It's tactical nihilism. Guess what: most of us can make some pretty intelligent guesses about things just based on looking at them. The observation may not be

It's tactical nihilism. Guess what: most of us can make some pretty intelligent guesses about things just based on looking at them. The observation may not be perfect, it may not even be true, but if the goal of the observation is to inform a system for self-preservation, false positives might be totally acceptable if the cost of taking a preservative action is not too high. For example, avoiding a person your subconscious tells you is dangerous - you can ignore it and overrule it, or you can give in and take the safe action. Much of the time, the latter is the better choice, even if you didn't need to be scared, even if there was no danger, because you have no better way of knowing in advance what the situation truly is. Should we use this kind of heuristic in law enforcement? No, this is not Minority Report or the Asimov world of Multivac; while it may be useful for an aggregate at scale we will not get good enough accuracy to know much about individuals. However, it's entirely possible it will tell us about the behaviours of groups of people, and that could still be useful for policy decisions.