UK police arrest man via automatic face-recognition tech
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
However as with all human things, it is better and less trouble to be able to take shortcuts rather than have to stick to the rules 100%. For example people crossing the road in the middle of the night with not a car in sight. People reversing down the road a little bit to turn or get a parking spot. Being able to cross the centre green patch on a high way at night because there won't be a u-turn available for many kms. The issues with identical twins and not being able to get IDs (basically the inability to override a system).
These sort of issues help remove stress and simplify things in our daily lives, and help make the world function.
In the case of facial recognition there was examples of twins being rejected for IDs because the system thought it was the same person applying under different names.
I'd also be dubious as how well it can identify people based on grainy and low resolution camera footage.
"Cameras are everywhere and record every crime. Somewhere in the city a man commits a murder. Computers register the crime. Later that same man steps into a self-driving car. The man explains to the car that he wants to travel to the other side of the city. The car doors lock and the vehicle takes off. But the car is not going to where he thinks. Slowly the man realizes that he is being taken directly to the nearest police precinct for booking. Desperately the man tries to exit the car but the doors are locked. He lays down in the seat and frantically kicks at the windshield but there is no time. The car has been given emergency priority and begins traveling over 90 mph. The precious seconds tick by...
Back at the precinct the cop takes another bit of his doughnut and reminisces about the time when policing was not just a desk job."
That's enough of the crystal ball for today.
Some AI is interpreting all camera around the country in real-time. A single government employee is adjusting parameters according to what the current elected officials deem important. There is, however, extra CPU time dedicated to cameras monitoring political opponents.
After all, we commit crimes regularly, unknowingly. There are so many laws that not only are there lifelong jobs in the law business, but there are several different types of them. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438...
Damn, damn, damn...
It loosely follows this premise of multiple AGIs going head-to-head against each other as one is used for "good" and the other for "evil" by their respective creators.
I think it's a great show. Very interesting.
>>>> A single government employee is adjusting parameters according to what the current elected officials deem important.
Is exactly my job... But seems totally fine. After all, politics are here to say what to do (provided it's not going too far)
eg. in australia, they launched the derided 'robo-debt' system that sent people notices about potential benefit fraud charges, and the harassment of people caused senate investigations in several states. turns out the new system is as correct/wrong as the manual process (20% error rate), but it's now able to process several order magnitude more cases, so effectively floods downstream workflows (claims, complaints, courts) that were not ready for such an increase in demand.
The most frustrating thing was trying to get anyone to acknowledge the possibility of the error in the first place. Even some years ago when this happened, there was so much blind trust in the almighty database that it was basically dumb luck that I eventually managed to find someone willing to take a deeper look without just hanging up the phone or otherwise cutting me off.
The biggest underlying problem, apart from the original error that caused the whole situation, seemed to be that despite my complaints there was no sort of formal case opened to deal with the problem, nor any clear set of records kept, nor any specific individual assigned to resolve the matter. The whole system simply didn't acknowledge the possibility of a mistake or provide any process for correcting it.
At least in my case the problem was obvious to me. With modern systems making automated decisions about anything from mortgage applications to who goes on a secret no-fly list, there seems to be a very real danger of innocent people suffering very serious problems as a result of these errors but having no way to even identify the cause of the problem to start trying to get it fixed.
There's a broad region in between those two poles, where some cases are merely somewhat awful and not completely horrible, and other cases where I guess it's kind of okay, but not that great. The rest of the time, it's an apathetic, civil neither.
Mass surveillance provides unparalleled power to those who control it. It's unprecedented in all of human history. I don't believe humanity knows how to safely handle such power at this point.
One of the most fundamental concerns is the fact that, once collected, the data is vulnerable to being misappropriated or weaponized for the entirety of its existence, possibly for many decades or longer. By that point, laws may have changed significantly and the entire political climate could be drastically different.
Imagine being automatically put on a special list and thus denied certain basic priveleges due to "questionable" posts you made in an online forum 15 years ago. We can imagine a wide variety of vague and controversial definitions of "questionable content" for this thought experiment.
Courts are of course complicated, and I imagine that police would abuse such a network to arrest people without means to fight back... but at the end of the day I can at least hope to be in front of a judge. And it's not like the courts are the ones doing the dystopian investigating.
Hopefully at this point in the future humans will be augmented and have tools to circumvent this sort of thing. Confuse the AIs, jam the cameras, whatever.
In other words, systems set up against people doing bad things are also perfect for framing people inconvenient to the operators.
If anything, we need to slow down the justice system. Remove plea deals. For every charge to go before a jury. Force the DA to focus only on the bad crimes and let anyone with minor crimes off with no charges.
In 2030 when the AI watching you on all the security cams decide your behaviour pattern skew two standard deviations toward terroristlike, your road accident rates go up.
The AI-driven car insurance companies are the first to catch on. When your car premiums shoot skyhigh for no reason, time to stop doing whatever you were doing.
2) 2030. Some researchers in a big prestigious university decides to do a study on SDC accident rates. They find that cars from a particular major maker have a tendency to hit women and black people more often. Results are published in a major journal, media has a field day.
The company apologizes profusely and promises to fix its racist mysogynist ways. Their software-engs are left scraching their heads because they can't find the bug. Everything seems to be working... except accidents still skew towards politically sensitive demographics.
In desperation the company decides to very slightly decrease the threshold for hitting non-black non-women, evening the numbers. This patch is combined with a major service release which improves accident rates across the board, so that the overall accident rate stays the same.
Six months later the journal publishes a very small correction for the original paper that fixes a few bugs in its statistics. The correction is behind a paywall. Nobody reads it.
I vaguely remember it being a girl being arrested by an automated car and her having to hack her way out, maybe while going over a bridge. Damn my shoddy memory!
Identification of humans, dogs, car plates will be in real time plus the identities will be logged for 5 years.
The CCTVs will record in PetaHD, enough for fingerprint identification from distance of 120 meters.
PetaHD © records use two cameras (for 3D) with auto zooming for moving objects.
All cars will have black boxes with video and sound recording. Illegal turns will be autofined (if you were able to turn illegally, because most of the time your car won't allow you).
I also expect the fines to get lower once everybody gets a couple of fines per day on average.
Suspicion will be auto-assigned to people who are detected to have phones (via video analyzed pocket bulge or historic behavior) but which are not emitting signals due for example to 'flight mode', or those who lend NFC identities, which may become illegal or against terms of service.
I'm convinced that this will be a "bonus feature" if/when Google/Facebook/SpaceX get their balloons/drones/satellites off the ground. I don't want to live in that future.
As spooky as automatic facial recognition is for finding and arresting criminals, it's like they're parodying themselves with this statement. You couldn't sound more evil if you tried.
There are also several legitimate use cases, e.g. Amber alerts, Public right to record, etc. The society can delay dealing with technology for only so long. Over the next decade we will see huge adoption of Autonomous cars, robots, cheap drones essentially "Mainstreaming" of surveillance technology. At this point the legal system would have to decide a sane framework to resolve the challenges posed by technology. However given the paralysis in Washington, and inability to deal with even the most basic questions of algorithms and law (No-fly lists being the prime example) I am not too hopeful.
[1] https://github.com/search?q=topic%3Aface-recognition&type=Re...
Used by corporations it will be frustrating and take privacy intrusions to the next level. In the end though, democracies will survive fine.
The real issue is tyrannical regimes getting their hands on facial recognition, it's a terrifying prospect and likely to be used with great effect.
We are a long way from 'you have twenty seconds to comply' policing.
Just look at the comments made by serving UK police officers in light of the recent high-profile attacks, particularly about the relative lack of intelligence now that there are so few officers assigned to basic community policing and everything has become about reaction rather than relationships.
Compare and contrast those views with the recent comments by Theresa May about how the problem wasn't really caused by a sharp reduction in the number of police officers but instead must be fixed by regulating everything and throwing human rights laws out the window if they happen to be inconvenient.
But as you mention, police, despite all accusations to the contrary, are not stupid. They know what policing is and it is about communities and people rather than enforcing the edicts of a given political party. It is strange how police are always politically controlled, maybe in some do-gooding place like Norway they are allowed to be professional without interference.
Along with 'twenty seconds to comply...' there is this instant execution by police that happens. Nobody is shedding a tear for the three terrorists shot 8 minutes into their killing spree, however, would the police have been able to apprehend them if they only had their batons?!? This was the situation in the UK until recently, if you 'went postal' in some regional town it would take a while before officers with guns would arrive. You would have hours to escape bullets. But now? 8 minutes.
I also imagine a world where no terrorist gets tried in court. Death awaits them before they get that far and the quaint notion of justice before a jury goes by the by.
Bear in mind this was in Central London during a period of high alert.
I think those units have been around in London for decades at this point. Probably ever since the ring of steel was installed as a response to the IRA bombing campaigns of the 70s/80s.
Similarly the area of Westminster around Parliament and the Palace will be completely covered 24/7, extending out towards the nearby embassies and Whitehall civil service buildings.
Nope, far from it. Norway might be better than most places though.
When seconds count, police are minutes away.
Edit: Assuming real world conditions where people don't pose for you.