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One aspect of crime which bothers me a lot can be summarized by a thought experiment: Imagine a state which does not sufficiently punish criminals who are guil

One aspect of crime which bothers me a lot can be summarized by a thought experiment: Imagine a state which does not sufficiently punish criminals who are guilty of certain white-collar crimes. Over time, the amount of white-collar crime causes a significant negative effect on the efficiency of its capitalist system to the point that it becomes impossible to compete in this system and make a living without also resorting to white-collar crime. Now imagine that the system, by its design, is forcing more and more people into crime, just to survive... And then consider that AI would try to predict and possibly punish crimes before they happen... Surely AI would learn that those who are most harmed by the socio-economic system are the most likely to turn to crime. Systemic discrimination would become the main predictor of crime. It would identity flaws in the socio-economic system in order to punish the people who are most harmed by those flaws, in order to punish those people... As opposed to using those patterns to fix the system itself. Very dystopian.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
that presupposes many factors to come to that conclusion That necessity is the the driver of crime. That systemic discrimination is the driver of necessity. The part I think this fails is that these factors are not sufficient for crime. Not everyone who is poor becomes a criminal. In fact, it is an incredibly poor predictor by the numbers. A poor person might be more likely than a rich one to commit grand theft, but this ignores the the fact that 99.99% of poor people don't commit grand theft. Overall, I think overstating the power of the correlation does a great disservice to all the poor people who are not criminals.