AI cameras will spot motorway litter louts and enhance issuing of fines | Hacker News Reader

AI cameras will spot motorway litter louts and enhance issuing of fines

telegraph.co.uk

16 pointsperihelions12 comments

What incentive does the person reviewing the footage have to admit to a false positive (including scenarios where it's by accident)? That's a very real concern given that it's been contracted out to a private firm. What's it to them that your toddler chucked a PET bottle out the window or some plastic was blown loose? I hate littering as much as the next person but this feels petty and mean.

> What incentive does the person reviewing the footage have to admit to a false positive

I'd expect it to run like current traffic cameras (at least, the ones in my locality). Fully automatic, you get a ticket in the mail, nobody ever reviews it for accuracy, unless you contest it. Then they usually drop it, though it could end up in traffic court for a judge to look at. Also, our automated ticketing systems generally only use fines as punishment, there's some kind of state law that says you cannot be personally assigned a moving violation unless you were stopped by an actual cop in real time.

It's your responsibility to ensure that you and your passengers aren't letting trash out of the vehicle.

There is no exception in the littering laws for: "my car is so messy I didn't notice trash getting sucked out the window I opened."

A wasp made its way into my car on the highway -- I opened the window to let it out, but the napkins in my cup holder made a break for it, as well.

I already find driving in the UK trying because of all the cameras. This big brother stuff might seem like a good idea on the surface but I'm not so sure automated enforcement cameras are a good thing for humanity.

unpopular opinion (which I hold, so I wish it were more popular): anything that makes driving awful is good because the worse it is to drive the more pressure there is for people to move to any other form of transportation, and everything else is better for the world (except maybe flying, depending on the details)

I think your opinion is more and more popular. Personally I drive for a hobby, I don't have a commute or anything. Is my few thousand miles of year hobby driving really the issue?

There's no single thing you can point to as "the issue" (unless you just point to fossil fuels in general, I guess). Driving a couple of thousand miles per year as a hobby is pretty bad, that's quite a lot of "unnecessary" co2 emissions. Will it cause mass starvation and make environments uninhabitable? No, not by itself, but it'll contribute more than most hobbies. I believe it's in the same ballpark as a round-trip flight across the Atlantic, for reference.

I would be okay with automated traffic law enforcement if police officers were forbidden from making traffic stops for the sort of violations that the cameras issue fines for.

It would turn the most common motoring offenses into predictable fines, rather than gambles where you can get away with it most of the time, but you might get arrested or shot if somebody is having a bad day.

It could also encourage voters to demand that speed limits and road construction reflect the real traffic conditions, ideally reducing the vast stretches of 40mph highways where you'll get tailgated by semi trucks if you're doing less than 70mph.

On the downside, it would make license plate scanning a permanent fixture of most roads, but that's already true in many places.

Plate scanning is happening everywhere all the time, so yeah it won't help that.

This is all big brother stuff, society going into surveillance mode. Goodbye any kind of real freedom of the road.

Good ol tech like AI mosquito laser zapping. Marketed for offlabel uses too.

Something I've been kicking around in the back of my head since GPT-4 was released: how long before enough of the population demands AI-assisted law enforcement? Watching cameras or flying drones looking for physical crime, skulking around in bank mainframes looking for laundering, issuing unexplained wealth orders, etc.

If that does take off, and proves at all successful, how long after that will enough people demand AI-assisted government in order to reduce corruption? It isn't hard to envision a diminishing role for humans to participate in that sort of regime, until the national leader figurehead is the only manned position remaining.

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