3 ms·
The problem is that laws are an approximation of safety and well being. When laws were all we had, the delta between the laws and the actual thing we want (safe
by jerf 3y ago
The problem is that laws are an approximation of safety and well being. When laws were all we had, the delta between the laws and the actual thing we want (safety) was not something we spent a lot of time worrying about, because we couldn't detect the difference. The law couldn't be enforced anyhow.
The problem is as we get perfect enforcement, the delta does become visible. The reality is that when a road is set to 55 mph, that is not some sort of pronouncement from God that that is the one true speed that the road is safe at. It was just an approximation. But then we set up a camera that treats it as rigid ground truth, and now you can be nailed with a ticket if you're doing 56 miles per hour.
But does that help anyone? Was anyone unsafe because you were going 56 mph rather than 55? No, of course not. 55 was never the point. Nominally, safety was the point. Safety is not about going a single speed. There are days and conditions when 65 is practically as safe as 55. There are days and conditions where 65 may be safer than 55 (e.g., everyone around you is doing it on a multi-lane road, you're safer following along than stubbornly insisting on being 10 mph divergent). There are days and conditions where the safe limit may well be 15, or even 0. That's the real thing we want. But that's not what computers and AI give us. They give us rigid enforcement.
As society develops the capability to enforce laws rigidly, it will need to figure out that rigid enforcement isn't what we ever wanted. The laws were not themselves the end goal.
Unfortunately, this is going to be harder than it should be because this rigid enforcement creates and/or reinforces a power center in the people who will benefit from this rigid enforcement, both monetarily and through the additional power to selectively pardon people for what is de facto a brand new set of crimes, in the sense that the are a whole bunch of convictions that could never have occurred in the past. Modestly clever use of the pardoning process will allow them to hold on to that power for extended periods of time by using it to cover over the worst and most socially costly offenses (see also "Support via working out how to raise enough of a Twitter fuss to get the company's attention"; you can suppress outrage and even look magnanimous by pardoning the things that get into the news while hammering everyone else).
We will, of course, have to learn this the hard way.
- nvm0n2 3y agoI mean sure but they give us rigid enforcement because there's no universal and fair way to define what the "real" limit should be. Limits do get changed dynamically on motorways. You can argue that with the ever greater digitization of cars there's a way out of that: use AI to monitor road conditions and dynamically adjust the speed limit, where those superseding limits are uploaded to a central server that in-car dashes can download from. As long as the limit only ever goes above the signposted limit, it can work. People with old cars just won't learn when they can go faster (except via smartphone maps).
- Gud 3y agoOr better yet, school our children to be intelligent human beings that know how to use their judgement rather than implement some dystopian horror future where we are monitored by the all seeing busybodies assisted by AI.
- nvm0n2 3y agoI'm as libertarian as they come but honestly I can't get worked up about traffic cameras. We are tracked everywhere we go with our phones anyway, that battle is lost (and of course wearing a cap or mask in your car isn't illegal). The type of AI surveillance that is truly dystopian is surveillance of communications and participation in public debates, with automatic financial punishment for wrongthink. That's where the puck is going and where focus is needed.
- Gud 3y agoYou cannot claim to be as libertarian as they come while simultaneously advocating(not simply accepting) an ever present panopticon. I also consider myself as libertarian as they come; I refuse to accept the rapid decline in personal freedoms(including on the road) and will do what I can to resist it.
- nvm0n2 3y agoPurist libertarians believe in having enough state-enforced rules to prevent people using violence against each other. The gap here is only between deliberate acts of violence and irresponsibility large enough to yield the same effect. Like, if someone gets drunk and punches someone else in the face, libertarians say the police should step in (which requires that they know it's happening). If that person gets drunk and then mows someone down in a car, it's not inconsistent to say police should step in there too. So I can't quite tell if you're in favor of laws against things like drunk/distracted driving but don't want them to actually be enforced, or if you're against the laws themselves. I'm not sure it can be consistent to be for such laws but against the most obvious way of enforcing them. I don't think libertarianism as a classical philosophy has much to say on the topic of surveillance, as it would be captured in having a minimal/small state anyway. But given that it does believe in enforced laws, I can't see where the prohibition against cameras comes from.