Why are cops not treated the same way? OP is right, AI is totally irrelevant in this story.
If the point is "cops can't be trusted". Why do they have GUNS?! AI is the least of your problems.
I feel like I'm going crazy with this narrative.
We're only getting warmed up. There are programmers on HN that will take the output of their favorite AI, paste it and run it. And we're supposed to be the ones that know better.
What do you think an ordinary person is going to do in the presence of something that they can not relate to anything else except for an oracle, assuming they know the term? You put anything in there and out pops this extremely polished looking document, something that looks better than whatever you would put together yourself with a bunch of information on it that contains all kinds of juicy language geared up to make you believe the payload. And it does that in a split second. It's absolutely magical to those in the know, let alone to those that are not.
They're going to fall for it, without a second thought.
And they're going to draw consequences from it that you thought could use a little skepticism. Too late now.
You might even argue that's the purpose of the inscrutable black box.
Also, their whole job is dealing with people who constantly lie to them.
What you're stating is your wishful thinking. Don't get me wrong. I'd also like what you say to be true. It very much is not. Quite the opposite, which is why salespeople "work".
The amount of AI bullshit Senior+ level developers just paste to me as truth is astonishing.
Police get raises and recognition for closing cases. In general they don't care if you're guilty or not, that's someone else's problem. Same with the detective, same with the DA. The more cases they close they 'tougher they are on crime'.
The next thing occurring is
https://abcnews.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story...
* Nobody can find a police department that administers any kind of general cognitive test.
* There are large states with statewide written police aptitude tests that are imperfect but correlated to general cognitive ability, and maximizing scores on that test is the universal correct strategy.
* It's a luridly stupid policy and most municipalities aren't luridly stupid.
I think this happened like, once or twice, in one or two of the 20,000 police departments across the United States, many of which are like one goober and his sidekick (no offense to them; just, you live in gooberville, you're a goober), and now it's an Internet meme that police departments specifically hire for midwittery. Nah.
The LST isn't; it's a domain-specific occupational exam.
If you find a place that (1) uses the Wonderlic and (2) has recently (like, not all the way back in 2000) claimed there was a high-end cut-off for applicants, you'll have disproven my claim. I don't think giving general cognitive tests to prospective police officers is common; this is why there are things like the LST, the PELLETB, and the POST.
The issue is that facial recognition is just not very reliable. Not for humans and not for machines. If you look at millions of people, some of them just look incredibly similar. Yet police apparently thought that was all the evidence they will ever need. A case so watertight there's no point in even talking to the suspect
To define the line between the two, calculate the percentage of cases when mainstream CPUs return anything but integer 4 after addition of integer 2 and integer 2, and use that as the threshold to define "reliable".
By that logic the “I” in Siri is 2x more intelligent.
Who is this "someone"? OP's article and the discussion here are absolutely not neglecting the human factors and general institutional failure that made this possible. But it's also true that without these "AI" tools, it would never have happened.
No. That's gaslighting, and totally misplaced political activation.
Waymo hitting a cat is obviously less tragic, but if it can hit a cat, what else can it hit? A toddler? A human? The wall of your kitchen? This is a problem that has no known solution; furthermore, it's a problem that the engineers at Waymo don't seem overly keen on solving quickly.
Great, let's just apply that logic to Waymo as well and call it a day (see how silly that sounds?). Waymo has engineers..so does the Department of transportation.
"Among his accomplishments has been establishing the department’s Real Time Crime Center that leverages technology and data to support officers in responding more effectively to incidents," the city's release said. "Zibolski also prioritized officer wellness initiatives to strengthen mental health resources and resilience within the department. He reinstituted the Traffic Safety Team to focus on roadway safety and proactive enforcement, and ... played an active role in statewide discussions on various issues affecting law enforcement."
The technology seems highly relevant here. Plus, as we've seen in the software world, when a mandate comes from the top to use the shiny new magic AI tools as much as possible, the officer may have felt pressured to make arrests using the new system they paid a bunch of money for instead of second guessing whatever it spits out.
But, then what good is facial recognition for? Would it have been okay for this woman’s life to have been merely invaded because she matched a facial recognition system? Maybe they can just secretly watch you so you’re not consciously aware of being investigated? Should that be our new standard, if a computer thinks you look like a suspect you can be harassed by police in a state you’ve never even been in?
I just don’t see a legitimate way for AI to empower officers here without risking these new harms. That’s why I lean towards blaming the AI tech, rather than historically intractable problems like the reality of law enforcement.
If you'd like, you can replace the term "suspect" in my post with "person of interest", which colloquially implies a lot less suspicion but isn't practically any different in terms of how the police interacts with you.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are certain it won't happen to them, and it has been practically impossible to establish any kind of accountability. It has only gotten worse since 2020.
Cops are already susceptible to confirmation bias, and for "efficiencies" they are delegating part of their job to apparently magical tools that will only increase their confirmation bias. And because it is for efficiency you can bet they won't be given extra time to validate the results.
What or who is at fault isn't either/or, it's a bunch of compounding factors.
It's absolutely absurd. The argument that AI is the problem is literally the people arguing against AI shedding responsibility to the machines. The people arguing that AI is the problem are essentially (philosophically) the same people who will say it was the AIs fault.
The thing that it most reminds me of is people trying to stop the deaths and injuries that come as a result of "swatting" by being really angry at people who "swat" and proposing the harshest punishment for it that they can come up with (or outdoes anyone else in the thread.)
The problem with swatting is that police were showing up to the houses of harmless people based on anonymous phone tips and murdering them. You guarantee swatting will work indefinitely when you indemnify the cops.
You don't need AI for injustice in the US justice system. There is literally no part of the US justice system that makes sense at all, and even in the best case scenario when the guilty are caught, tried, and punished, it is tremendously wasteful, cruel, and ass-backwards. Juries are basically the AI of the US justice system, allowing the prosecutorial and enforcement apparatus to be infinitely cruel, illogical, self-serving and incompetent. 12xFull AGI. AI couldn't do any worse.
> I feel like I'm going crazy with this narrative.
You're not alone.
For anyone who has been victimized by law enforcement or governments before, we’ve been warning about this shit for decades. About the lack of consequence for police brutality. The lack of consequence for LPR abuse. The lack of consequence for facial recognition failures and AI mismatches.
You need to understand that by using these systems correctly and holding yourself accountable, you are in the minority. Most people do not think that critically, and are all too happy to finger the computer when things go badly.
And until you accept that, and work to actually hold folks accountable instead of deflecting blame away from the tool, then this won’t actually change.
However, I hold to the opinion that if you are discussing actual reality, based on decades (if not the entire period post civil war, for near certainty) of historical examples and the current “majority” position of the US electorate: there is a nearly unqualified NO. We cannot, or will not, hold law enforcement accountable for even intentional, planned, and malicious conduct in a vast majority of cases. There is practically no accountability at all, and that’s just for thoroughly proven intentional conduct. Bad judgement, alleged mistakes, etc are even less able to result in any action.
The reality of the legislation and precedent ensure it. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Short of video evidence of blatant gun to the back of the head style homicide qualified immunity means most law enforcement officials are never held accountable for their miscarriages of justice. Criminal charges against officers are exceedingly rare. She should be able to sue this detective directly. Of course she can sue the government too, and should. But without any personal consequences for the people carrying out these acts, taxpayers will continue to bail out these practices without ever noticing. Your own government should not be a shield for a police officer who has violated you or your neighbors.
And frequently not even then.
There's nothing to repeal. Qualified immunity is a doctrine that the judicial branch made up out of thin air, with no legislative backing.
But agreed, we need legislatures to write laws that expressly hold police accountable, and declare that they are not shielded from liability when things go wrong due to their own failures and negligence.
While the origins of qualified immunity are judicial, some State loved the idea so much the went and made it statutory too. Louisiana’s 2024 bill explicitly removes negligence as an exception (which is a valid method to circumvent qualified immunity based on jurisprudence at the federal and most state levels). Louisiana requires intentional violations or criminal actions to even be able to bring a claim.
I could understand someone who disagrees with it, but your position would be antithetical to current and historical thought on what defines a fair jury.
>excluding these types of belief
You have not stated what belief you are talking about.