Huntington Park’s “RoboCop” stores pedestrians’ faces, scans license plates | Hacker News Reader

Huntington Park’s “RoboCop” stores pedestrians’ faces, scans license plates

muckrock.com

125 pointsdanso88 comments

> There’s nothing in the documentation to indicate what criteria the the HPPD would use, or is currently using, to add a face, license plate, or smartphones to a “blacklist,”

Regulation can't come soon enough for this industry.

About 20 years ago one of the youngest cops ever to be promoted to detective in the City of Chicago told me this after a long night of drinking...

"If I see a car with more than two black people, I just followed it. Sooner or later they'll make a mistake and I can pull them over. Very often one of them will have an outstanding warrant.". When my face turned to horror he asked me the jaw-dropping question "you are Italian, right ?"

Honestly, if ML is statistically driven, how long before it determines that African Americans and Latinos are over represented in the criminal database and should have a higher blacklist score as a rule and the whole cycle repeats. Meanwhile innocent looking white kids can keep selling meth in the park.

This is sinister in a subtle way: profiling in this capacity is not only wrong, it is self-perpetuating. If police are trained to do this, then more African Americans are arrested even without warrants, and then end up in the system / in legal trouble, which means more are likely to have warrants. In turn, this means that future police trained to do this are likely to find success doing it by virtue of past police doing it.

That's... totally fucked.

Thing is, you don't even need overly racist whoever for this to happen, a completely "neutral" neural net would happy take the same stroll down that particular primrose path without tightly controlling for self-reinforcing effects like this.

Evolutionary systems are very good at perverting any and all definable fitness functions - it's a red queen's race. At best, if you want systems to behave you either have to supervise them all the time or have a system which can which itself must be supervised less often. While we want human morals and ethics to be a part of our systems, humans will forever need to remain in the loop.

It’s fascinating to see that we’re _already_ at a point where the AI alignment problem («what morality do we want our automated systems to have») is becoming a practical reality, long before AGI or self-improving AI appears to be imminent.

I think this is a clear, contempirary demonstration that philosophizing around the use of AI (even today) has practical benefits beyond the practice of philosophy as an inherently worthwhile species-wide intellectual pursuit.

> AI alignment problem

This is a problem as old as civilization.

Bureaucratic procedure (of governments, religious organizations, corporations, armies, NGOs, ...) always leads to bad outcomes in edge cases if individual administrators are not given enough autonomy to make exceptions and enough oversight/accountability to prevent abuse.

I think it’s also fascinating how this is an age-old philosophical problem, as in the stories of the malicious genie. People have known for a long time that the rigid, precise specification of morality or desirability isn’t easy.

Is it so hard to remove gender race nationality and so on from automated profiling?

There are tons of stats that serve as effective proxies for such things: What schools did you go to, what is your name, who are your friends, etc.

So yes, it is EXTREMELY hard.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio...

Thats exactly what amazon tried to do here, but because the AI based its decisions on amazon's previous hires (that is, almost no women) and blinded the AI to gender, it instead proxied women for one of a dozen other things such as school, courses taken, etc.

That’s the problem with ML and statistics. With the wrong input they quickly turn into something that constantly reinforces the status quo. It’s a dangerous path if not handled carefully.

You can see this even in advertising. All the ads I am being shown are about stuff I have bought or was interested in. They can’t give me new ideas or handle when my tastes have changed.

Yep, a related question you might ask is: Would machine learning end slavery, or perpetuate and strengthen it, assuming it existed today as an accepted mass societal institution.

Consider it would likely be wealthy slaveholders that would aggressively deploy it first, being as they hold most of the capital, and have the most to gain from it.

I think people should consider the answer to that question very seriously.

From your story it seems like human guards are profiling African Americans and Latinos now. At least with a bot you'd be able to explicitly prevent them from doing so. Probably a lot harder to prevent a human from using biases

Machine learning - using statistical associations between features in a large population to make predictions about individuals - is profiling. There is no such thing as removing profiling from machine learning. The profiling is the only thing there.

> At least with a bot you'd be able to explicitly prevent them from doing so.

Not really. They're really good at finding a proxy for the banned characteristic.

This is the same model as the "suicidal" robot from DC a couple of years back.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/suicidal-r...

Knightscope robots also assault children apparently without repercussions. https://abc7news.com/news/parents-upset-after-stanford-mall-...

I wonder whether a cardboard box is a good first line of defense against these?

I wonder what the problem was. The article states that the robot first ran over the child. Are the sensors scanning only too high? How does it avoid low obstacles then?

At the peril of sounding heartless I’d say that it is quite probable that the kid ran into the robot because they were not watching where they were going, it has happened to me several times that a kid ran into me from the back.

Thought this security robot was the same.

I'm waiting for someone stick a speaker to one that just repeats "EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINAAAATE!" line as this robot bumbles around whatever corporate campus it's deployed on.

Right idea, but it should be playing the dialog from the classic arcade game Berzerk [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxCTd0Y9wYo

Hopefully they remember to leave their phone at home or blocking their face won't be sufficient to protect their identity.

It might get you banned from that particular retirement community but it's hard to imagine being prosecuted for hilariously taping a speaker to what's basically a really buff roomba

I'm not even sure what they would charge you with. Disturbing the peace?

There's one of those Knighscope K5 units at The Beacon, in San Francisco, between 4th, 5th, King, and Townsend. It's very slow moving in its normal mode. You can walk up to it. It's probably there to keep homeless people from camping in their plaza.

Or maybe to discourage the undesirable element of drunk white guys from the ballpark.[1]

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Knuckleheads-run-amok-a...

Most cop cars these days have scanners on the rear trunk that will scan license plates as it drives by.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/72131699@N00/3803321792

Note this photo was taken in 2009. This is not a new concept.

Some towns in LA mounted those on their traffic lights around the edge of town. Yep.

8k/month to do a $20/hr at most job. Just hire another meter maid, they can actually restrain someone or conduct first aid.

Classic small town logic, all about the shiny new toys.

How do you blacklist someone from a city?

I know there is probably a good reason they made it look like a Cylon, some down-forward facing sensor, but its still really funny to me.

I was thinking it looks more like a Dalek...

Its like if a Cylon and a Dalek had a baby.

Adorable.

With the colouration of Marvin the Paranoid Android.

Harder and hard to write any sort of fiction where the protagonist does anything slightly illegal, not to mention extremely illegal, and is not immediately apprehended.

Very few people violating the law are immediately apprehended for it. It would be very hard to write realistic contemporary fiction where that happened consistently.

I don't see this thing surviving for too long. Someone's going to vandalize it or steal it, even with its array of sensors.

Just put a bag or sack over the top of it. All visual, radar, laser and ultrasound sensors will become pretty useless when covered, but there won't be any physical damage done to police property.

so they'll make them harder to destroy...or put them 30 feet up in the air. Sadly, we're screwed. This is staying

I give it 3 months before someone with a mask on shows up and shoots it 8 times in the "head". Same result with a drone. That's why the ones in the movie robocop worked, because it had guns, and a mind of its own (usually a brain from a convict too). This is more like a roomba with a camera.

I don't think anyone will steal it for fear of GPS tracking.

And then get sued based on their phone id being sent back to homebase: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6239554-13-Staff-Rep...

I don't expect it will be destroyed by a cunning criminal with an agenda. It's just going to get beaten up by some kids goofing around, or some drunk dude walking home from the pub, or someone who just wants to smash things. They'll quite possibly get caught.

Pretty much. It’d be like walking into police station and attempting a crime. By the time they do something everything about them is known. It’s self defeating.

So... don't bring a phone?

Debatable if the concept is staying. But Knightscope is almost certainly not going to be around for long. Take a look at their financials and you’ll see they’re very much lacking both a revenue stream and a reliable fundraising strategy.

Paintball marker comes to mind..

In Huntington Park, it's probably already gone!

The referenced twitter link shows a news broadcast of them describing it. He starts to laugh near the end of what he was saying - almost like he was going to say, this can't end well. And then she blurts out - I Kinda Like It - cutting him off.

haha

I don’t know why (maybe it’s the shape or something...) but this thing elicits a strong desire within me to run it over with my pickup. Then incinerate the remaining pieces with a boring company flame thrower.

I will pop on a Hong Kong style facemask and push this thing down a staircase.

It’ll probably get stolen or vandalized in that area. Source, I live nearby.

No need to even vandalize the thing. Just shove it over.

It weighs around 400lbs. Pushing it over is not something most would be capable of. Were they successful, It has omni-directional vision, and undoubtedly that information is sent to the cloud almost immediately, so this seems like a bad strategy.

Well, the company is nearly bankrupt and has lost a lot of people lately so odds are you might get away with it.

Give me a lever, a place to stand, and a mask.

You can push over a cow. It all depends on where the center of mass is.

And you just wear a mask if you don't want to be caught.

Oh that's easily defeated. A motorized spy platform falling over is no big tragedy.

Is this like the one that drowned a few years back? https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/7/17/15986042/dc-security...

Soon enough, It will also store pedestrians' feces.

In San Francisco a shit sucking robot would be transformative.

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