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Comment by next_xibalba | Hacker News Reader

Or we might be living in a crime free utopia.

Edit: to the repliers-I am merely pointing out that there other possibilities than the dystopian doomer vision. I’m not speculating on probabilities. But, if I lived on the South side of Chicago, I would welcome this.

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'Find My' is a thing for years, yet police unable to find your phone, nor mobile operator can disclose where is the SIM card now. We are going be tracked 24h but that won't affect crime rate.

But the ads will be so relevant and valuable!

It kind of reminds me of fear of nuclear power and GMOs. Are these things capable of causing problems without sufficient oversight? Sure. Does that justify the almost knee-jerk opposition to them, particularly when they could bring about vast improvements? Not at all. Too many people seem to dream of nightmare scenarios for new tech instead of thinking about more likely possibilities as well as the very real opportunity costs.

The problems on the Southside aren’t fixed by high tech cameras and drones- those just get smashed and or looted for parts. Or the numbers look really bad so law enforcement doesn’t even bother because embarrassing the mayor’s office makes things uncomfortable for everyone.

These sorts of measures are deployed against mostly law abiding citizens. They do not successfully combat lawlessness.

All those dystopian nightmares are a utopia for a certain class of people.

Unfortunately, government is not in possession of a magical barrier that prevents criminals from getting inside of it. In fact there's quite the incentive for smarter criminals to get inside of it, and they have been quite successful at times.

The world will never be crime free. It doesn't matter if you have 100% solved/captured/punished rate, because you'll always have someone who doesn't care about the consequences (including choosing suicide after the crime).

Don’t be so pessimistic, once everyone has their mandatory neuralink it should be trivial to punish or prevent any unapproved thoughts and actions. Or before that, AI and constant location, audio and possibly biometric monitoring should be pretty good at weeding out any “criminals”, false positives be damned.

So drones will be taking on tax fraud next?

If Q* can really combine mathematical logic with simple NLP, why not? Text Search has already automated a lot of what lawyers spent time doing, why wouldn't accountants be next?

Yes citizen. Please provide a copy of your last annual IRS statement. Hold steady with your raised hands while our drone scans it. You have 60 seconds to comply.

It might be a bit of both. Crime as a personal effect is a horrible thing to experience. Crime as a general statistic had the wonderful effect of keeping rent low.

Sure, I have an ED-209 to sell.

What do you consider a utopia?

going to rewatch Demolition Man today

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