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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

Of all the potential uses for AI, catching people violating traffic laws in safety critical situations is one of the least offensive to me. Ticketing people who run school bus stops is a no brainer. Same for people recklessly driving through construction zones or making unsafe passes on two lane roads. Also a fan of using these systems to ticket people looking at their phones while driving. Too many people die every year from stupid reckless driving.

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The problem, of course, is all the thousands of vehicles caught up in the scans that didn't violate any traffic laws. What happens with that data? Why should my privacy be compromised for the chance of someone committing a minor traffic infraction?

Hell, let's just police everyone's hard drives just in case, you know? Isn't catching pedophiles a good thing, after all?

If a school bus with cameras films you on your private land then trespass it away and get a court order to destroy records. On a public street, however, you don't have privacy, anybody can film you.

When filming becomes tracking someones every move it's called stalking, and it's considered abhorrent and often times illegal. AI monitoring of cameras was previously touted as new effortless 'tracking' so people aren't willing to give the benefit of the doubt anymore.

If you believe the school bus is stalking you - press charges. IANAL but I believe you will be missing necessary elements such as it should target you specifically but try your luck, I guess.

> When filming becomes tracking someones every move it's called stalking

Cellphones have been doing this to all of us for decades.

They very well might be using the data in nefarious ways beyond just detecting people who blow through a bus stop sign, and I support legislation restricting that.

But when you’re driving a deadly vehicle on public roads, you don’t have a legal right to privacy that’s the same as if you were on private property.

I trust zero cameras in a world where Flock exists. Seeing me in a camera in a public place? Not a violation of my privacy. Using cameras to track my movements? Absolutely a violation of my privacy.

Laws first, then we’ll talk about cameras.

I don't own a car, but I still walk on the sidewalks, and these cameras can still see my face. Or do I also need to accept the reduced privacy imposed on motorists when I step outside my front door facing a road?

I wonder what the AI part is? It seems you could achieve the same thing with a motion triggered or beam-tripped camera. If so, why use "AI" for this?

It's the AI term bloat where any application of machine learning or vision becomes AI, it's been happening for 2+ decades now I think it's pretty well established and here to stay.

That said it does need to be more complex because to produce as few false positives as it can, which would cost BusPatrol money to review in their first pass before sending to police (so there's at least a minor incentive to reduce them), they would have to determine where the car is and if it's required to stop not just trigger if a car passes by while the arm is out. Laws vary a lot by state but usually if there's any kind of real median traffic in the opposite direction is not required to stop so it would at least need to detect if that is present (or work off a database that knows where all the divided roads are in the area I'm not sure which would be cheaper but mapping feels harder and having the camera able to determine if there's a median can be deployed anywhere while mapping data is location specific).

There are models that do license plate recognition, ie to find the specific box in an image that contains the license plate. Then there are also OCR models to read the characters from the plate itself. Both have been around for a long time and are not particularly revolutionary technology.

The post office has used OCR machines (optical character recognition) since the 80s.

I think the 80s machines used something more like hand built digital image processing to find the characters, but OCR is absolutely not new.

That's more like machine vision rather than real AI. But you dont even need that when the video is being sent to a human anyways.

They'd be at least minorly incentivized to cut down on false positives because 1) they had a review step before sending to the police and 2) if they're cheaping out on that first review and sending loads of false positives to the cops for citations they're likely to lose their contracts.

Are LLMs “real AI”? What exactly is “real AI”?

Helps justify the $400/bus monthly "technology fee."

AI just means software at this point.

I partially agree, but current monetary fines were set when enforcement was very manual and often lenient. Technically, in California, even speeding 1 MPH above the speed limit can land you a $234 fine. If we had perfect AI systems that fined everyone every time they went 1 MPH over, most Californians would be broke. Certainly, most people break a dozen laws every time they drive to work.

You can say that we should only restrict this to critical safety situations, but it becomes a very slippery slope once cities start to see that revenue coming in. In some situations, cities have contracted private companies who profit on every ticket their cameras issue - that creates a huge conflict of interest and incentive for them to keep tuning the cameras to catch more and more 'offenses'.

Yeah I'm of the same view. If you're driving, the least you can do is take the responsibility seriously and give your surroundings proper attention.

An automated fine is the least painful way to enforce that.

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