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Comment by dwaltrip | Hacker News Reader

Great comment. I think this is an underappreciated trend. Technology is enabling actions that were previously unfathomable, due to limited resources and circumstantial practicalities.

Modern systems are much more powerful (in certain ways), enabling potential injustices that no one ever considered possible, and thus of course made no effort to protect against. We are only beginning to consider all of the ramifications of these new systems, what new abuses are available, what the impacts could may be, and how to properly account for new abuses.

We have to work hard to make sure our systems don't enable large-scale automated injustice.

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I just got a $136 ticket from a stoplight camera for failing to Completely Stop at an intersection where there were no other cars for at least 1 mile in any direction, and made a right turn on red at about 3mph. It is serviced by a company 6 states away. Automated injustice is very alive today.

I am waiting for these devices to be declared unconstitutional. Many states already have.

So you ran a red light? Everyone has a justification for their own behavior

That's not quite the same as running a red light. In many places in the US, it is legal to make a right turn when the traffic light is right, provided that you slow down to a complete stop first. In practice, if there aren't any cars or pedestrians around, many people just slow down to ~3mph and keep going (a "rolling" stop, which is not quite legal).

Why is getting a ticket for a rolling stop injustice?

The serious answer to this is a sort of echo of the root comment in this thread. Our legal system incorporates the understanding that laws can only be partially enforced. Imagine if robots in the sky automatically cited you for every single infraction. How often do you cross the street outside of a crosswalk? Exceed the speed limit by 1mph? Fail to signal a turn? Drive a block or two without fastening your seatbelt?

Yeah, rolling through a stop at 3mph in the middle of nowhere probably isn't great, but it's not what folks hand in mind when they created the penalties for running red lights. An officer probably wouldn't have bothered to make the stop. But in a world where law enforcement is automated, 99.9% of citations will be these marginal cases.

An officer probably wouldn't have bothered to make the stop

If I had a dollar for every DUI story I've heard that involved getting pulled over "a block from home" after rolling through a stop sign..

I don't necessarily disagree with your point but I've seen and been on the receiving end of what could only described as "bored cop"

> If I had a dollar for every DUI story I've heard that involved getting pulled over "a block from home" after rolling through a stop sign..

If a cop suspects DUI, I want that driver pulled over even if they're entering their own driveway. "But I wasn't going to put any more people's lives in mortal danger by my recklessness tonight" is not a good argument. And keeping people from recklessly endangering others, whether by penalties that make them think twice or by taking their license, is one of the most basic reasons we have police at all.

You wont find a word of dissent from me on any of what you're saying here.

Doesn't the root comment come to the opposite conclusion, though? From its last paragraph:

> Perhaps the real solution is to change the laws so that no one can legally take advantage of these loopholes, no matter how much money or resources they have.

i.e. if a law was created with the supposition that in practice it would only apply to a certain subset of cases to which it could in theory, then change the law so that it is universally applicable.

That being said, your "robots in the sky" scenario strikes me as a perfectly plausible example of a techno-dystopia we could create for ourselves far enough down that path.

Because it disregards common sense in favor of mindlessly adhering to the law simply for the sake of doing so, without any thought about context or why the law exists in the first place.

Assuming the OP is correct, and he could actually see there were no cars, pedestrians, or cyclists nearby.

This[1] was on the front page of hacker news the other day.

[1] https://newsmaven.io/pinacnews/courtroom-files/ny-man-arrest...

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