5 ms·

I don't mind a local AI on an airgapped security camera network monitoring a camera and issuing an alert to a security guard. The issues are internet connectivi

I don't mind a local AI on an airgapped security camera network monitoring a camera and issuing an alert to a security guard. The issues are internet connectivity, data retention/mining/sale, and non-local processing (ie handing stuff off to a third party that does who knows what and probably doesn't take security seriously).

ben_w 8mo ago
Even with that, I do mind. Just as two trivial examples, even though neither affects me personally: The estimated number of heroin users in the UK exceeds the total prison population. The number of class-A drug users in the UK is estimated to be so high that if they actually followed the minimum sentencing guidelines for possession, it would cause a catastrophic economic disaster both from all the people no longer working and also all of the people who suddenly had to build new prisons to hold them. I'm not interested in drugs (and I don't live in the UK, but I assume the UK isn't abnormal in this regard). Another example is road traffic law. Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK, often enough that after a month the only people left allowed to drive would be people like me who don't even own a car. The entire legal system has to be radically changed with far less punishments for almost everything if you have perfect, or even 30% of the way to perfect, surveillance.
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  I was a bit unclear. I agree, I don't want the government using AI to identify all violations of the law. That sounds like a very straightforward dystopia. What I don't mind is private companies using AI analysis to support their security guards. I object to any sharing of the data with third parties though. It should be illegal for the data to leave their internal network and it should be illegal to retain it for more than a few days. I don't care if grocery store loss prevention has eyes on every aisle. My concern is data warehousing and subsequent misuse.
- egorfine 8mo ago
  > Another example is road traffic law. Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK, often enough that after a month the only people left allowed to drive would be people like me who don't even own a car. You don't have to strip the driving licenses. You should impose a fine and not an extremely painful one for starters. And then probably within less than a year the whole population will drive properly. I think I'm in favor of indiscriminately fining everyone speeding at every camera, but I realize there is no privacy-preserving way to do it today thus I will be against it. (I'm a driver and car lover who is never speeding)
  - ben_w 8mo ago
    That's covered by "system has to be radically changed". UK driving licences give you room for 12 "penalty points" worth of mistakes before you risk being banned from the road, of which speeding costs you at least 3: https://www.gov.uk/penalty-points-endorsements/endorsement-codes-and-penalty-points https://www.gov.uk/penalty-points-endorsements/endorsement-c...
    - Angostura 8mo ago
      Indeed. 4 strikes and you are out seems fine to me (as a UK driver). You can also opt to take a speed awareness course in leu of the points, I believe
      - ben_w 8mo ago
        4 strikes today with current speed enforcement is fine; 4 strikes in a hypothetical where 100% of infractions are caught, I aver will catch (almost) everyone who actually drives within a month.
        tln 8mo ago
        If notice of the infractions is a envelope delivered days later and sitting on on end table for a week, typical drivers are going to rack up 4 strikes before seeing the first one! Perfect enforcement has to come with immediate feedback
- KaiserPro 8mo ago
  > Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK, So we have a fucktonne of speed cameras allover the place: https://www.speedcameramap.co.uk/ https://www.speedcameramap.co.uk/ (you need to zoom in there are so fucking many) But we have less redlight cameras than the US. we also have hatching cameras (yellow hatched boxes mean no stopping, usually at junctions) we also have bus lane cameras, where if you drive in a buslane you get a fine. For the Speed cameras, they are normally put there based on evidence of road deaths linked to speeding. I dont like speed cameras, but they do serve a purpose. When you get a speeding ticket, if its your first offence, you can take a speed awareness course, and you won't get points on your license. otherwise its three points and a £100 fine. The points age out after 3 years. the maximum you can normally get is 12 points on your license. Its only in extreme cases do you get a ban, or license revoked. The reason why people are still able to drive are numerous: 1) its been a gradual evolution. 2) we have fairly robust training for drivers (theory, comprehensive real world test) 3) Evidence based placement. Its not like they just shove these things where poor people live (or in the US where the city has zoned living for people with more melanin than others). If there are higher than average road crashes, the road is re-made to make it safer, speed limits dropped, traffic calming put in place, then speed cameras. 4) You are expected to follow the traffic rules 5) the traffic rules are actually pretty sensible.
  - fc417fc802 8mo ago
    > we also have hatching cameras (yellow hatched boxes mean no stopping, usually at junctions) Weirdly I've never encountered these in the US (only red light cameras) and do we ever need them. I'm generally opposed to government associated cameras due to concerns about turnkey authoritarianism but if we have to have cameras at intersections they could at least curb the awful self centered behavior.
    - pclmulqdq 8mo ago
      Most states ban speed cameras and many ban red light cameras as 4th amendment violations. You cannot face your accuser when your accuser is a robot. As a result, speed camera tickets have always used some legal sleight-of-hand to nail you into confessing, and this has become unpalatable. If we raised speed limits (almost) across the board to the actual safe limits of modern cars, I think a lot more people would be ok with speed cameras. There would still be a constitutional problem, however.
- Thorrez 8mo ago
  Speeding is a special case, because it's unclear what the lawmakers, road designers, and police intend. When the speed limit is 65 mph, do they actually intend for everyone to go no faster? I don't think so. I think the lawmakers, if driving in traffic, want people to go a bit faster. Same with the police. And I think the road designers design the roads knowing most people will speed. I want to follow the law. But when it comes to speeding, it's hard for me to follow the letter of the law, because all the parties involved in creating and enforcing the law don't want me to follow the letter of the law. So I instead follow the intent of the law, and speed up to 9mph. When Google Maps pops up a "police ahead" warning, I don't slow down at all, because I'm following the intent of the law, and that's what police around where I live enforce. If I'm driving in other areas of the country, I'm less certain what police want, so I'll be more likely to follow the letter of the law. If there was automated strict enforcement of speeding, then it would be clear to me that the letter of the law is the intent, so I would gladly obey the letter of the law. There would certainly need to be a transition period with clear warnings that in the future, the letter of the law will be enforced, instead of the current status of something looser.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    The purpose of a system is what it does. In Australia, they want you to go 50. In the USA, they want a reason to fine you.
    - Thorrez 8mo ago
      > In the USA, they want a reason to fine you. In my area of the US, I don't think so. I'll go 9mph over the speed limit when I drive by a police car. I've never been pulled over. In some other areas of the US, you're right, which is why I'm less likely to speed in other areas.
  - tsimionescu 8mo ago
    > When the speed limit is 65 mph, do they actually intend for everyone to go no faster? I don't think so. Where is this supposed ambiguity coming from?
- speleding 8mo ago
  I'm going to argue the other side: in Chinese cities like Chongqing they've seen a drastic reduction in crime after blanketing the city with cameras and monitoring technology. Whole categories of crime disappeared. Women and elderly feel safe to walk the streets at night. No one locks their bike anymore in Chongqing. I care about privacy, but I think we should be smart enough to work out a way to get some of those benefits without going full 1984. For example by having surveillance that can only be queried by an AI with very strong guard rails. Admittedly, I live in a country with very strong democratic institutions, and I trust we would take action the moment something gets abused or surveillance overreaches. I would probably feel differently living elsewhere.
  - fc417fc802 8mo ago
    > I trust we would take action the moment something gets abused or surveillance overreaches. The thing about turnkey authoritarian solutions is that once something happens it's likely too late to take action. However there are often alternative solutions that physically constrain the system such that substantial abuse is impossible without time consuming and expensive physical modifications. The traditional speed cameras in the UK for example. Cameras, AI integrated at the edge, software that can't be updated remotely, the full stack publicly audited, that only output video data when a suspected violent crime is flagged. Something like that might work. I'm not optimistic such a solution would see much support though. You'd also probably want a policy put in place in advance to quickly pull them down if certain criteria are met. But again, I'm not optimistic about the prospects.
    - speleding 8mo ago
      Well I agree, and my hopes aren't very high of this actually happening. Our politicians tend to be clueless with anything tech related, their opinions calibrated by what they saw in Hollywood movies, where anything tech related always turns into "black mirror". (By contrast, allegedly over half the Chinese politburo has an engineering degree of some kind). But we could start small, with just one neighborhood, a pilot project where the kinks get worked out and slowly scaled up. Getting permission for a small scale pilot shouldn't be impossible.
- ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
  I have a friend that was just fired from a job, driving 18-wheelers, because he was being monitored by an AI, and the AI malfunctioned, yelling at him for hours to put on his seat belt (it was on). He put a piece of tape over the speaker, and was fired for that. One of the best, and most experienced big rig truckers in the area. They lost an invaluable employee, and he got another job in minutes (truckers are still a valuable commodity). One of the things about computers, is that they can’t cut you (or themselves) slack.
- naasking 8mo ago
  > The entire legal system has to be radically changed with far less punishments for almost everything if you have perfect, or even 30% of the way to perfect, surveillance. Prosecutorial discretion means they can just collect evidence and choose not to charge you unless they want to leverage you for something. This already happens, but universal surveillance means it can literally happen to anybody, because everybody breaks the law in some way due to how many laws we have. Discretion is the real problem I think. It seems extreme, but maybe discretion should be eliminated: if you commit a crime you will be charged. This will at first result in way too much prosecution, which will lead to protests and hopefully repealing laws and we'd end up in a better place where the law is understandable and predictable by mortals.
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  Speed cameras are a source of income, they are not for enforcement or safety.
  - ben_w 8mo ago
    My understanding is this varies wildly by jurisdiction. But it doesn't matter to my point: assume it's just about income, put the cameras everywhere, how fast does it make driving unaffordable? Same for anything with a fine, e.g. would littering fines be enough to replace taxation, but in a weird way that also puts the messiest subset of the population into life-long bankruptcy to pay those fines? (Of course, current AI is nowhere near good enough for this, if it was those Amazon "AI-powered" "cashier-free" shops wouldn't have secretly been done by humans watching CCTV).
  - ranger_danger 8mo ago
    Two things can be true at once
eesmith 8mo ago
Determining where the cameras are placed and what to alert on are also important and unresolved issues. Simply getting alerts from a camera can cause people to believe that the area is a high-crime area, when it's merely a consequence of having a camera there. Poor people are more like to be in public areas than rich pedophiles who can buy an island or ranch so they and their friends can enjoy wonderful secrets out of the eye of any Flock camera. If the camera alerts on AI facial recognition for wanted criminals, and facial recognition causes disproportionally higher false alerts for people of south Asian heritage than of Anglo-Norman heritage, then systemic racism is built into the system, which we should all mind.
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  I'm not talking about monitoring public spaces or searching for criminals. I don't want either of those things and I'm generally opposed to the government operating cameras. I just don't mind private businesses using them to support their existing security guards so long as they don't mishandle or abuse the data. I'd even be in favor of entirely banning the use of facial recognition technology in conjunction with security cameras. Have them alert on concrete suspicious activity.
  - eesmith 8mo ago
    I took your list ("The issues are internet connectivity, data retention/mining/sale, and non-local processing") as being incomplete. The examples I gave were to give examples of additional issues. There are equivalents for my examples to private businesses, even putting recognition systems to the side. I personally have noticed that "alert" and "suspicious" tends to mean "something unusual", and not "something illegal". Increasing alerts results in forced normality. On the flip side, if the information was there and not used, then the security guards are blamed for not connecting the dots, so investigating alerts becomes a CYA task. As an example, security guards have harassed people on public sidewalks who are legally taking pictures of the building they are guarding. They are incentivized to investigate the alert, face no consequences (so long as that harassment doesn't itself break the law) for a false alert, and risk losing their job if the photographs are used for nefarious purposes. Adding air-gapped AI may help the security guards, while increasing the amount of harassment. Yes, I have had a security guard stand over me while I delete a photograph I took of a building while in a public park. I think I was not legally required to follow request. I wasn't going to risk escalating the confrontation over a picture of a neat-looking gargoyle. No, I don't want AI enabling more of that harassment.
ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
I just watched Enemy of the State (late 1990s sequel to The Conversation [1974]) — one of the major plot elements is having to physically acquire the footage/tape (from isolated witnesses/cameras); whereas today, everything feeds into one central company [0]. [0] whom then repackages streams and sells to anybody — mostly law-enforcement — with no 4th Amendment protections ('cause it's a private company brah!).
- JCattheATM 8mo ago
  > I just watched Enemy of the State (late 1990s sequel to The Conversation [1974]) Not officially, just as a fun fan theory.

ben_w 8mo ago

Even with that, I do mind. Just as two trivial examples, even though neither affects me personally: The estimated number of heroin users in the UK exceeds the total prison population. The number of class-A drug users in the UK is estimated to be so high that if they actually followed the minimum sentencing guidelines for possession, it would cause a catastrophic economic disaster both from all the people no longer working and also all of the people who suddenly had to build new prisons to hold them. I'm not interested in drugs (and I don't live in the UK, but I assume the UK isn't abnormal in this regard). Another example is road traffic law. Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK, often enough that after a month the only people left allowed to drive would be people like me who don't even own a car. The entire legal system has to be radically changed with far less punishments for almost everything if you have perfect, or even 30% of the way to perfect, surveillance.

fc417fc802 8mo ago
I was a bit unclear. I agree, I don't want the government using AI to identify all violations of the law. That sounds like a very straightforward dystopia. What I don't mind is private companies using AI analysis to support their security guards. I object to any sharing of the data with third parties though. It should be illegal for the data to leave their internal network and it should be illegal to retain it for more than a few days. I don't care if grocery store loss prevention has eyes on every aisle. My concern is data warehousing and subsequent misuse.
egorfine 8mo ago
> Another example is road traffic law. Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK, often enough that after a month the only people left allowed to drive would be people like me who don't even own a car. You don't have to strip the driving licenses. You should impose a fine and not an extremely painful one for starters. And then probably within less than a year the whole population will drive properly. I think I'm in favor of indiscriminately fining everyone speeding at every camera, but I realize there is no privacy-preserving way to do it today thus I will be against it. (I'm a driver and car lover who is never speeding)
- ben_w 8mo ago
  That's covered by "system has to be radically changed". UK driving licences give you room for 12 "penalty points" worth of mistakes before you risk being banned from the road, of which speeding costs you at least 3: https://www.gov.uk/penalty-points-endorsements/endorsement-codes-and-penalty-points https://www.gov.uk/penalty-points-endorsements/endorsement-c...
  - Angostura 8mo ago
    Indeed. 4 strikes and you are out seems fine to me (as a UK driver). You can also opt to take a speed awareness course in leu of the points, I believe
    - ben_w 8mo ago
      4 strikes today with current speed enforcement is fine; 4 strikes in a hypothetical where 100% of infractions are caught, I aver will catch (almost) everyone who actually drives within a month.
      - tln 8mo ago
        If notice of the infractions is a envelope delivered days later and sitting on on end table for a week, typical drivers are going to rack up 4 strikes before seeing the first one! Perfect enforcement has to come with immediate feedback
KaiserPro 8mo ago
> Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK, So we have a fucktonne of speed cameras allover the place: https://www.speedcameramap.co.uk/ https://www.speedcameramap.co.uk/ (you need to zoom in there are so fucking many) But we have less redlight cameras than the US. we also have hatching cameras (yellow hatched boxes mean no stopping, usually at junctions) we also have bus lane cameras, where if you drive in a buslane you get a fine. For the Speed cameras, they are normally put there based on evidence of road deaths linked to speeding. I dont like speed cameras, but they do serve a purpose. When you get a speeding ticket, if its your first offence, you can take a speed awareness course, and you won't get points on your license. otherwise its three points and a £100 fine. The points age out after 3 years. the maximum you can normally get is 12 points on your license. Its only in extreme cases do you get a ban, or license revoked. The reason why people are still able to drive are numerous: 1) its been a gradual evolution. 2) we have fairly robust training for drivers (theory, comprehensive real world test) 3) Evidence based placement. Its not like they just shove these things where poor people live (or in the US where the city has zoned living for people with more melanin than others). If there are higher than average road crashes, the road is re-made to make it safer, speed limits dropped, traffic calming put in place, then speed cameras. 4) You are expected to follow the traffic rules 5) the traffic rules are actually pretty sensible.
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  > we also have hatching cameras (yellow hatched boxes mean no stopping, usually at junctions) Weirdly I've never encountered these in the US (only red light cameras) and do we ever need them. I'm generally opposed to government associated cameras due to concerns about turnkey authoritarianism but if we have to have cameras at intersections they could at least curb the awful self centered behavior.
  - pclmulqdq 8mo ago
    Most states ban speed cameras and many ban red light cameras as 4th amendment violations. You cannot face your accuser when your accuser is a robot. As a result, speed camera tickets have always used some legal sleight-of-hand to nail you into confessing, and this has become unpalatable. If we raised speed limits (almost) across the board to the actual safe limits of modern cars, I think a lot more people would be ok with speed cameras. There would still be a constitutional problem, however.
Thorrez 8mo ago
Speeding is a special case, because it's unclear what the lawmakers, road designers, and police intend. When the speed limit is 65 mph, do they actually intend for everyone to go no faster? I don't think so. I think the lawmakers, if driving in traffic, want people to go a bit faster. Same with the police. And I think the road designers design the roads knowing most people will speed. I want to follow the law. But when it comes to speeding, it's hard for me to follow the letter of the law, because all the parties involved in creating and enforcing the law don't want me to follow the letter of the law. So I instead follow the intent of the law, and speed up to 9mph. When Google Maps pops up a "police ahead" warning, I don't slow down at all, because I'm following the intent of the law, and that's what police around where I live enforce. If I'm driving in other areas of the country, I'm less certain what police want, so I'll be more likely to follow the letter of the law. If there was automated strict enforcement of speeding, then it would be clear to me that the letter of the law is the intent, so I would gladly obey the letter of the law. There would certainly need to be a transition period with clear warnings that in the future, the letter of the law will be enforced, instead of the current status of something looser.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  The purpose of a system is what it does. In Australia, they want you to go 50. In the USA, they want a reason to fine you.
  - Thorrez 8mo ago
    > In the USA, they want a reason to fine you. In my area of the US, I don't think so. I'll go 9mph over the speed limit when I drive by a police car. I've never been pulled over. In some other areas of the US, you're right, which is why I'm less likely to speed in other areas.
- tsimionescu 8mo ago
  > When the speed limit is 65 mph, do they actually intend for everyone to go no faster? I don't think so. Where is this supposed ambiguity coming from?
speleding 8mo ago
I'm going to argue the other side: in Chinese cities like Chongqing they've seen a drastic reduction in crime after blanketing the city with cameras and monitoring technology. Whole categories of crime disappeared. Women and elderly feel safe to walk the streets at night. No one locks their bike anymore in Chongqing. I care about privacy, but I think we should be smart enough to work out a way to get some of those benefits without going full 1984. For example by having surveillance that can only be queried by an AI with very strong guard rails. Admittedly, I live in a country with very strong democratic institutions, and I trust we would take action the moment something gets abused or surveillance overreaches. I would probably feel differently living elsewhere.
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  > I trust we would take action the moment something gets abused or surveillance overreaches. The thing about turnkey authoritarian solutions is that once something happens it's likely too late to take action. However there are often alternative solutions that physically constrain the system such that substantial abuse is impossible without time consuming and expensive physical modifications. The traditional speed cameras in the UK for example. Cameras, AI integrated at the edge, software that can't be updated remotely, the full stack publicly audited, that only output video data when a suspected violent crime is flagged. Something like that might work. I'm not optimistic such a solution would see much support though. You'd also probably want a policy put in place in advance to quickly pull them down if certain criteria are met. But again, I'm not optimistic about the prospects.
  - speleding 8mo ago
    Well I agree, and my hopes aren't very high of this actually happening. Our politicians tend to be clueless with anything tech related, their opinions calibrated by what they saw in Hollywood movies, where anything tech related always turns into "black mirror". (By contrast, allegedly over half the Chinese politburo has an engineering degree of some kind). But we could start small, with just one neighborhood, a pilot project where the kinks get worked out and slowly scaled up. Getting permission for a small scale pilot shouldn't be impossible.
ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
I have a friend that was just fired from a job, driving 18-wheelers, because he was being monitored by an AI, and the AI malfunctioned, yelling at him for hours to put on his seat belt (it was on). He put a piece of tape over the speaker, and was fired for that. One of the best, and most experienced big rig truckers in the area. They lost an invaluable employee, and he got another job in minutes (truckers are still a valuable commodity). One of the things about computers, is that they can’t cut you (or themselves) slack.
naasking 8mo ago
> The entire legal system has to be radically changed with far less punishments for almost everything if you have perfect, or even 30% of the way to perfect, surveillance. Prosecutorial discretion means they can just collect evidence and choose not to charge you unless they want to leverage you for something. This already happens, but universal surveillance means it can literally happen to anybody, because everybody breaks the law in some way due to how many laws we have. Discretion is the real problem I think. It seems extreme, but maybe discretion should be eliminated: if you commit a crime you will be charged. This will at first result in way too much prosecution, which will lead to protests and hopefully repealing laws and we'd end up in a better place where the law is understandable and predictable by mortals.
jacquesm 8mo ago
Speed cameras are a source of income, they are not for enforcement or safety.
- ben_w 8mo ago
  My understanding is this varies wildly by jurisdiction. But it doesn't matter to my point: assume it's just about income, put the cameras everywhere, how fast does it make driving unaffordable? Same for anything with a fine, e.g. would littering fines be enough to replace taxation, but in a weird way that also puts the messiest subset of the population into life-long bankruptcy to pay those fines? (Of course, current AI is nowhere near good enough for this, if it was those Amazon "AI-powered" "cashier-free" shops wouldn't have secretly been done by humans watching CCTV).
- ranger_danger 8mo ago
  Two things can be true at once

eesmith 8mo ago

Determining where the cameras are placed and what to alert on are also important and unresolved issues. Simply getting alerts from a camera can cause people to believe that the area is a high-crime area, when it's merely a consequence of having a camera there. Poor people are more like to be in public areas than rich pedophiles who can buy an island or ranch so they and their friends can enjoy wonderful secrets out of the eye of any Flock camera. If the camera alerts on AI facial recognition for wanted criminals, and facial recognition causes disproportionally higher false alerts for people of south Asian heritage than of Anglo-Norman heritage, then systemic racism is built into the system, which we should all mind.

fc417fc802 8mo ago
I'm not talking about monitoring public spaces or searching for criminals. I don't want either of those things and I'm generally opposed to the government operating cameras. I just don't mind private businesses using them to support their existing security guards so long as they don't mishandle or abuse the data. I'd even be in favor of entirely banning the use of facial recognition technology in conjunction with security cameras. Have them alert on concrete suspicious activity.
- eesmith 8mo ago
  I took your list ("The issues are internet connectivity, data retention/mining/sale, and non-local processing") as being incomplete. The examples I gave were to give examples of additional issues. There are equivalents for my examples to private businesses, even putting recognition systems to the side. I personally have noticed that "alert" and "suspicious" tends to mean "something unusual", and not "something illegal". Increasing alerts results in forced normality. On the flip side, if the information was there and not used, then the security guards are blamed for not connecting the dots, so investigating alerts becomes a CYA task. As an example, security guards have harassed people on public sidewalks who are legally taking pictures of the building they are guarding. They are incentivized to investigate the alert, face no consequences (so long as that harassment doesn't itself break the law) for a false alert, and risk losing their job if the photographs are used for nefarious purposes. Adding air-gapped AI may help the security guards, while increasing the amount of harassment. Yes, I have had a security guard stand over me while I delete a photograph I took of a building while in a public park. I think I was not legally required to follow request. I wasn't going to risk escalating the confrontation over a picture of a neat-looking gargoyle. No, I don't want AI enabling more of that harassment.

ProllyInfamous 8mo ago

I just watched Enemy of the State (late 1990s sequel to The Conversation [1974]) — one of the major plot elements is having to physically acquire the footage/tape (from isolated witnesses/cameras); whereas today, everything feeds into one central company [0]. [0] whom then repackages streams and sells to anybody — mostly law-enforcement — with no 4th Amendment protections ('cause it's a private company brah!).

JCattheATM 8mo ago
> I just watched Enemy of the State (late 1990s sequel to The Conversation [1974]) Not officially, just as a fun fan theory.