data suggested youths in a certain area and time were prone to acting up, it could propose some sort of distraction instead - street ball tournament, TV station truck doing an impromptu giveaway, police outreach, etc.

yakult 10y ago
It is best to take the pessimistic view whenever it comes to how policies are applied and how technical solutions are used. Sure, it can be used constructively, but there will always be a few assholes using it to oppress their enemies and exploit it for material gain. Much like you can predict the success of a spam filter by thinking about how it will be exploited by the worst 1%, it is instructive to think about what this tool will do in the hands of ignorant, uncaring and corrupt assholes, because that's probably how it'll turn out. And that's why we can't have nice things, which is the common thread between telemetry in win10, trigger warnings in colleges and censorship on social media.
PavlovsCat 10y ago
It would absolutely possible to train neural nets to use speeches and interviews of politicians and powerful people to suggest likely canditates for sociopathy and other fun things. The trouble is that those people would not submit to actual clinical diagnosis, and even if they did, nothing useful would come of it. Failing to even think in such directions, and instead pondering how to treat small fish even more like lab rats, that can't be the way.
- brbsix 10y ago
  Speeches are written. Interviews are scripted. Personas are cultivated. I'm not sure how it would be able to ascertain whether a politician is a sociopath any more than it would be able to determine whether Brad Pitt is after analyzing one of his films.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    Your argument would have been a lot stronger this time last year. Brexit and the Philippines are notable examples of some fairly sociopathic political behaviour that fairly closely followed on-record comments. What happens next year will be the exciting part.
  - PavlovsCat 10y ago
    We don't know how neural nets can do stuff like schizophrenia from CCTV footage, merely from how someone walks, but apparently this and other things are already emerging, and with some earnest effort could provide some real results. Mind you, I was talking about neural suggesting people for clinical diagnosis, not about neural nets diagnosing people. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not even that much interested in the idea (which strikes me as a bit Orwellian), but in the cold feet it would give a lot of people with skeletons in the closet. They don't know that it's not fool proof, they just know they don't want to be found out.
- otakucode 10y ago
  I have actually been wanting to do something very similar to what you propose for a long time. Not as an effective measure or anything, but specifically to show people how such technology CAN be used. My specific idea would be to take news stories and other data around each member of Congress, and train a system to predict how likely each member of Congress is to be cheating on their spouse. I got this idea when everyone responded to the revelations about the NSA spying on everyone in an extremely specific way 100% of the time. Everyone focused on human analysts reading the text or listening to the audio of conversations. Read literally any article you find where the NSA, Obama, others in the government, absolutely anyone talks about the things the NSA has done and how they practices might be altered. In every single case, they talk solely about human analysts reading things directly. They never once talk about automated systems analyzing communications and inferring behavior profiles, using those inferred profiles to make decisions or target investigations, nothing like that. And that's where essentially all of the actual danger lies as far as I'm concerned. So perhaps if a website popped up rating each Congressperson on how likely it is they are cheating on their spouse determined by a neural net (or hell even a Bayesian filter, it doesn't actually need to be accurate at all), maybe we could actually get someone to talk about the issue. Because as it is, no one ever has or is willing to as far as I have seen. I don't know if it's because the politicians aren't aware of what such systems can do, or if they've been tricked into thinking they can actually be effective (they can't) so they intentionally try to misdirect people to concentrating on "they'll stop listening in on your phone calls" or what. The only reason I haven't built the site is that I'm unsure if there would be legal implications and if I'd end up charged with slander or something.
  - TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago
    There's a good reason for that. The NSA don't consider data to be "collected" until it is presented to an employee or processed into a human readable form[1]. This allows them to gloss over all the data they gather in the normal, dictionary definition of the word "collect", as well as ignoring any automated analysis of that data before it's presented to a human. As far as I can tell, the NSA don't have a term to properly describe gathering and analysis of data which isn't presented to a human for analysis. [1]: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf (Page 15, 2.2.1)
- peteretep 10y ago
  > to suggest likely canditates > for sociopathy But what use would that information be? I don't care one iota if my president is a sociopath as long as he or she implements the agenda I want them to.
  - golergka 10y ago
    If anything, sociopathy will actually help them do it.
  - PavlovsCat 10y ago
    And since you have zilch recourse if they don't, making predictions based on their past behaviour and personality is your only bet. Also, marketing budgets in the millions of all sorts of people and corporations engineered to make them seem less banshee-like speak another language -- you may not care, but most people still have the hair on the back of their back stand up when faced with the alien, barren inner landscape of a sociopath. Faking it is, uhm, kind of important to everything they do and are. Without it, they have a meltdown, at best only destroying themselves. If we're talking about the real deal and not just someone who is sometimes a bit of a jerk, that is. If people mind stuff like baby killers, Stalin and other things, they do mind sociopaths, whether they know what the word implies or not.
  - posterboy 10y ago
    wouldn't it be good to know upfront that they are likely to not do that precisely because of sociopathic tendencies?
justaaron 10y ago
One issue is that the AI system has inbuilt racial bias, to the degree that it's tuned with prior data and the algorithms seek to find "more of the same". It leads to profiling and arrest of teens DRESSED in a certain way or hanging out at a certain location, etc. There is also a major ethical problem with harrassing people for things they didn't actually DO. Look, unless you've had run-ins with the business side of law-enforcement you may believe the myth that police are there to "protect and serve" Law-enforcement has a single task to catch people breaking laws (any kind, the easier and lower risk to catch them, the better) and process them (arrest, run them in the system, write up the particular offenses, etc.) If anything, the moral/ethical culture in policing in most cities only ENCOURAGES this kind of snap-judgement thinking as well. We need LESS of that and not more. (of course, if you are Dubai, you consider it a grave public danger if someone is smoking a joint somewhere or engaging in consensual acts between 2 adults who happen to be of the same sex, etc...) The CULTURE in law-enforcement is already one of impunity, and globally there is a reason that in perhaps 90% of the planets nations there is some derogatory remark for police rooted in their "us vs them thin blue line" nonsense. Look at America, and it's rash of police killings. Over 1500 last year. There needs to be fundamental reform of most policing in the 21st century before we give them more tools to act like bullies with...
- briandear 10y ago
  1500? Not true. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... And the vast majority of those were clearly justified (suspect being armed and posing an obvious threat threat.) Police are far from perfect but they also have to deal with people on a daily basis who are quite literally the dregs of society: where "F--- you pig!" is as common as "Thank you Officer." As far as inbuilt racial bias -- have you spent time on the streets? You tell me what the percentages are for a crime being committed among different racial and ethnic groups. If you're in Chicago you are far more likely to be shot by a male of a specific racial group than by any other. That's just a fact. Nothing racist about it.
  - otakucode 10y ago
    There is some bias in such a system, though. On the whole, for instance, white collar crime kills more people, and does more economic damage to society than street crime ever does by a significant margin. But we'll build and deploy a system to tackle street crime, not one to tackle white collar crime. That's a conscious decision on the part of our society, and part of the reason why crime is normalized in white collar circles. And it certainly does our society no favors. (For the research into the normalization of white collar crime, and its greater harm to society, I listened to the 'Explaining Social Deviance' course by Prof. Paul Root Worpe a few years ago)
dx034 10y ago
If you'd spend enough money on social services, they could certainly use these systems to send out people and help the potential criminals. I guess you'd quickly see that these areas will also have problematic schools where extra money is probably a way better crime prevention method than policing. The problem with this is that the effect is not easy to measure. If you bring down the crime rate by policing than this can directly be associated with the cost spent. If you improve a school and the crime rate goes down the effect is much harder to measure, and cost/benefit will be in different organizations within the government.
briandear 10y ago
That's a great idea -- pre-crime prevention. There might be something to your idea; sort of like a tornado warning but for crime and the mitigation method would be to deploy positive resources to the area. Kind of like a SWAT team for helping diffuse potential crime with love/support rather than a show of force.
otakucode 10y ago
In order for such a thing to work, 2 things would have to be true: First, those able to make the decisions to do such things would need to be willing to listen to the AI. Second, the AI would need to be saying things that we do not already know would help. Because if it's just saying things like "reduce economic disparity to lower the crime rate" and "increase autonomy of adolescents" and similar that we have had the research for decades to show are effective, well, why would those able to change things listen? They ignore research, they're not going to listen to an AI if it's saying things that conflict with their worldview that produced the problems in the first place...
- notahacker 10y ago
  I'm not sure the insights into things already well-known are that sophisticated. I'd imagine it's more along the lines of "computer thinks street crime less likely to happen if there's a visible police presence outside bars on Friday night" (or applied to Dubai "if you maintain a visible presence at these hotel bars the men in them will have to book their prostitutes online instead" and "watch the foreign workers closely and your conviction rate will skyrocket") These sort of predictions "work", for certain values of work...
forgottenpass 10y ago
lol. You don't need crime prediction software to figure out which neighborhoods could benefit from a youth program.

by prawn 10y ago

yakult 10y ago

It is best to take the pessimistic view whenever it comes to how policies are applied and how technical solutions are used. Sure, it can be used constructively, but there will always be a few assholes using it to oppress their enemies and exploit it for material gain. Much like you can predict the success of a spam filter by thinking about how it will be exploited by the worst 1%, it is instructive to think about what this tool will do in the hands of ignorant, uncaring and corrupt assholes, because that's probably how it'll turn out. And that's why we can't have nice things, which is the common thread between telemetry in win10, trigger warnings in colleges and censorship on social media.

PavlovsCat 10y ago

It would absolutely possible to train neural nets to use speeches and interviews of politicians and powerful people to suggest likely canditates for sociopathy and other fun things. The trouble is that those people would not submit to actual clinical diagnosis, and even if they did, nothing useful would come of it. Failing to even think in such directions, and instead pondering how to treat small fish even more like lab rats, that can't be the way.

brbsix 10y ago
Speeches are written. Interviews are scripted. Personas are cultivated. I'm not sure how it would be able to ascertain whether a politician is a sociopath any more than it would be able to determine whether Brad Pitt is after analyzing one of his films.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  Your argument would have been a lot stronger this time last year. Brexit and the Philippines are notable examples of some fairly sociopathic political behaviour that fairly closely followed on-record comments. What happens next year will be the exciting part.
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  We don't know how neural nets can do stuff like schizophrenia from CCTV footage, merely from how someone walks, but apparently this and other things are already emerging, and with some earnest effort could provide some real results. Mind you, I was talking about neural suggesting people for clinical diagnosis, not about neural nets diagnosing people. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not even that much interested in the idea (which strikes me as a bit Orwellian), but in the cold feet it would give a lot of people with skeletons in the closet. They don't know that it's not fool proof, they just know they don't want to be found out.
otakucode 10y ago
I have actually been wanting to do something very similar to what you propose for a long time. Not as an effective measure or anything, but specifically to show people how such technology CAN be used. My specific idea would be to take news stories and other data around each member of Congress, and train a system to predict how likely each member of Congress is to be cheating on their spouse. I got this idea when everyone responded to the revelations about the NSA spying on everyone in an extremely specific way 100% of the time. Everyone focused on human analysts reading the text or listening to the audio of conversations. Read literally any article you find where the NSA, Obama, others in the government, absolutely anyone talks about the things the NSA has done and how they practices might be altered. In every single case, they talk solely about human analysts reading things directly. They never once talk about automated systems analyzing communications and inferring behavior profiles, using those inferred profiles to make decisions or target investigations, nothing like that. And that's where essentially all of the actual danger lies as far as I'm concerned. So perhaps if a website popped up rating each Congressperson on how likely it is they are cheating on their spouse determined by a neural net (or hell even a Bayesian filter, it doesn't actually need to be accurate at all), maybe we could actually get someone to talk about the issue. Because as it is, no one ever has or is willing to as far as I have seen. I don't know if it's because the politicians aren't aware of what such systems can do, or if they've been tricked into thinking they can actually be effective (they can't) so they intentionally try to misdirect people to concentrating on "they'll stop listening in on your phone calls" or what. The only reason I haven't built the site is that I'm unsure if there would be legal implications and if I'd end up charged with slander or something.
- TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago
  There's a good reason for that. The NSA don't consider data to be "collected" until it is presented to an employee or processed into a human readable form[1]. This allows them to gloss over all the data they gather in the normal, dictionary definition of the word "collect", as well as ignoring any automated analysis of that data before it's presented to a human. As far as I can tell, the NSA don't have a term to properly describe gathering and analysis of data which isn't presented to a human for analysis. [1]: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf (Page 15, 2.2.1)
peteretep 10y ago
> to suggest likely canditates > for sociopathy But what use would that information be? I don't care one iota if my president is a sociopath as long as he or she implements the agenda I want them to.
- golergka 10y ago
  If anything, sociopathy will actually help them do it.
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  And since you have zilch recourse if they don't, making predictions based on their past behaviour and personality is your only bet. Also, marketing budgets in the millions of all sorts of people and corporations engineered to make them seem less banshee-like speak another language -- you may not care, but most people still have the hair on the back of their back stand up when faced with the alien, barren inner landscape of a sociopath. Faking it is, uhm, kind of important to everything they do and are. Without it, they have a meltdown, at best only destroying themselves. If we're talking about the real deal and not just someone who is sometimes a bit of a jerk, that is. If people mind stuff like baby killers, Stalin and other things, they do mind sociopaths, whether they know what the word implies or not.
- posterboy 10y ago
  wouldn't it be good to know upfront that they are likely to not do that precisely because of sociopathic tendencies?

justaaron 10y ago

One issue is that the AI system has inbuilt racial bias, to the degree that it's tuned with prior data and the algorithms seek to find "more of the same". It leads to profiling and arrest of teens DRESSED in a certain way or hanging out at a certain location, etc. There is also a major ethical problem with harrassing people for things they didn't actually DO. Look, unless you've had run-ins with the business side of law-enforcement you may believe the myth that police are there to "protect and serve" Law-enforcement has a single task to catch people breaking laws (any kind, the easier and lower risk to catch them, the better) and process them (arrest, run them in the system, write up the particular offenses, etc.) If anything, the moral/ethical culture in policing in most cities only ENCOURAGES this kind of snap-judgement thinking as well. We need LESS of that and not more. (of course, if you are Dubai, you consider it a grave public danger if someone is smoking a joint somewhere or engaging in consensual acts between 2 adults who happen to be of the same sex, etc...) The CULTURE in law-enforcement is already one of impunity, and globally there is a reason that in perhaps 90% of the planets nations there is some derogatory remark for police rooted in their "us vs them thin blue line" nonsense. Look at America, and it's rash of police killings. Over 1500 last year. There needs to be fundamental reform of most policing in the 21st century before we give them more tools to act like bullies with...

briandear 10y ago
1500? Not true. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... And the vast majority of those were clearly justified (suspect being armed and posing an obvious threat threat.) Police are far from perfect but they also have to deal with people on a daily basis who are quite literally the dregs of society: where "F--- you pig!" is as common as "Thank you Officer." As far as inbuilt racial bias -- have you spent time on the streets? You tell me what the percentages are for a crime being committed among different racial and ethnic groups. If you're in Chicago you are far more likely to be shot by a male of a specific racial group than by any other. That's just a fact. Nothing racist about it.
- otakucode 10y ago
  There is some bias in such a system, though. On the whole, for instance, white collar crime kills more people, and does more economic damage to society than street crime ever does by a significant margin. But we'll build and deploy a system to tackle street crime, not one to tackle white collar crime. That's a conscious decision on the part of our society, and part of the reason why crime is normalized in white collar circles. And it certainly does our society no favors. (For the research into the normalization of white collar crime, and its greater harm to society, I listened to the 'Explaining Social Deviance' course by Prof. Paul Root Worpe a few years ago)

dx034 10y ago

If you'd spend enough money on social services, they could certainly use these systems to send out people and help the potential criminals. I guess you'd quickly see that these areas will also have problematic schools where extra money is probably a way better crime prevention method than policing. The problem with this is that the effect is not easy to measure. If you bring down the crime rate by policing than this can directly be associated with the cost spent. If you improve a school and the crime rate goes down the effect is much harder to measure, and cost/benefit will be in different organizations within the government.

briandear 10y ago

That's a great idea -- pre-crime prevention. There might be something to your idea; sort of like a tornado warning but for crime and the mitigation method would be to deploy positive resources to the area. Kind of like a SWAT team for helping diffuse potential crime with love/support rather than a show of force.

otakucode 10y ago

In order for such a thing to work, 2 things would have to be true: First, those able to make the decisions to do such things would need to be willing to listen to the AI. Second, the AI would need to be saying things that we do not already know would help. Because if it's just saying things like "reduce economic disparity to lower the crime rate" and "increase autonomy of adolescents" and similar that we have had the research for decades to show are effective, well, why would those able to change things listen? They ignore research, they're not going to listen to an AI if it's saying things that conflict with their worldview that produced the problems in the first place...

notahacker 10y ago
I'm not sure the insights into things already well-known are that sophisticated. I'd imagine it's more along the lines of "computer thinks street crime less likely to happen if there's a visible police presence outside bars on Friday night" (or applied to Dubai "if you maintain a visible presence at these hotel bars the men in them will have to book their prostitutes online instead" and "watch the foreign workers closely and your conviction rate will skyrocket") These sort of predictions "work", for certain values of work...

forgottenpass 10y ago

lol. You don't need crime prediction software to figure out which neighborhoods could benefit from a youth program.