4 ms·

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
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six
dazc 9y ago
A sad fact of life, albeit based on life experience and anecdote, being young and female will mean you are being watched and followed even though you have never committed a crime.
Zarath 9y ago
Crime != bad Hopefully at this point in the future humans will be augmented and have tools to circumvent this sort of thing. Confuse the AIs, jam the cameras, whatever.
userbinator 9y ago
Imagine a world with no crime. You'd probably not want to live in one, unless you're somehow very eager to do nothing but exactly what the government says you may, with the entire infrastructure preventing you from even attempting to do otherwise.
Piskvorrr 9y ago
First one who said "the innocent have nothing to fear" was some Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre. He was eventually executed. Turns out, it depends a lot on who decides your innocence, and not a lot on you doing nothing wrong. In other words, systems set up against people doing bad things are also perfect for framing people inconvenient to the operators.
BearGoesChirp 9y ago
The majority of criminals are good people who deserve no punishment. The majority of criminals who deserve punishment don't receive it. The law has grown to the point where perfectly moral and reasonable behavior is criminal. Automating a authoritarian system of enslavement is not a good thing when it has become so divorced from morals or ethics. If anything, we need to slow down the justice system. Remove plea deals. For every charge to go before a jury. Force the DA to focus only on the bad crimes and let anyone with minor crimes off with no charges.

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
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six

dazc 9y ago

A sad fact of life, albeit based on life experience and anecdote, being young and female will mean you are being watched and followed even though you have never committed a crime.

Zarath 9y ago

Crime != bad Hopefully at this point in the future humans will be augmented and have tools to circumvent this sort of thing. Confuse the AIs, jam the cameras, whatever.

userbinator 9y ago

Imagine a world with no crime. You'd probably not want to live in one, unless you're somehow very eager to do nothing but exactly what the government says you may, with the entire infrastructure preventing you from even attempting to do otherwise.

Piskvorrr 9y ago

First one who said "the innocent have nothing to fear" was some Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre. He was eventually executed. Turns out, it depends a lot on who decides your innocence, and not a lot on you doing nothing wrong. In other words, systems set up against people doing bad things are also perfect for framing people inconvenient to the operators.

BearGoesChirp 9y ago

The majority of criminals are good people who deserve no punishment. The majority of criminals who deserve punishment don't receive it. The law has grown to the point where perfectly moral and reasonable behavior is criminal. Automating a authoritarian system of enslavement is not a good thing when it has become so divorced from morals or ethics. If anything, we need to slow down the justice system. Remove plea deals. For every charge to go before a jury. Force the DA to focus only on the bad crimes and let anyone with minor crimes off with no charges.