AI cameras catch 297 drivers in three days in Cornwall
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
― C. S. Lewis
[My own thoughts, I feel are less effective and eloquent than Lewis'. I often feel that the expectations and rules of society don't make a lot of sense. Except for the extremely obvious, which frequently don't have explicitly stated expectations or rules due to being so obvious. My conclusion is that nobody else really gets it either; it's just that everyone else adjusts to this better than me. As we find ways to encode these nonsense rules into silicon and then aim it at everyone all the time, the end result will not be good for anyone.]
I understand that point of view but I do think it can be tyrannical to not let people live their lives even if they are making decisions that are bad for their physical health. In the US, obesity is a far greater burden on our health care system than people not wearing seatbelts. I still can't get behind fining people for overeating or something like that.
Distracted driving is a risk to other people, obesity is not.
Additionally, this article is about the UK where healthcare is paid through taxes. Are you suggesting the overweight pay higher taxes?
A soft drinks industry levy, for example?
Sure.
The UK uses a nationalized essentially communist form of healthcare provisioning and then gives it away for free to anyone who turns up, legally or otherwise, so they should expect constant shortages. Nobody else uses that system for a reason. However the UK is unwilling to change, so it's not something you can generalize from. There are other places in the world where healthcare systems do scale up just fine and supply keeps up, because they provision differently.
BTW the UK government does impose all sorts of sin taxes on people already, and provides benefits based on health assessments, so tying tax levels to the outcome of similar health assessments isn't a big leap. But yes in reality it'll be countries with more flexible insurance systems that can calibrate things that way.
You wouldn't, and I wouldn't, but someone else might.
This is the problem: who gets to decide? Today the people deciding the parameters for focusing the AI's attention might be benevolent and acting in good faith by your standard and mine, but who is to say that this will still be true tomorrow? Not everyone shares our quality metric.
Strangely, while all of that is covered under the existing laws too, none of it gets covered by AI cameras.
Must be an oversight that will be corrected any second now ...
It's the mass surveillance that was called such.
> It's for the good of everyone else on the road
Nope, they too are subject to mass surveillance.
It's fair to say that Lewis would prefer moral busybodies in Cornwall with speed cameras to either the KGB or the Gestapo. But he considers the Gestapo (specifically mentioned in the essay) to be the end state of what he's talking about when he made the quote.
The source is, IIRC, the essay "A Reply To Professor Haldane", which I found in the book "Of Other Worlds".
Oh what a slippery slope indeed. /s Instead of grandstanding, how do you suggest the law get enforced otherwise than partially automating checking if drivers are not driving blind for dozens of meters at a time?
The problem is as we get perfect enforcement, the delta does become visible. The reality is that when a road is set to 55 mph, that is not some sort of pronouncement from God that that is the one true speed that the road is safe at. It was just an approximation. But then we set up a camera that treats it as rigid ground truth, and now you can be nailed with a ticket if you're doing 56 miles per hour.
But does that help anyone? Was anyone unsafe because you were going 56 mph rather than 55? No, of course not. 55 was never the point. Nominally, safety was the point. Safety is not about going a single speed. There are days and conditions when 65 is practically as safe as 55. There are days and conditions where 65 may be safer than 55 (e.g., everyone around you is doing it on a multi-lane road, you're safer following along than stubbornly insisting on being 10 mph divergent). There are days and conditions where the safe limit may well be 15, or even 0. That's the real thing we want. But that's not what computers and AI give us. They give us rigid enforcement.
As society develops the capability to enforce laws rigidly, it will need to figure out that rigid enforcement isn't what we ever wanted. The laws were not themselves the end goal.
Unfortunately, this is going to be harder than it should be because this rigid enforcement creates and/or reinforces a power center in the people who will benefit from this rigid enforcement, both monetarily and through the additional power to selectively pardon people for what is de facto a brand new set of crimes, in the sense that the are a whole bunch of convictions that could never have occurred in the past. Modestly clever use of the pardoning process will allow them to hold on to that power for extended periods of time by using it to cover over the worst and most socially costly offenses (see also "Support via working out how to raise enough of a Twitter fuss to get the company's attention"; you can suppress outrage and even look magnanimous by pardoning the things that get into the news while hammering everyone else).
We will, of course, have to learn this the hard way.
You can argue that with the ever greater digitization of cars there's a way out of that: use AI to monitor road conditions and dynamically adjust the speed limit, where those superseding limits are uploaded to a central server that in-car dashes can download from. As long as the limit only ever goes above the signposted limit, it can work. People with old cars just won't learn when they can go faster (except via smartphone maps).
But first we must pass through a period of time where it becomes evident to even the dumbest and most self-interested people that automated enforcement of essentially arbitrary approximations is not in the best interest of society, no matter how appealing it may sound on the surface. Inhuman law enforcement is inhuman.
The type of AI surveillance that is truly dystopian is surveillance of communications and participation in public debates, with automatic financial punishment for wrongthink. That's where the puck is going and where focus is needed.
I also consider myself as libertarian as they come; I refuse to accept the rapid decline in personal freedoms(including on the road) and will do what I can to resist it.
So I can't quite tell if you're in favor of laws against things like drunk/distracted driving but don't want them to actually be enforced, or if you're against the laws themselves. I'm not sure it can be consistent to be for such laws but against the most obvious way of enforcing them.
I don't think libertarianism as a classical philosophy has much to say on the topic of surveillance, as it would be captured in having a minimal/small state anyway. But given that it does believe in enforced laws, I can't see where the prohibition against cameras comes from.
Wearing a seatbelt isn't oppression you muppet.
Seatbelts are a great example of exactly the stated form of oppression through giving moral busybodies the power to be more than merely annoying with their presumptions and opinions about your life.
Therea are building codes the require smoke alarms EXIST in any living space, and other codes that say any business or facility providing public or employee access to a space must HAVE extinguishers and other features.
Those would be equivalent to the regulations that car manufacturers must include seatbelts and other features and meet various standards in order to sell their products to the public.
I didn't suggest or even remotely imply anything like those codes.
We live in a society.
What you just demanded was antisocial. Meaning it was not an example of living and letting live, and getting along with your neighbor. It was an attempt to impose your will on your neighbor, without the excusing necessity of any shared resource or effect on yourself.
To illustrate the difference, I don't care if you wear a seatbelt or not.
I also think cars should be required to possess them as they are.
I even think it's at least arguably not automatically wrong to protect kids from some parents and require them for kids until they take over responsibility for themselves. That is a more complicated question not automatically right or wrong, because a lot of kids have been harmed under the banner of "protecting kids from parents", but there is at least a valid theory for it.
Second, and no longer tongue in cheek: You are definitely in violation of the HN guidelines. You can't comment like that here.
Will obey the HN guidelines.
You freedom fighters are funny little creatures.
Tired of people who shout authoritarianism as every minor implementation of AI or CCTV.
I feel like their should be room to advocate for responsible use of systems like this and good oversight of police departments.
I do not believe it is desirable (or practically possible) to eliminate all risk of death or injury from life, and increasingly orwellian surveillance measures to clamp down on every misdeed and ill advised risk does not, I think, make for a happier or freer society.
I can agree that complete safety is not practical or desirable.
But in our current society, simply walking down the street can get you killed by a driver. That is not freedom in my mind.
So you had us check. We hope it is now clear to you that you showed having misunderstood the poster: «thousands of people are being killed by drivers every day» does not imply "here".
But according to data,
( Road deaths over the long-term, 1900 to 2021 // Annual number of reported deaths resultant from any type of road accident. This includesvehicles, pedestrians and cyclists. - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/road-deaths-over-the-long... )
taking 2019 (just to be sure of having more data), you are partially right: apparently not even half-a-thousand per day. But hundreds per day.
Top by Country: China: 172 ; USA: 99 ; Russia: 47 ; Turkey: 15 ; Japan: 11 ; S.Korea: 9 ; France: 9 ; Italy: 9 ; Germany: 8 ; Mexico: 8 ; Poland: 8 ; Uzbekistan: 6 ; Chile: 5 ; Kazakhstan: 5 ; Romania: 5 ; UK: 5 ; Canada: 5 ; Spain: 5 ; Australia: 3 ; Azerbaijan: 2 ...
Conclusions from those numbers, that is another matter.
Putting it on a major "safe" motorway is perfect. As you will have a chance to check most cars there. Being and to go at the speed limit where it seems safe (from inside the car anyway) to go faster is also the most important psychological trait for safe driving. Catching people who aren't up for that will improve safety in other places as well.
But let us keep the logic terse. There are dead because of X, and if some practice P reduces X there will be some advocacy to have it adopted around. The numbers are just relative so largely irrelevant to the advocates.
But it is best to have them right so the lower instances summoned by "Millions!" and "One per million!" - out of context if a cost-risk-benefit with quantifications in all parts is not fully construed - can be avoided.
Please let me know which of these deaths you are happy with.
They passed laws to allow it by crying safety; but then botched the entire deployment by being the greedy nepotistic politicians they are.
AI isn't suited to fix any of the underlying problems here.
The camera is not discerning in the slightest.
Fortunately the judge agreed and tossed my ticket, but I doubt many people go through the effort to contest them.
The police: "the civil force of a state, responsible for the prevention and detection of crime and the maintenance of public order."
If you gave this task to "transportation department or some such" they become the police. They become the civil force of a state, responsible for the prevention and detection of this specific crime.
Except of course if you boot up a brand new police force just for this task they will bumble around and make all the mistakes while they lean how to you know police.
> a lot of the privacy concerns rightfully stoked by involving the police
What privacy concerns does this raise which are not already raised by the 11,000 other automatic number plate recognition cameras in operation in the UK?
The Police are already tooled up to issue traffic citations. Tooling up the BTP to do the same task would just mean more money, and end you at the same result, no?
Where I'm from, the police actively resist oversight, and have not responsibly used many of the systems they already possess.
I'd like to set this up using off the shelf hardware to be able to demand more enforcement but also approach the people living here directly and if nothing helps. It's a heartbreaking situation that's waiting for something terrible to happen.
Edit: I'm a noob in some fields that are involved here (image classification, cameras, etc) so if anyone has a pointer for me, I'd greatly appreciate it
It’s heartbreaking when this happens and I fully agree that there should be more checks in place to prevent this.
However, I am very glad that I live in a country where you are not allowed to record and process this because it’s a violation of my privacy.
I do not think that this is the solution.
Hehe, I don't even know if I do but honestly I'd be happy to let it come to it. Sometimes it takes a little escalation to bring about change. For sure I'll have a look though to see what the law says here.
I know how selfish I am here but I value my kids' and my community's kids safety higher than other people's privacy. And it's not that I'd publicize the footage. Not even the offenders'. Yet :)
> I do not think that this is the solution.
I can't wait for someone to implement a "solution" because that usually requires people actually dying.
Growing up my parents didn’t allow me near certain parts because of the risk of accidents, but I was fortunate enough to have a wide area to run around where it was much safer.
Even if you know who the offenders are, it’s not always directly solving the problem.
Take care and stay safe.
We're talking about people operating motor vehicles on a public taxpayer-funded way. Clearly the public has a right to see them do it?
In California at least there are laws that limit how darkly you can tint your windows, because driver visibility is recognized as part of safe driving, eh?
We’re not talking about _operating motor vehicles_. I am talking about the constant recording and processing of data captured in public places without a permit.
Privacy is not one-dimensional and it should not be.
But, there need to be some guardrails on this program. The UK police have a habit of keeping massive amounts of data around for years, and storing it inappropriately. I have no doubt all of the images this system takes will end up on a public S3 bucket or left open on an insecure email server within the next decade.
For the Americans/Canadians, also consider that there are already a LOT of speed cameras in the UK already -- far more than there are across the ocean. The only new thing here is that instead of connecting it to a radar system, it's using computer vision to decide to fine somebody or not. It's new technology, but not really a paradigm change for the culture.
In general, the idea of being tracked in public makes my skin crawl, but what sets me off is recent cars with GPS units. At least with a smartphone, I can leave it at home.
if this is true I really don't see a problem necessarily. AI is just being used as a tool not a decision maker, so long as humans are good about filtering out false positives. which for something as dangerous as driving I'm all for
All this talk about scary surveillance and what not coming from people who offer no solutions for a huge problem at hand. Let's use the technology so the laws put there to protect lives are actually respected.
Pay attention to your speed when you are driving. Most, if not all, modern cars have cruise control where you can set your speed if you are having trouble following the speed limits.
A bank's management was concerned that its tellers' cash drawer balances were often slightly off the expected counts. During spot checks, one drawer might be 25 cents over; another might be a few dollars short, and so on. Management thought this was symptomatic of sloppiness. To address the problem, they instituted a rule that all cash drawers had to be reconciled at the end of each day, and if there were a discrepancy, the teller would be disciplined.
After a few weeks, management asked for a report. Congratulations were given all around. Discrepancies had vanished entirely. Problem solved.
Eventually the real story surfaced. The tellers responded to the rule by creating a secret piggy-bank fund. If a drawer was over at the end of the day, the excess went into the fund. Deficits, likewise, drew from the fund. Thus, the books balanced perfectly at the end of each day. No other process changes occurred.
The lesson is that when you're trying to manage a process, you'll almost always see improvements in what you're measuring, but that does not mean that the root problem is solved. The number of tickets issued by these cameras will certainly go down, and police will use that number to justify more installations. In reality, drivers will start holding phones above their heads, wearing seatbelt-colored shirts, driving with the sunshade down, avoiding the routes with cameras, waving their arms around the cabin, and so on. The metric is number of tickets issued. Drivers and law enforcement will collaborate, conspire, and independently innovate for the exclusive goal of bringing that number down.
Though in here I think big part is religion - karma / Buddha protects good people, and most people feel they're good people, so their life is already protected, you'd just think they'd get it some day as the fatal road accident numbers are so high every year and everyone knows someone who was "a good person" but is now dead from traffic..
This is actually one of the interesting cases.
Some studies indicate that while red light cameras reduce the number of red light running, it also increases the amount of rear end collisions. Because people are afraid of getting a ticket they slam on their brakes.
Similarly, (iirc) there was some controversy about certain areas with red light cameras adjusting the length of yellow lights not to maximize safety, but to maximize ticket revenue. At the very least the wiki link includes:
> There is also concern that the international standard formula used for setting the length of the yellow phase ignores the laws of physics, which may cause drivers to inadvertently run the red phase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_light_camera
I don't think running red lights or otherwise driving recklessly is somehow our right or a good thing. However, there are side effects to these things and they don't necessarily make things universally better.
There should be some kind of warning before the red light comes on.
I've got it! A cell phone app. Whenever you're driving: the app sends your coordinates to the cloud, and every traffic light is also linked in via dirt-cheap IoT. Then, at some point between the light being green and red, the user is warned through a tweet, text, or email message that the red light will go on soon! They can navigate away from the video they were watching while driving, click through the terms of the website, adjust for their privacy preferences, take advantage of any offers that might pop up, and still find out a few seconds before the light turns red!
And then: because we know they'll be stopped at the light and for how long, we can show them a short video offering them valuable products and services right near where they are located! We can do this! Who's in?
Sounds like some motorists received an expensive lesson on the topic of "What is a safe following distance, and why does it matter"
There are plenty of ways to make it more obvious how long the yellow light will last and whether you can make it through before it turns red. The all-red grace period that wiki article mentions also makes sense to me.
I would say it is better to trade red-light-running collisions for yellow-light-stopping collisions. Just because you can't eliminate all collisions doesn't mean you do nothing. That's letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
What we're seeing here is surveillance of a public area, used for a clear goal, which is proportional (because texting while driving is insane) and is reviewed by humans, and has clear avenues for escalation when it makes a mistake.
The scary parts are the parts that such a system is capable of, but which are not made public. For one the article doesn't mention whether the data is used for anything else or if it is ever deleted. It's also not clear if there are plans to use it for less serious offences, or if the human review is going to be removed at some point.
I'm inclined to agree, but I would also love to see more detailed analysis. It is easy for everyone to jump on this particular bandwagon (I have found very few people willing to say that texting while driving is no big deal), but at the same time I see a lot of texting while driving happening every day. And while we do know it contributes to accidents, driving remains a relatively safe activity statistically given how dangerous it seems.
It's a little bit similar to the 'think of the children' argument, and it makes me uncomfortable when we use such justifications for massively increasing surveillance in a way that seems disproportionate to the problem we are trying to solve.
Is it massively increasing surveillance? UK is full of speed cameras[1] and automatic number plate recognition cameras[2].
"Vehicle movements on UK roads are recorded by a network of 11,000 cameras that read around 60 million number plates daily."
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_speed_limit_enforcement_i...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
To those who call it dystopian or authoritarian: go drive on your own private land. The roads are created by and shared by us as a society. If you don't like it you can always walk.
I don't want to die because some idiot is texting while driving. Whether these idiots are caught by a human looking attentively 24/7 or by a high-speed camera with an AI flagging possible violations and being reviewed by a human makes zero difference to me.
What exactly is wrong or dystopian here? AI bad? Cameras bad?
If a group has repeatedly shown that they will use their tools and power to oppress others, why give them tools that increase their odds of doing so?
And police are already using technology in actually nefarious ways - technology that never had a positive use like this.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are probably under the impression that this won't catch you doing something illegal? You might be surprised how extensive the laws are (and we add to them all the time), and many driving behaviors that you think are harmless are in fact technically illegal.
If, for example, we start sending people tickets every time they fail to stop before the stop line on the road, or don't come to a complete stop, we're going to need to install much larger mailboxes. Or people who speed 1 mph over the limit for 1 second. Or stay in the left lane a little too long while someone is waiting to pass. The possibilities are endless.
Well no, not by itself. The way I look at it, this is a precedence. It works, and there is not a lot of resistance. That's huge. And there will be next steps to this.
It doesn't take too many steps from here to a distopian surveillance state.
The fact that a govt couldn’t reasonably do this at this scale without computer vision being as advanced as it is just adds more AI skepticism flavor to the argument.
Except being awarded penalty points, or fined for doing something dangerous is not exactly "cannot make mistakes" is it? You do a stupid and dangerous thing, you are fined and hopefully you won't do it anymore. If you do it often enough your privilege of piloting a giant metal box around people is revoked.
So the question isn't whether or not we have ubiquitous surveillance (we have it), it's how do we want to set and enforce policy?
This leads me to the oxymoronical-sounding idea of "humane tyranny". Since we cannot escape techno-tyranny we must make it humane.
On one hand I hate that people use their mobiles while driving, not because I particularly care if the driver wants to take that risk with their own life, but because they risk the lives of their passengers and other road users.
That said, the UK does not have a good track record when to comes to applying this technology reasonably in my opinion. We have similar cameras which catch people driving in bus lanes or in low emission areas in the UK, and while I often agree in principle with bus lanes and low emission areas, I feel like they're enforced unfairly and with a complete lack of context.
For example my city recently introduced a low emission area, the rules for which are not very clear and for some reason these low emission areas seem to primarily include high trafficked sparsely populated areas. A few weeks ago I had a family member drive down to visit me and they very briefly drove in one of these areas by accident and were hit with a £120 fine.
Point is there is not adequate warning for road users and the low emission areas haven't even been implemented in areas that are reasonable – such as those that are highly populated or have high foot traffic. I'd actually argue the low emission zone in my city is just an anti-car, revenue generating move, enforced via automatic license plate recognition cameras which have no appreciation for context.
Similarly here, I wonder how these camera might be used. Admittedly there are times I will remove my seat belt in the car such as to remove a jacket at stop lights, and although I never use my phone while driving I will sometimes pick it up and check notifications on the lock screen when it's safe to glance at it such as in slow moving traffic or at stop lights. I don't think doing this is any more dangerous than say fiddling with a car radio (which is perfectly legal), and it's very different from someone texting or holding their phone to their head while driving, but these cameras and the way they're enforced typically have no appreciation for this.
So I dunno... I guess if they're preventing cases such as the one shown in the article then great, but if they're going to be fining people £120 for glancing at their notifications at stop lights I'd rather they not exist. It's just going to effectively be another tax on working people who need to drive to / for work.
> The force, which is trialling the system, said if an offence has been correctly identified, the driver would either be sent a warning letter or a notice of intended prosecution, depending on the severity of the offence.
This is after human review.