Chinese driver gets ticket for scratching his face
bbc.com
bbc.com
I'll take the opposite view.
Distracted driving causes 1.6 million traffic accidents a year in the US alone, causing more than 3,000 deaths [0].
I don't have statistics for China, but 4x the population indicates maybe 6.4 million accidents and 12,000 deaths a year.
No system is completely error free. Even posting a cop on every corner to cite distracted drivers will make mistakes.
So given the carnage, agony and grief that could be prevented, how many false positives are acceptable?
I'm stunned to see someone arguing that ticketing someone for scratching their face is acceptable. Just because a machine lets attempt it at scale doesn't make it any more acceptable.
A cop pulled her over for illegal use of the carpool lane. It's a completely understandable error since the car appeared from the outside to have only one occupant.
The point is that errors happen with all methods of enforcement. But when we talk about automated systems, somehow the standard is set much higher, so even one driver falsely accused is too much.
Since the tradeoff to minimizing false positives is greater injury and death, it matters that we get it right.
If this system were backed by some sort of flag-and-review system, then this man wouldn't have received a ticket for scratching his face.
So you can have a system which flags cases for human review and that's fine, but it's insanity to have fully automated decision making.
This is so stupid because none of those techniques are reliable enough to be put in such kind of scenarios.
Not mention that software developers work for gov or bank in China are usually worse than developers in tech companies.
It's true.
But in recent years, leading tech corporations like Alibaba are becoming the major backers for the government's plan on big data and smart city. You are sure the Chinese governments won't start outsourcing its mass surveillance system to the private sector?