If a kid has shown themselves to be repeatedly irresponsible, when they ask for a circular saw you don't just give it to them and turn away. You make them explain what it is for and ensure they know how to safely use it. And if they start swinging it around wildly in opposition to what you said, you take it away, they are obviously incapable of using it right.
If someone released a hammer that when held a certain way would cause your hand to explode and it kept happening over and over, the solution wouldn’t be just to tell people to hold it better, it would also be to recall the tool and fix it so the issue were less likely or impossible to occur. And if it can’t be done, then maybe the hammer shouldn’t be released again.
This “it’s just a tool, the proper solution is to rework civilisation” defence is frankly as tired as it is ignorant. The way you fix the system as a whole is via a lot of small fixes.
I don't it's about an innocent skill issue like you imply (holding a hammer the wrong way). It's an ethical issue of bad actors in the government, together with an accountability issue of the system preventing holding those bad actors to account.
AI cameras are just one tool; there are other tools, too. Where do you draw the line for which tools deserve the removal for your kind of reason? Perhaps degun the police departments because guns also get abused? How do you decide in a principled way that AI cameras are somehow special compared to other tools?
It doesn’t have to, but historically we can observe that the longer something has been entrenched as the norm, the harder it is to change (authoritarians regimes take advantage of this too, by making it appear some things are older than they are). Which is why it’s doubly important to resist when something new with bad consequences is introduced.
> I don't it's about an innocent skill issue like you imply
There was no “skill issue” implication. If anything, the opposite is the point.
> AI cameras are just one tool; there are other tools, too.
This is just whataboutism. Yes, there are several tools which are problematic. The submission is about this one, which is why we’re discussing it. We can’t discuss everything that needs to change in every conversation. That’s called focus.