And that's why we can't have nice things, which is the common thread between telemetry in win10, trigger warnings in colleges and censorship on social media.
I got this idea when everyone responded to the revelations about the NSA spying on everyone in an extremely specific way 100% of the time. Everyone focused on human analysts reading the text or listening to the audio of conversations. Read literally any article you find where the NSA, Obama, others in the government, absolutely anyone talks about the things the NSA has done and how they practices might be altered. In every single case, they talk solely about human analysts reading things directly. They never once talk about automated systems analyzing communications and inferring behavior profiles, using those inferred profiles to make decisions or target investigations, nothing like that. And that's where essentially all of the actual danger lies as far as I'm concerned.
So perhaps if a website popped up rating each Congressperson on how likely it is they are cheating on their spouse determined by a neural net (or hell even a Bayesian filter, it doesn't actually need to be accurate at all), maybe we could actually get someone to talk about the issue. Because as it is, no one ever has or is willing to as far as I have seen. I don't know if it's because the politicians aren't aware of what such systems can do, or if they've been tricked into thinking they can actually be effective (they can't) so they intentionally try to misdirect people to concentrating on "they'll stop listening in on your phone calls" or what. The only reason I haven't built the site is that I'm unsure if there would be legal implications and if I'd end up charged with slander or something.
As far as I can tell, the NSA don't have a term to properly describe gathering and analysis of data which isn't presented to a human for analysis.
[1]: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf (Page 15, 2.2.1)
So that's why the NSA parses their words very carefully, and likely Obama as well... but what about their critics in Congress?
If there's no name for it, you can't accidentally name it.
Mind you, I was talking about neural suggesting people for clinical diagnosis, not about neural nets diagnosing people. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not even that much interested in the idea (which strikes me as a bit Orwellian), but in the cold feet it would give a lot of people with skeletons in the closet. They don't know that it's not fool proof, they just know they don't want to be found out.
> to suggest likely canditates
> for sociopathy
If people mind stuff like baby killers, Stalin and other things, they do mind sociopaths, whether they know what the word implies or not.
These sort of predictions "work", for certain values of work...
The problem with this is that the effect is not easy to measure. If you bring down the crime rate by policing than this can directly be associated with the cost spent. If you improve a school and the crime rate goes down the effect is much harder to measure, and cost/benefit will be in different organizations within the government.
It leads to profiling and arrest of teens DRESSED in a certain way or hanging out at a certain location, etc.
There is also a major ethical problem with harrassing people for things they didn't actually DO.
Look, unless you've had run-ins with the business side of law-enforcement you may believe the myth that police are there to "protect and serve"
Law-enforcement has a single task to catch people breaking laws (any kind, the easier and lower risk to catch them, the better) and process them (arrest, run them in the system, write up the particular offenses, etc.)
If anything, the moral/ethical culture in policing in most cities only ENCOURAGES this kind of snap-judgement thinking as well. We need LESS of that and not more.
(of course, if you are Dubai, you consider it a grave public danger if someone is smoking a joint somewhere or engaging in consensual acts between 2 adults who happen to be of the same sex, etc...)
The CULTURE in law-enforcement is already one of impunity, and globally there is a reason that in perhaps 90% of the planets nations there is some derogatory remark for police rooted in their "us vs them thin blue line" nonsense.
Look at America, and it's rash of police killings. Over 1500 last year. There needs to be fundamental reform of most policing in the 21st century before we give them more tools to act like bullies with...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
And the vast majority of those were clearly justified (suspect being armed and posing an obvious threat threat.)
Police are far from perfect but they also have to deal with people on a daily basis who are quite literally the dregs of society: where "F--- you pig!" is as common as "Thank you Officer."
As far as inbuilt racial bias -- have you spent time on the streets? You tell me what the percentages are for a crime being committed among different racial and ethnic groups. If you're in Chicago you are far more likely to be shot by a male of a specific racial group than by any other. That's just a fact. Nothing racist about it.
White collar crime, like fraud and insider trading, sees as much automated detection software as street crime does. But even if it did not, let's assume we focus our attention on street crime, then your reasoning is a fallacy of relative privation: Y is a worse problem than X, so attempting to solve X is bad/unimportant/makes solving Y less likely.
> And the vast majority of
> those were clearly justified
Of course, the number of unjustified deaths will likely be disproportionately higher simply because all US police have the ability to react to a situation with lethal force. Sadly, as long as guns are as abundant as they are in the US, you'll never reduce that to the same level as the UK.
That used to be true, with a few exceptions (e.g. airports). It's not the case today and increasingly firearms officers are armed on patrol routinely.
Why is harder to answer. As a trend I don't think it's been directly related to terrorism. There have been no calls from the public for it and some typically quiet British grumbling at it.
The cynic in me imagines politics has played a part. Getting hold of extra budget for policing is probably difficult at the moment but guns are probably an exciting enough reason to release funds.
That said, they very much are using the latest incident in Berlin to push armed officers out onto the streets.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2440342/eleven-police-forces-t...