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Let me wave my hand around a crystal ball and peer into our future... "Cameras are everywhere and record every crime. Somewhere in the city a man commits a mur

Let me wave my hand around a crystal ball and peer into our future... "Cameras are everywhere and record every crime. Somewhere in the city a man commits a murder. Computers register the crime. Later that same man steps into a self-driving car. The man explains to the car that he wants to travel to the other side of the city. The car doors lock and the vehicle takes off. But the car is not going to where he thinks. Slowly the man realizes that he is being taken directly to the nearest police precinct for booking. Desperately the man tries to exit the car but the doors are locked. He lays down in the seat and frantically kicks at the windshield but there is no time. The car has been given emergency priority and begins traveling over 90 mph. The precious seconds tick by... Back at the precinct the cop takes another bit of his doughnut and reminisces about the time when policing was not just a desk job." That's enough of the crystal ball for today.

CapitalistCartr 9y ago
Or he commits the crime of unauthorized copying of software. Or building unlocked computers. Or helping people encrypt their data with secure, government-proof encryption.
- darkhorn 9y ago
  Or his crime is to critisize the sultan of Turkey, Erdoğan the second. Or the Trump the second.
  - thg 9y ago
    Or they just don't like the way he looks or walks and make up some artificial crime. The possibilities are endless.
fwsgonzo 9y ago
Going further: Some AI is interpreting all camera around the country in real-time. A single government employee is adjusting parameters according to what the current elected officials deem important. There is, however, extra CPU time dedicated to cameras monitoring political opponents. After all, we commit crimes regularly, unknowingly. There are so many laws that not only are there lifelong jobs in the law business, but there are several different types of them. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438...
- jostmey 9y ago
  Then I think you found a great startup idea. Create the AI that warns you when you are about to inadvertently commit a crime, thereby helping you navigate the complex and incomprehensible legal system. Investors will line up to give you money because they will know that everyone will need your patented AI to avoid jail
  - fwsgonzo 9y ago
    Or a new type of actor for hire that gets people to inadvertently commit crimes on cameras. Same reasons as 10,000 years ago: angry spouses, jealousy, political assassination etc.
    - funnyfacts365 9y ago
      Ohhhh. You just described law enforcement sting operations... Damn, damn, damn...
- Denzel 9y ago
  You'd probably like the show Person of Interest written by John Nolan -- Christopher Nolan's (writer and director of Dark Knight trilogy, Intersteller, Inception, etc.) brother. It loosely follows this premise of multiple AGIs going head-to-head against each other as one is used for "good" and the other for "evil" by their respective creators. I think it's a great show. Very interesting.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    The episode I liked most was if-then-else. It had the right mix of silly and smart for me. The conclusion of the show was not that great, IMO.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    Hehe :) Seconding recommendation for Person of Interest. Jonathan Nolan then went on to create the Westworld HBO series. These two brothers are really talented, it runs in the family.
Stanleyc23 9y ago
given all the different moving parts described in this scenario, the bureaucratic challenges alone make me immediately file this in the jetpacks and flying cars category of sci-fi/tech. the changes that would have to happen in government to make this work would be the real paradigm shift. what a world that would be.
adzicg 9y ago
sure, then it all falls on its face due to a stupid bug. I'm currently writing a book on cases where bugs caused serious damage or harm to people and it's amazing how many stupid assumptions people make believing that tech is always right. e.g. Georgia Department of Driver Services couldn't handle photo recognition for twins -- their fraud detection systems insisted it was the same person and rejected driving license test applications as potential fraud (same person applying twice under different names). BBC journalists managed to trick HSBC voice authentication (again using twins). Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles falsely identified a person by matching his drivers license photo against an anti-terrorism database and revoked his license, wouldn't even tell him over the phone why. It's just a matter of time before some really serious mess kicks off because a computer wrongly recognised something.
- ivanhoe 9y ago
  But all of this was happening before, and it's still happening all the time: people getting arrested (some even convicted) just because they looked like someone else, bureaucrats refusing to issue documents to people because of some paperwork mistake, etc. My uncle had at one point to prove to police that he's still alive in order to get a new driving license, because someone with the similar ID number died, and they accidentally marked him as deceased. These kinds of errors always existed, and probably will always exist, just that before they were always caused by human factor, and now we have technology related errors too.
  - adzicg 9y ago
    agreed, but now it's going to happen at scale. eg. in australia, they launched the derided 'robo-debt' system that sent people notices about potential benefit fraud charges, and the harassment of people caused senate investigations in several states. turns out the new system is as correct/wrong as the manual process (20% error rate), but it's now able to process several order magnitude more cases, so effectively floods downstream workflows (claims, complaints, courts) that were not ready for such an increase in demand.
    - 9y ago
o_____________o 9y ago
Let's make a film about this hypothetical scenario and call it Minority Report starring Tom Cruise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrxyr1CjiSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrxyr1CjiSM
dingo_bat 9y ago
Isn't this good? Fuck criminals. Anything that makes catching then easier is good.
- pavement 9y ago
  It's wonderful, when the punishment for murder is a Norwegian prison, terrible when the punishment for shoplifting is ISIS chops off your hand. There's a broad region in between those two poles, where some cases are merely somewhat awful and not completely horrible, and other cases where I guess it's kind of okay, but not that great. The rest of the time, it's an apathetic, civil neither.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  The problem is trying to "automate" the justice system, and in the process, accidentally creating a dystopian dictator's fantasy. Mass surveillance provides unparalleled power to those who control it. It's unprecedented in all of human history. I don't believe humanity knows how to safely handle such power at this point. One of the most fundamental concerns is the fact that, once collected, the data is vulnerable to being misappropriated or weaponized for the entirety of its existence, possibly for many decades or longer. By that point, laws may have changed significantly and the entire political climate could be drastically different. Imagine being automatically put on a special list and thus denied certain basic priveleges due to "questionable" posts you made in an online forum 15 years ago. We can imagine a wide variety of vague and controversial definitions of "questionable content" for this thought experiment.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    But the police is explicitly _not_ the justice system. Courts are of course complicated, and I imagine that police would abuse such a network to arrest people without means to fight back... but at the end of the day I can at least hope to be in front of a judge. And it's not like the courts are the ones doing the dystopian investigating.
    - lawless123 9y ago
yakult 9y ago
1) Ubiquitous self-driving vehicles + facial recognition + cellphone gps tracking = plausibly deniable targetted killings on a massive scale. In 2030 when the AI watching you on all the security cams decide your behaviour pattern skew two standard deviations toward terroristlike, your road accident rates go up. The AI-driven car insurance companies are the first to catch on. When your car premiums shoot skyhigh for no reason, time to stop doing whatever you were doing. 2) 2030. Some researchers in a big prestigious university decides to do a study on SDC accident rates. They find that cars from a particular major maker have a tendency to hit women and black people more often. Results are published in a major journal, media has a field day. The company apologizes profusely and promises to fix its racist mysogynist ways. Their software-engs are left scraching their heads because they can't find the bug. Everything seems to be working... except accidents still skew towards politically sensitive demographics. In desperation the company decides to very slightly decrease the threshold for hitting non-black non-women, evening the numbers. This patch is combined with a major service release which improves accident rates across the board, so that the overall accident rate stays the same. Six months later the journal publishes a very small correction for the original paper that fixes a few bugs in its statistics. The correction is behind a paywall. Nobody reads it.
deadbunny 9y ago
That paragraph seems to be a paraphrase (intentionally or not) of something I read a while ago, I'll be damned if I can remember what though. I vaguely remember it being a girl being arrested by an automated car and her having to hack her way out, maybe while going over a bridge. Damn my shoddy memory!
- alexhawdon 9y ago
  I think it might have been something by William Gibson? I believe she had to cut through the seatbelt and then call a friend to step out in front of the car causing it to career off the bridge and into the water, at which point the locks would release. (The ethics calculation deemed it preferable that she escape rather than perish.)

CapitalistCartr 9y ago

Or he commits the crime of unauthorized copying of software. Or building unlocked computers. Or helping people encrypt their data with secure, government-proof encryption.

darkhorn 9y ago
Or his crime is to critisize the sultan of Turkey, Erdoğan the second. Or the Trump the second.
- thg 9y ago
  Or they just don't like the way he looks or walks and make up some artificial crime. The possibilities are endless.

fwsgonzo 9y ago

Going further: Some AI is interpreting all camera around the country in real-time. A single government employee is adjusting parameters according to what the current elected officials deem important. There is, however, extra CPU time dedicated to cameras monitoring political opponents. After all, we commit crimes regularly, unknowingly. There are so many laws that not only are there lifelong jobs in the law business, but there are several different types of them. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438...

jostmey 9y ago
Then I think you found a great startup idea. Create the AI that warns you when you are about to inadvertently commit a crime, thereby helping you navigate the complex and incomprehensible legal system. Investors will line up to give you money because they will know that everyone will need your patented AI to avoid jail
- fwsgonzo 9y ago
  Or a new type of actor for hire that gets people to inadvertently commit crimes on cameras. Same reasons as 10,000 years ago: angry spouses, jealousy, political assassination etc.
  - funnyfacts365 9y ago
    Ohhhh. You just described law enforcement sting operations... Damn, damn, damn...
Denzel 9y ago
You'd probably like the show Person of Interest written by John Nolan -- Christopher Nolan's (writer and director of Dark Knight trilogy, Intersteller, Inception, etc.) brother. It loosely follows this premise of multiple AGIs going head-to-head against each other as one is used for "good" and the other for "evil" by their respective creators. I think it's a great show. Very interesting.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  The episode I liked most was if-then-else. It had the right mix of silly and smart for me. The conclusion of the show was not that great, IMO.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Hehe :) Seconding recommendation for Person of Interest. Jonathan Nolan then went on to create the Westworld HBO series. These two brothers are really talented, it runs in the family.

Stanleyc23 9y ago

given all the different moving parts described in this scenario, the bureaucratic challenges alone make me immediately file this in the jetpacks and flying cars category of sci-fi/tech. the changes that would have to happen in government to make this work would be the real paradigm shift. what a world that would be.

adzicg 9y ago

sure, then it all falls on its face due to a stupid bug. I'm currently writing a book on cases where bugs caused serious damage or harm to people and it's amazing how many stupid assumptions people make believing that tech is always right. e.g. Georgia Department of Driver Services couldn't handle photo recognition for twins -- their fraud detection systems insisted it was the same person and rejected driving license test applications as potential fraud (same person applying twice under different names). BBC journalists managed to trick HSBC voice authentication (again using twins). Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles falsely identified a person by matching his drivers license photo against an anti-terrorism database and revoked his license, wouldn't even tell him over the phone why. It's just a matter of time before some really serious mess kicks off because a computer wrongly recognised something.

ivanhoe 9y ago
But all of this was happening before, and it's still happening all the time: people getting arrested (some even convicted) just because they looked like someone else, bureaucrats refusing to issue documents to people because of some paperwork mistake, etc. My uncle had at one point to prove to police that he's still alive in order to get a new driving license, because someone with the similar ID number died, and they accidentally marked him as deceased. These kinds of errors always existed, and probably will always exist, just that before they were always caused by human factor, and now we have technology related errors too.
- adzicg 9y ago
  agreed, but now it's going to happen at scale. eg. in australia, they launched the derided 'robo-debt' system that sent people notices about potential benefit fraud charges, and the harassment of people caused senate investigations in several states. turns out the new system is as correct/wrong as the manual process (20% error rate), but it's now able to process several order magnitude more cases, so effectively floods downstream workflows (claims, complaints, courts) that were not ready for such an increase in demand.
  - 9y ago

o_____________o 9y ago

Let's make a film about this hypothetical scenario and call it Minority Report starring Tom Cruise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrxyr1CjiSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrxyr1CjiSM

dingo_bat 9y ago

Isn't this good? Fuck criminals. Anything that makes catching then easier is good.

pavement 9y ago
It's wonderful, when the punishment for murder is a Norwegian prison, terrible when the punishment for shoplifting is ISIS chops off your hand. There's a broad region in between those two poles, where some cases are merely somewhat awful and not completely horrible, and other cases where I guess it's kind of okay, but not that great. The rest of the time, it's an apathetic, civil neither.
dwaltrip 9y ago
The problem is trying to "automate" the justice system, and in the process, accidentally creating a dystopian dictator's fantasy. Mass surveillance provides unparalleled power to those who control it. It's unprecedented in all of human history. I don't believe humanity knows how to safely handle such power at this point. One of the most fundamental concerns is the fact that, once collected, the data is vulnerable to being misappropriated or weaponized for the entirety of its existence, possibly for many decades or longer. By that point, laws may have changed significantly and the entire political climate could be drastically different. Imagine being automatically put on a special list and thus denied certain basic priveleges due to "questionable" posts you made in an online forum 15 years ago. We can imagine a wide variety of vague and controversial definitions of "questionable content" for this thought experiment.
- rtpg 9y ago
  But the police is explicitly _not_ the justice system. Courts are of course complicated, and I imagine that police would abuse such a network to arrest people without means to fight back... but at the end of the day I can at least hope to be in front of a judge. And it's not like the courts are the ones doing the dystopian investigating.
  - lawless123 9y ago

yakult 9y ago

1) Ubiquitous self-driving vehicles + facial recognition + cellphone gps tracking = plausibly deniable targetted killings on a massive scale. In 2030 when the AI watching you on all the security cams decide your behaviour pattern skew two standard deviations toward terroristlike, your road accident rates go up. The AI-driven car insurance companies are the first to catch on. When your car premiums shoot skyhigh for no reason, time to stop doing whatever you were doing. 2) 2030. Some researchers in a big prestigious university decides to do a study on SDC accident rates. They find that cars from a particular major maker have a tendency to hit women and black people more often. Results are published in a major journal, media has a field day. The company apologizes profusely and promises to fix its racist mysogynist ways. Their software-engs are left scraching their heads because they can't find the bug. Everything seems to be working... except accidents still skew towards politically sensitive demographics. In desperation the company decides to very slightly decrease the threshold for hitting non-black non-women, evening the numbers. This patch is combined with a major service release which improves accident rates across the board, so that the overall accident rate stays the same. Six months later the journal publishes a very small correction for the original paper that fixes a few bugs in its statistics. The correction is behind a paywall. Nobody reads it.

deadbunny 9y ago

That paragraph seems to be a paraphrase (intentionally or not) of something I read a while ago, I'll be damned if I can remember what though. I vaguely remember it being a girl being arrested by an automated car and her having to hack her way out, maybe while going over a bridge. Damn my shoddy memory!

alexhawdon 9y ago
I think it might have been something by William Gibson? I believe she had to cut through the seatbelt and then call a friend to step out in front of the car causing it to career off the bridge and into the water, at which point the locks would release. (The ethics calculation deemed it preferable that she escape rather than perish.)