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This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI and in particular cops with facial recognition tools, dragnet LPR surveillance tools, and all thi

This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI and in particular cops with facial recognition tools, dragnet LPR surveillance tools, and all this other new technology that essentially picks somebody's name out of a hat to have their life temporarily (or [semi-]permanently) ruined by shithead cops who won't ever face any real accountability. This keeps happening, and the reason it keeps happening is that shithead cops have these tools and are using them. Until we can find a reliable way to prevent this from happening, which may or may not be possible, cops who may or may not be shitheads should not have access to these tools.

throwaway314155 7mo ago
There’s nothing wrong with your comment per se, but it’s almost as if you didn’t even read the comment you’re responding to.
- Retric 7mo ago
  Seems like a direct response to me. >> How is this the fault of AI? > This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI You can’t separate the thing from how it will be used. It’s like arguing that cars on their own aren’t particularly dangerous, but the point of buying a car is to use it thus risking the general public.
  - fc417fc802 7mo ago
    But you can in fact argue exactly that. If (arbitrary example) pedestrians are being killed due to poor road engineering practices it isn't reasonable to point at cars and say "see those are the root problem" when in fact it's due to a willful lack of sidewalks or marked crossings or whatever. Being adjacent to something bad doesn't equate to being the root cause.
    - Retric 7mo ago
      History shows the timeline of dependence here. Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths. So clearly it’s cars that are necessitating sidewalks, etc. Same deal here, if something “becomes a problem” because of the introduction of AI, it’s AI that is the root case of the resulting issues. Many people are tempted to argue that flawed humans can’t implement the perfect system that is Anarchy, Communism, Recycling programs, or whatever but treating systems as needing to operate on the real world is productive where complaining about humans isn’t.
      - fc417fc802 7mo ago
        Well I (thought it was obvious that) I was referring to roads constructed relatively recently. If cars necessitate sidewalks and the city chooses to cut costs by not putting those in that isn't the fault of automobile designers or manufacturers or dealers or private owners or whoever. To your example, technology changes and that necessitates infrastructure changing. That doesn't mean that fault for mishaps in the meantime can be attributed to the new technology. A user operating the new technology in an obviously unsafe manner is solely at fault for his own negligence.
        Retric 7mo ago
        The safest street designs still result in automobile fatalities. You can at best mitigate the issue with better street designs but not address the underlying issue. Failing to acknowledge cars as the root cause may be comforting, but it blinds you to viable solutions. Indoor shopping malls for example solve many of the issues with cars by forcing people to move around on foot in a little island surrounded by a sea of very low density parking. They are’t perfect solutions, but they still saved a lot of lives and time. Saying people are misusing a new technology is just another way of saying that technology is flawed. This doesn’t mean you can’t utilize it, but pretending flaws don’t exist has no value.
      - tatersolid 7mo ago
        > Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths. Death by adverse horse encounter was very common before the 1920s. Not sure how many of those deaths can be blamed on poor quality road engineering. But putting a bunch of humans, carts, and excitable half-ton animals in the same crowded streets seems like poor engineering practice.
- caconym_ 7mo ago
  Let me help you out with this comprehension issue. The point of my comment is that I disagree with the apparent premise of the comment I replied to, which is that "AI" is some generic investigative tool that we can neatly snip out of the picture to blame this incident on human factors at the individual level ("the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility"). Said comment also implies that people are fixating on the AI aspect of this issue while ignoring the human factors, which IMO is a strawman. To me, the existence of AI in its current incarnations and the ways in which law enforcement will inevitably abuse it are, together, inseparably, the problem. AI (in the most general sense) opens up entire new dimensions for potential abuse. As a concrete example: > And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence. Let me state what should be obvious: without AI (as in, the facial recognition systems involved in this case), this woman would not have sat in jail for 5 months, or indeed for any length of time at all. So saying that it has "nothing to do with AI" is totally ridiculous.
  - throwaway314155 7mo ago
    Like I said, there wasn’t anything wrong with your comment. It just didn’t seem to directly address the parent comment. This does, thanks.
  - fc417fc802 7mo ago
    > Let me state what should be obvious: without AI (as in, the facial recognition systems involved in this case), this woman would not have sat in jail for 5 months, or indeed for any length of time at all. How do you arrive at that conclusion? Because it happened, and it wasn't an AI overseeing (the lack of) due process. The police identifying suspects is part of their job. So are arrest warrants and all the rest of it. I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here. All I see is a gaping systemic issue that could have happened regardless of AI if the wrong person got the wrong idea or had a personal vendetta. Suppose ICE busts down someone's door, drags them off, holds them in an internment camp for months, and then finally goes "oh, oops, guess you were a citizen all along sorry about that" and releases them. We don't blame the source of their faulty hit list. We blame the systemic practices and legal apparatus that permitted it all to happen in the first place. You might as well blame the SUV manufacturer because without vehicles the police wouldn't hav been able to drive over to make the arrest, right?
hinkley 7mo ago
It’s also cops Making the Numbers Go Up by marking down a case file as having progressed because someone is in custody. Which isn’t about justice.
- mothballed 7mo ago
  They don't seem to give a single iota of a fuck about that when a private regular person has their money stolen or their car totaled by hit and run driver. Finding some innocent person to arrest would indicate they are at least pretending to give a fuck, yet they seem to only be bothered to even keep up appearances when it is the bank being robbed.
  - chocoboaus3 7mo ago
    mate Capitalism 101
    - bloomingeek 7mo ago
      Sorry, I disagree. This is an example of the corruption inside the American legal system. The cops are at the level of us regulars, and their judgement and actions seem to have no supervision or accountability.
guelo 7mo ago
It's not just the shithead cops, it's the voters. All the "Blue Lives Matter", "thin blue line", "back the blue" propaganda works towards giving police infinite powers with zero accountability. This is what voters want and they've said so loudly over and over again.
cortesoft 7mo ago
Yes! This is about why mass surveillance and dragnets and the like are horrible. These all suffer from people not being able to understand the base rate fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy) Even if AI facial recognition gets really really good, and is 99.999% accurate, if you use it in this way you are going to arrest more innocent people than guilty people. If you find a suspect, who has a lot of evidence pointing to them being the criminal and you run a test that is 99.999% accurate and it tells you they are guilty, they are probably guilty. But if you take that same test and run it against the entire population of the country, it is going to find 3500 people that match with "99.999% certainty" That gives you a 0.02% of the person being guilty. People don't think like this, though, so they think the person must be guilty.
tgv 7mo ago
> cops [...] should not have access to these tools But what else can (identification via) face recognition be (safely) used for? Absolutely nothing. It's tech that's just made for surveillance.

throwaway314155 7mo ago

There’s nothing wrong with your comment per se, but it’s almost as if you didn’t even read the comment you’re responding to.

Retric 7mo ago
Seems like a direct response to me. >> How is this the fault of AI? > This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI You can’t separate the thing from how it will be used. It’s like arguing that cars on their own aren’t particularly dangerous, but the point of buying a car is to use it thus risking the general public.
- fc417fc802 7mo ago
  But you can in fact argue exactly that. If (arbitrary example) pedestrians are being killed due to poor road engineering practices it isn't reasonable to point at cars and say "see those are the root problem" when in fact it's due to a willful lack of sidewalks or marked crossings or whatever. Being adjacent to something bad doesn't equate to being the root cause.
  - Retric 7mo ago
    History shows the timeline of dependence here. Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths. So clearly it’s cars that are necessitating sidewalks, etc. Same deal here, if something “becomes a problem” because of the introduction of AI, it’s AI that is the root case of the resulting issues. Many people are tempted to argue that flawed humans can’t implement the perfect system that is Anarchy, Communism, Recycling programs, or whatever but treating systems as needing to operate on the real world is productive where complaining about humans isn’t.
    - fc417fc802 7mo ago
      Well I (thought it was obvious that) I was referring to roads constructed relatively recently. If cars necessitate sidewalks and the city chooses to cut costs by not putting those in that isn't the fault of automobile designers or manufacturers or dealers or private owners or whoever. To your example, technology changes and that necessitates infrastructure changing. That doesn't mean that fault for mishaps in the meantime can be attributed to the new technology. A user operating the new technology in an obviously unsafe manner is solely at fault for his own negligence.
      - Retric 7mo ago
        The safest street designs still result in automobile fatalities. You can at best mitigate the issue with better street designs but not address the underlying issue. Failing to acknowledge cars as the root cause may be comforting, but it blinds you to viable solutions. Indoor shopping malls for example solve many of the issues with cars by forcing people to move around on foot in a little island surrounded by a sea of very low density parking. They are’t perfect solutions, but they still saved a lot of lives and time. Saying people are misusing a new technology is just another way of saying that technology is flawed. This doesn’t mean you can’t utilize it, but pretending flaws don’t exist has no value.
    - tatersolid 7mo ago
      > Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths. Death by adverse horse encounter was very common before the 1920s. Not sure how many of those deaths can be blamed on poor quality road engineering. But putting a bunch of humans, carts, and excitable half-ton animals in the same crowded streets seems like poor engineering practice.
caconym_ 7mo ago
Let me help you out with this comprehension issue. The point of my comment is that I disagree with the apparent premise of the comment I replied to, which is that "AI" is some generic investigative tool that we can neatly snip out of the picture to blame this incident on human factors at the individual level ("the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility"). Said comment also implies that people are fixating on the AI aspect of this issue while ignoring the human factors, which IMO is a strawman. To me, the existence of AI in its current incarnations and the ways in which law enforcement will inevitably abuse it are, together, inseparably, the problem. AI (in the most general sense) opens up entire new dimensions for potential abuse. As a concrete example: > And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence. Let me state what should be obvious: without AI (as in, the facial recognition systems involved in this case), this woman would not have sat in jail for 5 months, or indeed for any length of time at all. So saying that it has "nothing to do with AI" is totally ridiculous.
- throwaway314155 7mo ago
  Like I said, there wasn’t anything wrong with your comment. It just didn’t seem to directly address the parent comment. This does, thanks.
- fc417fc802 7mo ago
  > Let me state what should be obvious: without AI (as in, the facial recognition systems involved in this case), this woman would not have sat in jail for 5 months, or indeed for any length of time at all. How do you arrive at that conclusion? Because it happened, and it wasn't an AI overseeing (the lack of) due process. The police identifying suspects is part of their job. So are arrest warrants and all the rest of it. I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here. All I see is a gaping systemic issue that could have happened regardless of AI if the wrong person got the wrong idea or had a personal vendetta. Suppose ICE busts down someone's door, drags them off, holds them in an internment camp for months, and then finally goes "oh, oops, guess you were a citizen all along sorry about that" and releases them. We don't blame the source of their faulty hit list. We blame the systemic practices and legal apparatus that permitted it all to happen in the first place. You might as well blame the SUV manufacturer because without vehicles the police wouldn't hav been able to drive over to make the arrest, right?

hinkley 7mo ago

It’s also cops Making the Numbers Go Up by marking down a case file as having progressed because someone is in custody. Which isn’t about justice.

mothballed 7mo ago
They don't seem to give a single iota of a fuck about that when a private regular person has their money stolen or their car totaled by hit and run driver. Finding some innocent person to arrest would indicate they are at least pretending to give a fuck, yet they seem to only be bothered to even keep up appearances when it is the bank being robbed.
- chocoboaus3 7mo ago
  mate Capitalism 101
  - bloomingeek 7mo ago
    Sorry, I disagree. This is an example of the corruption inside the American legal system. The cops are at the level of us regulars, and their judgement and actions seem to have no supervision or accountability.

guelo 7mo ago

It's not just the shithead cops, it's the voters. All the "Blue Lives Matter", "thin blue line", "back the blue" propaganda works towards giving police infinite powers with zero accountability. This is what voters want and they've said so loudly over and over again.

cortesoft 7mo ago

Yes! This is about why mass surveillance and dragnets and the like are horrible. These all suffer from people not being able to understand the base rate fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy) Even if AI facial recognition gets really really good, and is 99.999% accurate, if you use it in this way you are going to arrest more innocent people than guilty people. If you find a suspect, who has a lot of evidence pointing to them being the criminal and you run a test that is 99.999% accurate and it tells you they are guilty, they are probably guilty. But if you take that same test and run it against the entire population of the country, it is going to find 3500 people that match with "99.999% certainty" That gives you a 0.02% of the person being guilty. People don't think like this, though, so they think the person must be guilty.

tgv 7mo ago

> cops [...] should not have access to these tools But what else can (identification via) face recognition be (safely) used for? Absolutely nothing. It's tech that's just made for surveillance.