Just as two trivial examples, even though neither affects me personally:
The estimated number of heroin users in the UK exceeds the total prison population. The number of class-A drug users in the UK is estimated to be so high that if they actually followed the minimum sentencing guidelines for possession, it would cause a catastrophic economic disaster both from all the people no longer working and also all of the people who suddenly had to build new prisons to hold them. I'm not interested in drugs (and I don't live in the UK, but I assume the UK isn't abnormal in this regard).
Another example is road traffic law. Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK, often enough that after a month the only people left allowed to drive would be people like me who don't even own a car.
The entire legal system has to be radically changed with far less punishments for almost everything if you have perfect, or even 30% of the way to perfect, surveillance.
What I don't mind is private companies using AI analysis to support their security guards. I object to any sharing of the data with third parties though. It should be illegal for the data to leave their internal network and it should be illegal to retain it for more than a few days.
I don't care if grocery store loss prevention has eyes on every aisle. My concern is data warehousing and subsequent misuse.
You don't have to strip the driving licenses. You should impose a fine and not an extremely painful one for starters.
And then probably within less than a year the whole population will drive properly.
I think I'm in favor of indiscriminately fining everyone speeding at every camera, but I realize there is no privacy-preserving way to do it today thus I will be against it.
(I'm a driver and car lover who is never speeding)
Perfect enforcement has to come with immediate feedback
You may be amused/horrified to know that the UK police managed to send me a speeding ticket letter for a car I'd sold 6 months before the offence.
I only owned the car for a week, to sell on behalf of my partner who had moved abroad.
Eventually the camera manufacturers offer "easy setup" systems that dynamically adjust based on actual journey times. This works fine until the first office holiday, when the routine congestion is gone.
You don't even need AI for this. Its pretty basic.
It is similar to how air enforced speed limits are done. They just paint two lines on the highway. A plane overhead times your car between the lines.
And if it is, which it generally is, it means the speed limits are not set appropriately. But that point always seems to be overlooked.
Like, to pick an example that's specifically speed-limit related, if more people really tried hard to do 25MPH (the marked speed limit on many of them) or under for the entire length of an interstate off-ramp, I think we'd be spending more money on brake pads and there'd be a lot more cars getting rear-ended. Sticking to that speed the entire length is silly and not very safe, and things work just fine without people doing that. Tons of other edge cases like that where you're technically breaking some law or another for a little while, but things work way better if you do. Plus practically every one of these laws has some kind of judgement-call clause that applies to modify it, and I don't want the people making those judgement calls to know that if they do what seems right to them in the moment, there's a very high likelihood they'll be hassled for it.
I otherwise agree.
So we have a fucktonne of speed cameras allover the place: https://www.speedcameramap.co.uk/ (you need to zoom in there are so fucking many)
But we have less redlight cameras than the US. we also have hatching cameras (yellow hatched boxes mean no stopping, usually at junctions) we also have bus lane cameras, where if you drive in a buslane you get a fine.
For the Speed cameras, they are normally put there based on evidence of road deaths linked to speeding. I dont like speed cameras, but they do serve a purpose.
When you get a speeding ticket, if its your first offence, you can take a speed awareness course, and you won't get points on your license. otherwise its three points and a £100 fine. The points age out after 3 years. the maximum you can normally get is 12 points on your license.
Its only in extreme cases do you get a ban, or license revoked.
The reason why people are still able to drive are numerous:
1) its been a gradual evolution.
2) we have fairly robust training for drivers (theory, comprehensive real world test)
3) Evidence based placement. Its not like they just shove these things where poor people live (or in the US where the city has zoned living for people with more melanin than others). If there are higher than average road crashes, the road is re-made to make it safer, speed limits dropped, traffic calming put in place, then speed cameras.
4) You are expected to follow the traffic rules
5) the traffic rules are actually pretty sensible.
Weirdly I've never encountered these in the US (only red light cameras) and do we ever need them. I'm generally opposed to government associated cameras due to concerns about turnkey authoritarianism but if we have to have cameras at intersections they could at least curb the awful self centered behavior.
If we raised speed limits (almost) across the board to the actual safe limits of modern cars, I think a lot more people would be ok with speed cameras. There would still be a constitutional problem, however.
Data from various states raising their limits over the last few decades is that every 5MPH increase in state speed limits brings with it an 8.5% increase in traffic fatalities on freeways. With the 70MPH speed limit common for freeways through most of the US, we're already up 25% on road fatalities over the 55MPH that was chosen for gas mileage during the oil crisis.
For cities, pedestrians struck at 25MPH are already at a 10% chance of death, which reaches 50% at 40MPH.
It's not today as there's far more traffic. It's rare to have the opportunity outside of a few areas (south of Bristol on the M5, north of Kendal on the M6 etc). When I first learned to drive I'd do M62 to M5 in well under an hour, today it's about 20 minutes longer.
I don't really get this take though. If one contests the ticket, have it go to a manual review where someone looks at the tape and confirms the calibration history of the equipment, and boom now that person can be the official "accuser".
If its the argument that they might not have been the one actually driving the vehicle, just make the laws relate to the registered owner of the vehicle is ultimately responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle. If the owner wants to try and prove it wasn't them, they can deflect that in court and prove it was actually their friend or whoever.
If we had a CCTV of a murder happening we wouldn't just go "well that's just a robot not a real person making the recording, guess we need to toss that video!" I don't understand how we take that kind of position when it comes to moving violations.
Also FWIW the 4th Amendment has nothing about facing your accuser. Its the sixth amendment that talks about "...to be confronted with the witnesses against him".
Doesn't seem that many compared to what I was describing. At the scale of a country, "a lot" != "a high %".
Your point 3 is the biggest divergence between them.
Point 5 is only kinda true, the failure mode is weird: there's good reasons why the speed limit isn't enforced until you're significantly over it, but that in turn means it has to be set lower than physics and reaction times dictate, which in turn means people push back against them. 20 zones knowing people will do 25, chosen because if they were 30 zones people would do 35 and 35 is too fast, that kind of thing.
People who know that, let themselves go a bit over the limit; but a bit over means they get caught some of the time because of the same small occasional variations that are the reason why the speed limit isn't enforced at x+1 mph in the first place.
I want to follow the law. But when it comes to speeding, it's hard for me to follow the letter of the law, because all the parties involved in creating and enforcing the law don't want me to follow the letter of the law. So I instead follow the intent of the law, and speed up to 9mph. When Google Maps pops up a "police ahead" warning, I don't slow down at all, because I'm following the intent of the law, and that's what police around where I live enforce. If I'm driving in other areas of the country, I'm less certain what police want, so I'll be more likely to follow the letter of the law.
If there was automated strict enforcement of speeding, then it would be clear to me that the letter of the law is the intent, so I would gladly obey the letter of the law. There would certainly need to be a transition period with clear warnings that in the future, the letter of the law will be enforced, instead of the current status of something looser.
In my area of the US, I don't think so. I'll go 9mph over the speed limit when I drive by a police car. I've never been pulled over.
In some other areas of the US, you're right, which is why I'm less likely to speed in other areas.
Where is this supposed ambiguity coming from?
Or are you asking (2) how we wound up in this situation as a society?
(1) I think what I think for several reasons. Basically everyone speeds. Probabilistically that includes he very lawmakers writing the laws, the police, and the road designers. I've also read some articles talking about road design, and in it it's mentioned that the designers factor in that most people will speed if the road conditions are amenable. I've also seen police cars driving around without their lights on, passing people at higher than the speed limit, and when unable to pass, the appear annoyed to me.
(2) I think this situation arose in sort of a "normalization of deviance" manner. Police didn't want to be too strict, or didn't want to bother fighting tickets for people speeding only a little, so only gave tickets for people speeding a lot. Then over time many people realized that, and started speeding a little. More are and more people started speed just to fit in with the surrounding traffic, until eventually everyone was speeding. Peer pressure. I've heard driving the same speed as the surrounding traffic is generally safer than driving significantly slower (or faster). Once everyone is speeding, that includes lawmakers, road designers, and police. And they factor that in when they write laws, design roads, and enforce laws.
"it's unclear what the lawmakers, road designers, and police intend"
Many speed limits and policies were established in an era of fewer cars, but also much less capable cars with fewer safety features - many speed limits were established before the adoption of ABS, stability control and airbags, and more recent innovations in lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control.
Modern cars may be capable of travelling at greater speeds with greater safety, but there's a more recent recognition of the increase in emissions pollution from increased speed. Speed-limits typically remain grandfathered in at their original value (which may have been set 30, 40, 50 years ago), regardless of the change in context.
Then there are some pecularities such as the UK default of 60mph for a single-track road, but if you were to try that in many rural locations (think Cornwall, Scotland, Wales) you would likely find yourself upside-down in a ditch.
This post highlights the absurdity of some of the limits!
https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/1dng5z9/genuinely...
The UK NPCC (National Police Chief's Council) have a published policy where enforcement effectively starts at 10% +2mph over the speed-limit (whilst allowing officers to use individual discretion if they feel there are aggravating factors).
https://library.college.police.uk/docs/NPCC/Speed-enforcemen... [PDF]
The way the national limit is framed is more limit than road speed. It's interesting how we think of the limits as drivers: we get frustrated when other people go slower than the limit, we don't treat it as a limit, we treat it as the speed you should be traveling at.
I live fairly rural in New Zealand (UK expat) and even though you necessarily get a lot of speed variation on the roads around me, due to being winding, having farm traffic, sometimes narrow, you still get idiots who have to be going at the exact limit (or over) and tailgate 1m behind any vehicle in their way. Including trucks who can't really see them when they do that. I enjoy driving fast on those roads but I still don't understand the impatience.
That depends on where you are. In Texas, state highway speed limits are determined though a traffic study[1]. The monitor traffic for a while, then set the limit to the 85th percentile.
People can use this to get out of speeding tickets. If you find that it's been a long time since a speed study was done on the road you were on, the judge might throw the ticket out.
There are some hard limits though. For example, the maximum speed limit that can be set on a road is 85 mph.
[1]: https://www.txdot.gov/safety/driving-laws/speed-limits/speed...
So with perfect enforcement (punish everyone over the threshold), how do you enable an 85th percentile rule?
Not necessarily. If the data is heavily clustered around a single value, the percentile collapses to that number.
There's also the point that driving capabilities vary wildly by individual, and often decline drastically with age. Recent case-in-point, an elderly driver in San Francisco who killed a family of four (a mother, father and two daughters, waiting at a bus stop, not in the roadway at all), let off with a minimal sentence, raising much public furore:
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-west-portal-cra...>
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/san-francisco-west...>
The driver was speeding (70 mph in a residential area), and possibly driving the wrong way on the street.
Whole categories of crime disappeared. Women and elderly feel safe to walk the streets at night. No one locks their bike anymore in Chongqing.
I care about privacy, but I think we should be smart enough to work out a way to get some of those benefits without going full 1984. For example by having surveillance that can only be queried by an AI with very strong guard rails.
Admittedly, I live in a country with very strong democratic institutions, and I trust we would take action the moment something gets abused or surveillance overreaches. I would probably feel differently living elsewhere.
The thing about turnkey authoritarian solutions is that once something happens it's likely too late to take action. However there are often alternative solutions that physically constrain the system such that substantial abuse is impossible without time consuming and expensive physical modifications. The traditional speed cameras in the UK for example.
Cameras, AI integrated at the edge, software that can't be updated remotely, the full stack publicly audited, that only output video data when a suspected violent crime is flagged. Something like that might work. I'm not optimistic such a solution would see much support though.
You'd also probably want a policy put in place in advance to quickly pull them down if certain criteria are met. But again, I'm not optimistic about the prospects.
But we could start small, with just one neighborhood, a pilot project where the kinks get worked out and slowly scaled up. Getting permission for a small scale pilot shouldn't be impossible.
If you are worried about the slippery slope, then you are really worried that democracy does not work as intended. (And depending on where you live that may be a very reasonable worry). By the way, Nazi Germany was not really a surveillance state, perhaps you are thinking of East Germany?
Not really. That's a well established failure mode. People's perceptions can gradually shift as they become accustomed to the new way of doing things.
Personally I'd be less concerned about a slippery slope and more concerned about abrupt changes in policy. All infrastructure should be designed with the worst case scenario in mind. It's naive to assume that things will never get worse suddenly or that we will have plenty of warning or even a meaningful opportunity to react.
One of the best, and most experienced big rig truckers in the area. They lost an invaluable employee, and he got another job in minutes (truckers are still a valuable commodity).
One of the things about computers, is that they can’t cut you (or themselves) slack.
Prosecutorial discretion means they can just collect evidence and choose not to charge you unless they want to leverage you for something. This already happens, but universal surveillance means it can literally happen to anybody, because everybody breaks the law in some way due to how many laws we have.
Discretion is the real problem I think. It seems extreme, but maybe discretion should be eliminated: if you commit a crime you will be charged. This will at first result in way too much prosecution, which will lead to protests and hopefully repealing laws and we'd end up in a better place where the law is understandable and predictable by mortals.
But it doesn't matter to my point: assume it's just about income, put the cameras everywhere, how fast does it make driving unaffordable?
Same for anything with a fine, e.g. would littering fines be enough to replace taxation, but in a weird way that also puts the messiest subset of the population into life-long bankruptcy to pay those fines?
(Of course, current AI is nowhere near good enough for this, if it was those Amazon "AI-powered" "cashier-free" shops wouldn't have secretly been done by humans watching CCTV).
Simply getting alerts from a camera can cause people to believe that the area is a high-crime area, when it's merely a consequence of having a camera there.
Poor people are more like to be in public areas than rich pedophiles who can buy an island or ranch so they and their friends can enjoy wonderful secrets out of the eye of any Flock camera.
If the camera alerts on AI facial recognition for wanted criminals, and facial recognition causes disproportionally higher false alerts for people of south Asian heritage than of Anglo-Norman heritage, then systemic racism is built into the system, which we should all mind.
I'd even be in favor of entirely banning the use of facial recognition technology in conjunction with security cameras. Have them alert on concrete suspicious activity.
I personally have noticed that "alert" and "suspicious" tends to mean "something unusual", and not "something illegal". Increasing alerts results in forced normality.
On the flip side, if the information was there and not used, then the security guards are blamed for not connecting the dots, so investigating alerts becomes a CYA task.
As an example, security guards have harassed people on public sidewalks who are legally taking pictures of the building they are guarding. They are incentivized to investigate the alert, face no consequences (so long as that harassment doesn't itself break the law) for a false alert, and risk losing their job if the photographs are used for nefarious purposes. Adding air-gapped AI may help the security guards, while increasing the amount of harassment.
Yes, I have had a security guard stand over me while I delete a photograph I took of a building while in a public park. I think I was not legally required to follow request. I wasn't going to risk escalating the confrontation over a picture of a neat-looking gargoyle. No, I don't want AI enabling more of that harassment.
[0] whom then repackages streams and sells to anybody — mostly law-enforcement — with no 4th Amendment protections ('cause it's a private company brah!).
Not officially, just as a fun fan theory.
I think the current insane development are surveilance capitalists, trying to rush their panopticon to solidify their power. Guess that means no reasoable privacy law for the US, even under hypothetical president newsom.
If the government is only restricted from buying the data, then they'll just have someone else buy it. Palantir is not the government. So they can buy the real time feed, analyze it in real time, and give the real time results of that analysis to the government without issue.
Restricting the government from buying that data does nothing. If you want to stop the government taking advantage of the data, then you would have to outlaw the collection of the data altogether. So that the initial collection of the data by anyone, is illegal.
Personally, I don't think that's gonna happen. There's way too many people making way too much money telling the government who hangs out with who, who cheats with who, and so on and so forth.
Presumably they’re not doing this for free.
And if you think that is unrealistic you may need to do some research into who pays the bills of Palantir et al.
So if the goal of the ban is to prevent government overreach, you need to ban collection for everybody, except maybe well documenter scientific applications and specific private areas.
it’s ok for me to observe a person in public park - it should be ok to watch camera for an activity
But if it’s not ok for me to stalk someone I think it should be illegal for a network of cameras to watch my movements too!
Slapping AI onto stalking is still stalking.
> The laws need to be updated. Having police officers monitor public streets was fine because they wouldn't actually recall anything unless there was an incident. Now it's possible to go back and review specific footage and identify everyone on those camera's -- we need new privacy laws to reflect this capability.