[0] https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538
The war on terror really drove people crazy...
The "answers" the US came up with rather exacerbated the problem. Most also don't work with homegrown terrorism at all.
Using AI to profile such potential endemic perpetrators is ironically just another instance of trying to fit the problem to the tool.
Now you mention it, despite the two respective national stereotypes, the only airports where I can remember seeing machine guns on the security team were one of the London airports.
If I saw machine guns in SFO or JFK, I was too tired from the flight to remember.
The dispatch time for armed police has gone up because they are doing a regular police job, while armed, rather than waiting for the call up.
Don't remember whether it was Incheon or Gimpo.
What I see now is occasional police officers with their standard sidearms, but rarely see anyone more armed than that.
Whereas in the US, every cop is armed but there's more checks on the more strict stuff.
Your airport police want to be armed but there's no need for them to be heavily armed. So in the UK they all are, because it's the same people. In the US the heavily armed folk are deployed elsewhere (SWATing someone's Twitch stream if the media tells me the truth...)
Have you been at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in France? The security people there look like paratroopers[^1]. It's terrifying, and it's a reason I avoid that particular airport every time I fly. It sends the message "Paris is an unsafe place to be, we are very paranoid, blame the others, don't come here." The machine guns have no business among civilians, being with robots or people, period.
>> That is a job which is 99.99% about understanding human intentions in confusing and ambiguous situations, and where making a mistake will literally kill people.
Yes, if you ever are allowed to pull the trigger. And in that case, I wouldn't trust machine nor person; I have been profiled on the basis of my physical appearance more times that I can count.
But in some cases, like the airport above, the goal and effect is to simply terrify civilians. You can't deny that a machine would do a better job at that[^2].
[^1]: Just search Google images for "Security at Charles de Gaulle airport." I've been there, and that's exactly how they look.
[^2]: Here, have a Dalek with a white paint job: https://www.knightscope.com/ .
In europe there's 1-2 orders of less police brutality and issues overall, but the tradeoff is you randomly have military police walking around with rifles.
They're quite friendly actually, I've ended up getting directions from them once or twice when trying to catch a connection.
Also the FAMAS is a beautiful piece of French Engineering
What does suck about CDG is how horrifically unorganized they are. Like "print your boarding pass, but the printer was out of ink, so the barcode didn't generate, and they just *wave you through* the check with an invalid boarding pass because it happens all the time
that is what scares me, not European cops with guns
I doubt any relation of these two facts, or cannot see it.
Protest is part of French tradition
You're a braver person than I. I cannot imagine a circumstance where I'd be willing to even approach officers armed with machine guns, let alone ask them for anything. I'd just be itching to get out of that place ASAP.
Friendly-fire military incidents are common; while it's associated with inexperienced troops, the reality is that experienced and "elite" troops still have many friendly-fire incidents. And then there are all the civilians that are killed as collateral damage.
Of those that do, firearms officers - why would they carry a handgun?
And you are right - there is of course an element of security theatre!
Trains and planes already operate completely autonomously 99.9% of the time. Yet we still have pilots and train engineers there to handle the edge cases because having one or two people to keep an eye on a million dollar machine that can kill hundreds of people and cause billions in property damages if handled incorrectly works out to be a pretty good deal.
This is the main problem with self driving cars. They can kill people.
To be honest, if we're talking about most minimum wage jobs being performed better by AI (I would imagine being armed security, at least in the UK is a lot more than min wage, because of the responsibility and trust of course), I'd worry less about their AI machine gun at airports vs the existential questions around there being a working class (in the original sense).