The inaccuracy of our omniscient AI surveillance network isn't why I'm against it. The conclusion of this article is that we need more humans in the loop for a successful police state.
If you dont accept this, consider the perfect surveillance state under president N, used by president N+1 given the inevitable flipflop in party control.
Possibly at a time facilitated by the security apparatus that puts the teeth in the surveillance state, because even if they theoretically have the capability autocrats rarely are interested in running their surveillance and security systems themselves, and want to spend time doing other things—which puts a lot of power in the hands to which those tedious bits are delegated.
you can mock my beliefs, you can try to convince how misguided they are, but its really outside the minimum rules of discourse to tell me what I actually believe
I've been shouting this from the mountaintops.
Because when the other side gets in they're going to use those awesome powers to do "good" things. No one believes in institutions anymore.
This case is a perfect demonstration of the Base Rate Fallacy, and shows what happens when you surveil EVERYONE hoping to find a small percentage of bad people you want to stop.
Almost every car that Flock scans is a normal, law abiding citizen. Even at very high levels of accuracy, any sort of flagging it does is going to most likely be an innocent person simply because of the Base Rate Fallacy.
There are going to be a LOT more of these types of stories than there will be where they actually find a bad guy.
There is enormous variance in performance between police departments. Where I live now the police have been nothing but helpful. In college our neighbor was a cop and was ten times cooler than he had any obligation to be. I've also lived in places where they were nothing but a hindrance.
In fact I was once pulled over something like three times in a few weeks by one police department and given a warning each time for "speeding". The third time it happened I told them that I wasn't speeding, had dash cam evidence, and that I knew something was up given the frequency with which it was happening (probably not a wise idea but I was pretty fed up with it). Officer went to his car and came back five minutes later with some nonsensical excuse about my "VIN number [sic] not coming back properly in the database" and said I'd stop being bothered from them on. In his defense he seemed like he knew they'd made a mistake and was stumbling over his words a bit but the whole thing made absolutely no sense. No retired LEOs I've asked about it had good theories either.
It seems like this woman dealt with a more extreme, AI-powered version of the same. She has my sympathies, but this won't stop until LEOs that act like this are either upskilled or removed from positions of power.
If AI isn’t working, why use it at all?
This meant there were no humans in the loop.
edit: Every single thing you guys have replied with are policy/law debates, not enforcement debates. I disagree with many laws on the books today. I want the laws changed, not selective/arbitrary enforcement of them.
“Sir, we are coming by today because we are concerned you are insufficiently supportive of our public servants in uniform. It has come to our attention that you have been disparaging some members of our law enforcement divisions to groups as large as 100 people! This is part of our new thought policing initiatives, we need everyone to support our policing efforts!”
“Yes, I work for Flock Online. We only index statements posted at publicly accessible URLs, which in principle anyone can see. We are able to profile every person at scale for a more effective community policing database. This new thought policing initiative is being carried out as a public-private partnership with the full support of your county’s representatives, as a way to preserve our community’s harmony and enhance social cohesion.”
“Please don’t be alarmed, the AI flagged you but I assure you, this is a real human in the loop wanting to talk to you about your comments. I am here because we know you’d be home around this time. Can you please come down to the station with us?”
We just want the enforcement of this policy to be maximally successful! What’s wrong with that :-)
I expect this argument is actually a poison pill for some anarchist or libertarian fantasy of “if the laws fit onto a single sheet of paper all these problems would just go away”.
The problem with rats' nests of infrastructure is that it is effectively impossible to determine what wires are structurally load-bearing in unexpected ways, and there's literally nobody in a position of authority that would be even remotely trusted by a super-majority to construct a suitable replacement system from whole cloth.
His insistence that "The police are the public and the public are the police" doesn't really hold up in many countries anymore.
Flock does not force cops to be less arbitrary/selective any more than bodycams do.
So the question isn't: "Should we take away the tools these cops use to serve the public?" but "Should we give even more powerful surveillance tools to a group of unaccountable thugs who routinely abuse what they already have?"
It should be a quick bit of data work for records to be made of such stops based on duty logs (sans personally identifying information) and compare it to actual arrest/conviction rates to verify that at a minimum the perception of the police match reality. If they don't, then the local community should exert a suitable oversight to adjust police procedure.
To top that off there is almost no "suitable oversight" of any police departments in the US of any kind, let alone by the community.
There really are no simple solutions to this, even places not plagued by bigotry and racism have major structural power problems for the average citizen.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
While I merely quoted the text of the Forth Amendment, the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth are also arguably limits on policing power, making fully half the original ten amendments about limiting policing.
I invite anyone and everyone to peruse the contents of https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
* Driving a stolen car
* Driving a car used in a recent homicide