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Innocent Until Predicted Guilty
theodp writes "Gizmodo has an angry piece on IBM helping Florida to predict how delinquent your child's going to be. The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice has decided to start using IBM predictive analytics software to help them determine which of the 85,000 kids who enter their system each year poses the biggest future threat. From IBM's sales pitch: 'Predictive analytics gives government organizations worldwide a highly-sophisticated and intelligent source to create safer communities by identifying, predicting, responding to and preventing criminal activities. It gives the criminal justice system the ability to draw upon the wealth of data available to detect patterns, make reliable projections and then take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens.'"
your child doesn't fall into the minority report.
It seems to me that if the government thinks it can predict these things and takes certain actions in prevention, it might actually cause the problem that is predicted, and thus validate the method.
With IBM software we can lock threads before flame wars start....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Florida is insane, in the same way that senile demented octogenarians are insane. They never think past tomorrow, because they don't know if they're going to live until tomorrow. All that matters is today, the pudding, and Matlock.
But without that glorious touchscreen screens. And Tom Cruise.
You guys are being pretty hard on IBM. They're just providing computing and analytical power. You're acting like they collaborated with the Nazis or something.
The best part is, if the software doesn't currently consider you a "threat" we can always tweak it to push you over the threshold! Remember that come next election, or next time you purchase something we don't think you should, or even the next time you pass us and don't give us a compliment!
You can't make any inference about any particular individual based upon group characteristics.
Soon we'll be able to predict crimes such as muder far in advance, which will allow us to put those scumbags in cryofreeze well before they even commit the crimes!
Yet another science fiction becomes true life kind of story.
Do predictive analytics work for other demographics as well, e.g. middle aged white man from prominent Ivy League university running an energy company more likely to steal billions of dollars over young Latino kid living in downtown Miami?
int riskLevel = 0; //no niggers or spicks watch Faux News.
if(child.Race == "Nigger" || child.Race == "Spick")
{
riskLevel += 10;
}
else if(child.IsGullibleEnoughForFauxNews)
{
CheckForRetardation(child);
}
I believe the best use of this technology is as a means for monitoring our government officials and representatives (starting with the folks thinking about using it here.) It is arguable that the harm done by the average juvenile delinquent pales in comparison to the social and economic harm done by politicians and lawless officials. We should be using predictive technology keep them in check, and ensure that liberty is being preserved for future generations...
It seems that all the worst things in the movies "Demolition Man" and "Minority Report" are coming true, aren't they?
Corporatism != Free Market
New corporate slogan: "IBM an Integrated Best of Breed Final Solutions Provider"?
Okay, all I see here is a slippery slope argument. Juvenile delinquents who have been convicted of a crime are generally sentenced to probation, attendance in educational programs, counseling, etc. The only difference here is now they're using computer models to decide which programs are most appropriate for a given youth based upon the data they put in... instead of the court making the decision based upon a less complete set of data and a less methodical prediction of what would work best for that individual.
Now I'm not saying IBM's system works. It may or may not and that needs to be carefully studied. I have no problem, however, with computer models being used to determine which juvenile delinquents are most likely to benefit from specific programs and which are most in need of them when resources are limited. Appeals to various constitutional amendments are just empty rhetoric, given these kids have been convicted of a crime and this is part of their rehabilitation. In fact this whole article looks like an excuse for sensationalism and a reason to display cool graphics from "Minority Report". Lame Mr. Diaz.
The story doesn't give too much information, it's just a rant; I'm curious as to what "education" is going to take place; maybe it's a good thing.
I imagine that the software is a Bayesian filter that takes in lots of seemingly unrelated factors and combines them into a score. First, yeah, I get the obvious dystopian implications - I won't argue against the awful possibilities if it were widely deployed. That said, isn't it possible that it could genuinely help some kids? Suppose those factors like increased absences and a couple of minor contacts with police indicate that Johnny is extremely likely to drop out of school. Maybe that's a good hint that someone needs to talk to Johnny and see if something correctable is going on in his life.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You may eventually have a minority report..
Really. Really? I couldn't think of a bigger fucking hand job waste of time and money. How about responsibility. Wait, I can think of a better waste but I'll leave that up to Southpark.
Can it predict when we will get a minority report? Can it predict when a story will be so corrupted that there is no minority report in a movie called "Minority Report"?
I'd love to run some test benchmarks on that "highly predictive analitical system" with input data of someone like, Bernard Madoff's childhood history?
What a ridiculous waste of tax payers money, i lost whatever minimal respect i had for IBM.
It all depends on what they do with this software. My reading of this article is that this is an expert system for judges who sentence juvenile offenders. Typically judges have discretion in sentencing youth. They research the background, number of offenses, etc of the offender and pick an appropriate program. However, they don't have all the data to make a better decision. Do Latino youth who committed a second non-violent offense respond better (get arrested less often in the future) to mental health treatments, mentoring programs, or incarceration?
This system seems to automate this process. So it is possible it will save money and produce better results than the current system, while still maintaining fairness. After all, if you have committed a crime, both the maximum and minimum penalties for what you did should be fair outcomes.
Using statistical patterns is good Science, at least until it makes us uncomfortable. As a simple matter of the-universe-doesn't-care-if-it-isn't-fair, some people really are "more likely" to break the law. But, heaven forbid, we give extra attention to them. If we give "underprivileged" children positive attention, we're good citizens. The moment we give extra attention to someone for anything that could possibly be construed as negative, we're not only evil we "don't understand Science." Sadly, there is a fine line between being moral, and realizing the world doesn't always care what politically correct sentiments say.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
Actually, this is not an "octogenarian" problem.
It is a problem of having bloated and pretty much do-nothing administration.
Disclaimer: I live in this hell-hole jokingly called "God's Waiting Room".
So if this predicts that Johnny will be a criminal later in life, we can keep him under constant watch and limit his activities. Then when all this mistreatment causes him to become a criminal, we can declare success. Reminds me of the way teachers see some students as gifted, and thus given them extra attention etc., ensuring their predictions come true, and validating their method.
I would have read the article if Tom Cruise were mentioned...
Not to be to 4chan-ish, but is anyone here a kid in Florida?
If so, figure out what IBM's criteria are, set youself up as an at-risk kid by doing some of those criteria, and then lead a normal law-abiding life.
If IBM's data and results turn out to be crap, nobody will want to use this service.
Florida is an elephant graveyard. IBM will have to code it with punch cards so the population can understand what's going on.
if (child.gender=male && child.race=black) behavioralproblems=true;
Any reason why we are angry with this? The whole point appears to identify at-risk kids and make sure they get the support they need.
A: Kid is from a low income family
B: Kid lives in drug ridden neighborhood
C: Kid eats twice a day
D: Kid is in a single parent home
Kid is BLAH BLAH% likely to commit a violent crime.
A is 38% weighted
B: is 14% weighted
C: is 17% weighted
D: is 9% weighted
Per $ ROI indicates that an additional $4.22 spent weekly on school lunch program (C) will save $19.22 over 10 years in reduced criminal activity.
Blah blah blah...
Seems par for the course...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
In the past the next generation of internal "future threats" was dealt with one of two ways.
The burn now or work to death and burn later camp lines.
Why not sort internal populations with more care?
Good kids get full scholarships.
If your part of the system you should be productive.
Stable kids get to join City Year.
Your useful and might still get that scholarship.
Big pharma has a chemical solution for the rest.
Feel happy working to death over decades.
Safer communities for all.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It's hard to get angry at a bunch of engineers and government civil servants taking the next logical step in pattern recognition. Everybody involved is just individually contributing to a possible aid in dealing with a social problem. Let's face it, the most widely damaging forms of "evil" are rarely done by "evil" people. The next question I would also have would be, "what is the back end in this particular predictive system?" Are the consequences for the identified person punitive or does he or she get the help that he or she might need? Is this system designed to launch flowers at the target or bullets?
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
The average child's behavior does have the potential to reliably predict future social and behavior patterns for the individual; however, there are outliers of varying types who would not be well served by this attempt at divining the 'future history' of individual human beings. Here are some of the types I have noticed.
1. Situational issues such as abuse at home that cause anger, frustration and inappropriate behavior at school. Children's brains are luckily plastic enough to rewire themselves when presented with a new environment that is far more nurturing, safe and empowering.
2. Schools/Neighborhoods that have been left to become warrens of crime will produce children that seek criminal behavior to 'fit in', even if they are articulate and attentive in class they may be encountering overwhelming peer pressure to conform to another set of behaviors outside the classroom or face ostracization.
3. Mentally ill children who go unmedicated can be hellions the days they don't take their meds and perfectly reasonable mature human beings when they do. The flip side of this, is dealing with the many popular NT rich kids whose parents have gotten them adderall prescriptions babbling in the back of the classroom and acting hyper aggressive on the playground.
4. Police provoked violence/crimes. I did some student teaching in a High School which shall remain unnamed and the MO of the high school police was to find the 'troublemakers' smoking cigarettes across from the school or in the alleyways surrounding and set up a cop car on one side of them and try to herd them towards it, if they ran they tried to take them down with tackling and submission holds. The kids got suspended and charged with resisting arrest at the very least some got thrown in Juvi all for smoking a cig and being confronted by a dickish bunch of cops.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
So their back in the business of helping a goverment keep a count on undesirables. Ring any bells?
This isn't news. SPSS already exists since 1968, and is now on version 18 of the software. IBM just bought the program in 2009. For those who never heard of the program: it's a souped up Excel with advanced statistics and datamining. Here at my work (public health department in Amsterdam) they use it a lot for scientific studies of health, surveys etc. In fact the use of SPSS in the field of research is so widespread for many years already it's strange they only replaced Excel with it now...
I'd guess Slashdot geeks would really like it since you can program some nice stuff in a pseudo SQL script language (I don't know the name of it), but if you've ever seen it you'll know that SYSMIS sorta means NULL.
This way everytime a crime is committed we would have the location of the persons involved and only blind people could not be trace... unless you buy eyes in the black market from a Japanese but then three psiques teaming-up would be able to predict... er.. wait a minute.
Dear
The purpose is not to predict guilt in the innocent, it is to assess the threat of individuals already proven guilty. If you carefully read the article, they are applying this predictive analytics software to children that have already committed an offence - the 85,000 kids that enter the Florida Juvenile Justice system each year because of criminal actions.
If they start to apply this to all children, then yes we have a problem. At present, they are just trying to sort the existing offenders by threat of re-offence so as to work on correcting the behaviour of those kids at greatest risk to re-offend. This is a laudable goal, and if it helps to reduce the risk of re-offence then they have my support.
In the interest of full disclosure, when I was a kid I got in with a bad group and ended up getting charged with shoplifting. The system at the time (20 years ago) didn't do anything substantial to try and prevent the chances of my re-offending. I was simply lucky that my parents reacted appropriately and put me on the right path. Some of the kids I was hanging around with weren't so lucky, and they went on to bigger and badder crimes. I would have been right there with them if I hadn't had a firm support system guiding me.
In those cases where the parents of a young offender will not step up, I think it is society's responsibility to act. To me, this software is part of that solution.
At the risk of being modded into oblivion: The whole crime prediction thing often uses predictor variables that correlate highly with educational and economic opportunity. How about we just call it needs based intervention? If we know what risk factors are for kids, e.g., they didn't eat breakfast or have a learning disability, perhaps we could invest more resources into at risk kids (e.g., fully fund after school programs).
Gizmodo links this technology to Minority Report, and certainly not without cause, but the movie that really ought to worry you here is Gattaca. What happens to kids this software flags with a high potential for future criminal activity? If companies start taking this data seriously, a lot of them won't be hiring these kids. And while it was genetics that was the profiling mechanism in Gattaca, considering we've already cracked the human genome, it can only be a matter of time before someone decides to take a similar piece of software and run it against someone's DNA.
"...make reliable projections and then take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens." ... and help get the child the resources they need to hopefully find other options besides crime? Right?
Hello?
My mother who was a second grade teacher for many years, and believed she could predict with high correlation which kids would be felons. Is this passing sentence? No perhaps it is a way to identify kids in situations that need help. However there are some parents that will provide the poor situation and then defend it with no one can tell me how to raise MY kid. I contend you could do the same as this great data mining experiment by just asking the kids teachers... I guess if it comes from the computer then it's perceived to be unbiased.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Let's stop pretending that this is anything but a technological tool for doing what is already happening. Individuals are already differentially sentenced for all kinds of reasons, many of them terrible. Far better to use well-understood machine-learning/data-mining techniques instead of the discretion of individual judges and all its attendant biases.
N.B. This obviously has the potential for misuse (e.g. the first time some political hack suggests it is great for preemption.), but it is not a prima facie violation of individual's rights.
Eternal Vigilance, etc.
And then what will appen to all suspected "biggest future threats" kids? Tracked for life? A criminal record? Social Services? Special prisons? Or simply terminated?
If a state has thousands of young offenders on file with necessary criminal & rehabilitation data to make predictions of future behaviour, why shouldn't they do it? I assume Florida doesn't have infinite money to spend on probation officers etc., so any tool which allows them to more effectively allocate resources has to be a good thing. That doesn't mean the IBM tool is effective and it would have to prove its worth through some kind of objective study but I don't see any reason in principle they shouldn't do this.
If I recall my HBO docudramas correctly, wasn't it also Florida that used data from Texas to determine who should be blocked from voting in the 2000 election? Can't Florida do any kind of analysis on their own without using tainted data to start with?
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
Let's see. Florida is going to use statistical software to try to identify children, who have already committed crimes, who are most likely to continue to commit, most-likely more serious, crimes and prevent them from going down that path through intervention services such as mentoring, counseling, and community control.
Yes, what a horrible thing to take kids who have started down the path of a criminal life and trying to improve their lives and keep them from committing crimes, becoming drug addicts, and going to jail and/or prison repeatedly. Why, they must be stopped at all costs because these kids would be much better off following the downward spiral of being a repeat-offender criminals.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
This was almost attempted in the early 70's. Look up the "Hartman Value Profile". It was shot down in flames, I guess the concept of Civil Rights has changed a bit since then . . .
Not just answers, the correct questions.
If the past is any indication, Republicans seem to have a propensity towards killing abortion doctors, starting wars in foreign lands, and promoting the torture and killing of innocent foreign civilians.
FDR was which? And Truman? And Clinton? And Obama?
Since only Republicans ever order killings, I'm sure the Democrats will be sad to hear their political party has been absorbed.
When a hospital does this, they call it triage, and there is no outrage.
If we take as given that resources are finite, then not every case of juvenile delinquency can get the full service treatment, so we must find a way to allocate resources efficiently. The point of this analysis is to estimate which cases need more intervention, and which need less.
The teenager that is having problems with his girlfriend and acts out by picking a fight, or damaging some property, or whatever, is probably going to be fine with a slap on the wrist and some hands-off "supervision" like a call to his probation officer once a month. Why waste time and money by making him jump through more hoops?
This is the decision that the software is made for, not for finding people off the street to oppress.
See that "Preview" button?
Spare the rod, spoil the child.
And I can assure you, it couldn't predict that night follows day, let alone what behavior patterns a child would perform.
If it will be used to direct early intervention where it is needed most, and participation isn't mandatory or coerced, great.
If it will be used to label kids as "doomed to fail" or used to force kids into intervention against their/their parent's will, then that's not a world I'd be proud to live in.
--
To put it another way:
If I have enough money to help 10,000 kids this year, do I offer that help to everyone but advertise it only enough so about 10,000 sign up, knowing it's a waste of money for 3,000 of them, OR ... do I figure out who will benefit most, offer it to them and advertise enough so about 10,000 take advantage of the help, knowing probably 9,900 or more will be helped by it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Now, consider IBM's press release, which seems to be the only news available on this subject, and is certainly the unlinked source of Gizmodo's fit. Previously, Florida State officials were using Excel macros to sort convicted juvenile offenders into different programs, and now they will use IBM's software to do it. Whether Florida's juvenile prosecutions or unjust or not, whether their programs are effective or not, has no bearing on IBM's part in this.
IBM has sold Florida some statistical analysis software, which they will (apparently) use to stick heavy offenders into more punitive detention programs, saving the spaces in more rehabilitative programs for newer offenders. You may think that that policy is ill-advised as well--but it is perfectly legal. At least the sorting will be (hopefully) less capricious than it was before. IBM is certainly not enabling Florida to enforce "pre-crimes" or anything of the sort. This is not even affecting the judicial sentences. Everyone being analyzed here has already been found guilty by a court.
Prior to predictive analytics, the organization used Excel for basic analysis on projections for the number of delinquency cases they would take in, which had limited functionality. They selected IBM SPSS predictive analytics due to the ease of use and the advanced analytic capabilities.
The organization will now utilize the new predictive analytics system as a component in many of the performance measurement analyses conducted and distributed to agency staff throughout the year. These reports assess the future of delinquency cases to evaluate what juvenile crime trends may look like in the immediate future. This information will help the organization to better plan and project staffing and other resource needs.
IBM recently also announced that the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom uses predictive analytics to assess the likelihood of prisoners reoffending upon their release to help improve public safety. With predictive technology from IBM, the Ministry of Justice is analyzing hidden trends and patterns within the data. IBM SPSS predictive analytics has helped identify whether offenders with specific problems such as drug and alcohol misuse are more likely to reoffend than other prisoners.
It sounds like the Ministry of Justice might have something a bit more Orwellian (notice "public safety") in mind, but that will be a story for another day. Now take a deep breath, and control yourselves next time Kdawson posts a link to an inflammatory and ill-informed opinion piece. A worthier title for this event might have been "IBM enables Florida Juvenile Detention System to Become Slightly Less Cruel and Arbitrary."
Is it possible to use this software for screening against potential towards authoritarianism , corruption and dishonesty?
Start with HAL top brass!
Passing judgments, no matter how much data is processed to make the decision, will be inaccurate if the writers don't have full understanding of the juvenile delinquents being judged. There always seem to be assumptions about how to interact with youth that make perfect sense to adults but result in nonsensical interaction with the children. On the rare occasion that the child tries to inform the adult of a false assumption or possible miscommunication, it's usually misinterpreted as the child not understanding the full picture, because they're a child.
Precrime officers then, where do I sign up?
If this can predict which people in prison make good parole candidates, we can start letting some people out a lot sooner and save taxpayer money.
Of course, we'll still have to deal with the problem of the good-candidate-for-parole who still has a decade left before he's eligible for parole: Either we keep giving him free room and board for the next 10 years or we commute his sentence and pay the political price from victims-rights advocates or worse, the person is attacked by a vigilante when he gets out. Either way, it's a loss for the taxpayer.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You know what? I can predict who will become involved in criminal activities. The answer to one simple question can peg it every time: ARE YOU HUMAN?
People are criminals. Republican, Democrat, bullshit. You ever speed? Criminal. You ever not come to a 100% complete stop before advancing past a stop sign? Criminal. Smoke weed? Criminal. Drink before the age of 21? Criminal.
Laws exist to make us criminals. We all are. We just get away with our crimes until we piss off the wrong people.
They should be using the software to identify politician and bankers and smother them in their cribs...
Oh, oh, they did not mean THOSE people, we liked Bernie Madoff, even if we ripped off of a couple of billion dollars from people.
Its those bored youths who are destroying society. The ones we refuse to build parks, community centers, or have any organized activities for these kids to do so they are bored and cause trouble.
*END SARCASM*
It is meet and right that gizmodo's write-up strikes an angry tone. This kind of stuff helps societies become police states - which BTW my own cursed home country is already becoming, along with Britain and others. The security craze at its worst.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
IBM wants to make money off the US police state by setting up this big brother, pre-crime-ware and all the while they shed 5% - 8% of their US workforce each year.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
They should make a movie about this....Gattaca, Minority report, Demolition Man, 1984. Seriously, a government computer system for predicting crime? They cannot even balance the stinking checkbook. I cannot email, fax, or otherwise digitally send tax documents to the IRS because they cannot support it, but they are going to automate criminal predicition and processing.
Offend an incumbent policitian and grind, grind, ding! WHOOPER says you are an evil potential and a threat to civilization, go directly to jail. Things likely to get you on the short list....postings to slashdot.
An IBM marketing officer have been reported missing after giving a pitch on a new, future-predicting device. He was last seen with three males wearing wizard-like robe on Monday around 14:20 on the way between meeting room and restroom. According to the witnesses who accidentally caught some parts their conversation, the visitors made queries to the marketing officer with repeated references to a "talking hat" although when asked for their opinion they cannot explain what the visitors and the disappearing salesman was talking about.
The mystery grows thicker when security officers has no explanation when asked the identity of the three mysterious visitors let alone on the disappearance of the marketing officer.
that's not necessarily insanity. perhaps their decisions are optimal under a very small discount factor (which makes sense, since they could die any day now).
weinersmith
While there's always going to be the chemically-imbalanced person who is almost impossible to help, it's fairly simple process raising a well-balanced child. You just need to give a shit. And giving a shit generally turns out to be a hell of a lot harder than most people ever dreamed it would be. There are so many demands on adult time, prices for living day-to-day are so high as to be difficult to manage on a single income, and in many areas a sense of community has been traded for fences and home schooling.
It truly takes someone amazing to raise a child and if you're doing it and it's going well, please include yourself in that category. If things aren't going well, consider asking for help from your neighbors, friends, and organizations designed to help. People aren't cones in the road for you to dodge. People are there to talk to and listen to. Mostly, though, it's up to you to decide when inconvenience needs to be trumped by caring.
Er, then why is that an overwhelming number of felons are Democrats?
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
They shipped a lot of cataloguing machines to certain government in Europe, to put together an advanced census. That was good. Census can improve societies by identifying needs and problems that the government can solve. At the end, however, that didn't end well for more than 11 million people.
That's right, Florida offense statistics = census = NAZI HOLOCAUST!!!111one
IBM has a strong record track of helping governments to track citizens, say, remember 1935-1945 era ?
Why was this guy moded down? It's true!
Why is anyone defending these evil bastards? Does supporting open source, for their own gain, really cover that many sins?
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Take a step back here, guys. This system is NOT being implemented for children entering school, or anything like that. It is being used for children who are actually entering the juvenile justice system. Kids who are already very much in trouble. These kids are already being pigeonholed by caseworkers, DAs, judges, probation officers, and a host of outsiders of the system such as school officials.
They are actually trying to use some actual data to try to direct these kids within the justice system. That's not such a terrible thing - in fact, it's what people in the system who are trying to do the right thing are trying to do - get kids the help they need to save their future. Like anybody, I would hope that the software is not blindly relied upon, but the people in the system are still going to be there. It's pretty hard right now to fight for a kid to get the attention they need and be directed the way they should in that system. Because these are kids who are already being judged by the law, there's not really any worse situation they can get into. They can already have a judge or caseworker who arbitrarily hates them, or who wants to help them. The factors for re-offending are already being examined, it's just that now some software can spit out a report based on these factors.
There's not much to see here.
Wait, BobMcD as in Bob McDonnell? Get back to work, Governor!
On second though, you probably do less damage here. So never mind.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
I would have never expected this from a company that was ok with working with the Nazis.
if (age lt 25) {
return Crimes.Pirate;
}
Terrible slogan. Better: "IBM an Integrated Best of Breed Final Solutions Provider since 1939"
New corporate slogan: "IBM an Integrated Best of Breed Final Solutions Provider"?
Lets not forget IBM 'I BRING MASSMURDER' during WW2 - they provided the tabulation machines for the nazi murder machine. IBM destroyed some of its own documentation and then later said 'oops' about it too.
Of course, their proud stamp identifying their computers was later found by Allied Servicemen in SS offices.
...because I started counting how many Constitutional rights this violated, and ran out of fingers in a moment.
And that's just the Federal ones. I dunno much about the Florida state constitution, so I'm going to have to take off my shoes, I bet.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
As soon as this tool starts showing that poor minority kids are more likely to become criminals, some group will scream racisim or "profiling", and judges will order agencies to stop doing it. Might take a couple years, but I'll make a prediction here that it's forbidden after the first court case.
Just another day in Paradise
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/
Hm, wonder how long till this technology gets incorporated into our electronic voting machines? Could you imagine going to vote for your candidate only to be told of the future harm they will do?
"In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change" --Thich Nhat Hanh
Wow the Washington Post - what an unbiased politically neutral source!
It's just not being done by computers (or at least this blatantly). Police use profilers (not the silly versions on the TV) but those who know human psychology on difficult cases. They have more or less luck (I remember when the DC sniper was first predicted to be a lone, white male.) Also some criminals do read up on police procedures and change their MO from the "norm". For example, the idea that most serial killers kill people of their same race. The unpredictability of human nature eventually fouls up the nice conscripts of a program. There's an interesting program that can be used to triangulate crime scenes of known criminal and predict the area he lives in because most criminals will start out close to home in familiar territory. Of course, if someone knew that, they would move to some other area. Fortunately, most criminals aren't very clever.
And what happens when a crime, such as a robbery, is committed: go question the usual suspects. Some of what this program can do may be pretty accurate, but unnecessary. For example, a kid that's been on drugs since twelve, single mother, absentee father, escalation to more violent or frequent crimes--it doesn't take a computer to tell you that kid is going to be in and out of jail his whole life unless he gets gunned down in a gang war or shot by police. Yes, some can be turned around, but it takes a person who realizes they need to change and the desire to make an extreme effort to do so. (I worked for four years in a non-profit, long-term alcohol/drug rehab.)
I don't know that this computer will be able to PREVENT crime as it says...and who can measure success in something that doesn't happen? Long ago, it used to be thought that you could just tell someone was a criminal just by facial features.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Let me get this off my chest first: Jesus Diaz (the Gizmodo writer) is an idiot of the most supreme caliber. His MO on the Gizmodo is to write ill-researched inflammatory articles. Over time I have figured that these must be written solely to stir up internet frenzy and increase page views. More power to him, but it automatically disadvantages his opinions for me.
Now that the ad-hominem is out of the way, let me get to the meat of it. The conclusions here are 100% wrong. What we do is provide Juvenile Justice departments (which is almost always Juvenile Probation) with tools, in the form of academically validated models, that help them determine which kids are at highest risk to re-offend. We're also able to determine, with a high degree of accuracy (thank you academia!) what the kids biggest needs areas are.
So how does all of this information actually get used? It turns out that it's used in amazingly great ways. It helps keep children placed in their own homes, not in residential treatment, juvenile hall, or the state's Youth Authority. We've had jurisdictions report out-of-home placements drop by 50% after implementing our tools. It also means that a Probation Officer can focus on kids that are at a high risk to re-offend, and have minimal contact with kids that are at a low risk to re-offend. As it turns out, the PHds that come up with these tools are able to determine that having lots of contact with the criminal justice system is bad for kids that are low risk - so it really helps to know the kids that minimal intervention is the best path for. Another benefit of this sort of classification scheme (which works just as well for adults) is that the officers (who are time constrained) are able to spend more time with their higher risk kids because they aren't spending as much time with their low risk kids. This probably seems obvious to most readers, but I'm surprised by the number of commenters that don't get that last point.
My final point is that these kids are already getting put into treatment programs, like anger management, or drug counseling, or teenage parent classes. That happens regardless of whether or not a jurisdiction uses software like ours. What this type of analytic software does is help take away the "gut instinct" part of program placement and give the officer a little more guidance into what programs will be most effective. If you can only send a kid to one program, why make it an anger management class when, after an assessment, you are able to determine that it's actually his drug use and poor school attendance that are his biggest risk factors?
So in the end, this isn't about pre-crime, or thought-crime, or any sort of Orwellian conspiracy. It is, quite literally, about helping place minors (and adults) that have already committed crimes against people or their community, into programs that have the statistically best chance of helping them not commit another crime. The best part is, the followup data from jurisdictions using this type of software suggests that it works, with fewer placements and less recidivism.
Oh, and Jesus Diaz is a idiot (man that feels good.)
When I drank before I was 21, the legal age was 18, you insensitive clod!
Regarding speeding and stop signs, I'll plead the fifth.
> Laws exist to make us criminals. We all are. We just get away with our crimes until we piss off the wrong people.
This is a very cynical view of what laws have become rather than what they should be. It's also right.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I truly doubt this software can function at the level claimed, but hey it makes great science fiction. Hari Seldon would be pleased. Psychohistory has at last become a reality.
In his story the police use psychics to forsee crimes and arrest them before it happens. The modern analogue is to replace psychics with computers.
Lets assume it goes the other way. Instead of putting the pre-criminals in pre-jail, they are in fact giving them real help. Lets go full out, top of the line, and assume they are paying for a full time psychiatrist. Or maybe signing them up for a high end college-prep boarding school.
You know, the kind of things that liberal rich parents do when their kids get arrested, not the kinds of things that far right, zealous conservative judges do when they catch you desecrating a church.
Given that assumption than all your arguments are crap. The article did NOT go into depth about the preventative methods. You are basically yelling about something you have not even looked at. Stop complaining about IBM's pre-crime prediction algorythm and instead demand more information preventative programs. Maybe they are crappy 'pre-jail' stuff and should be stopped. But they could be real treatment programs that we can't afford to give to all the naughty kids, but we can afford to give to the kids at extreme risk.
Now, te
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Ah, IBM's long-standing tradition of selling tech to Nazis...
Liberty in your lifetime
I seem to remember that people used to measure the size and shape of heads, location of eyes and ears and so forth to predict whether you're going to be a criminal. Glad to see we've moved so much beyond that now.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This thing is a tool, just like most of the other ones that are out there. Your insurance (for pretty much anything, auto, life, house, etc.) use the same basic principle. You take the big factors, sort them out into groups, and then figure out the relative risk.
You're young, male, and single? Guess what, on average, you've got a better chance of being in a car accident. Live in Florida? On average, you've got a better chance of having a house being blown away by a hurricane. There's data support all of it, but you've got to remember that it's a mathematical predictor, which doesn't mean it's always true.
The real question is what the heck are they going to do after the risks are tabulated? As a post mentioned before, it seems that it may be used for sentencing guidelines, but I hope that's just a small part. If you can find out the groups of at-risk youth, and then do something (like spend money on programs and other things that will encourage those youth to not commit crime (I know, far cry of concept for our elected officials)), then the system is worth it. Prevention of crime doesn't always mean that the police are directly involved. Rather, they should be the last resort.
And as to "real time", it's about as real time (if they're using most modern analytical software) as the data they get in. Ask someone in insurance how quickly they get data in (bonus points if you can find out the differences in time for various coverages).
PS - I love the idea about using this for politicians, and comparing polls in their represented area to their voting history. I'd bet a lot of them wouldn't like that brought up.
will it give out pre speeding tickets?
... just like our models of markets.
It seems that the press release was a posthumous work of Jean Baudrillard.
check it out, they were the ones who helped the nazis catalog the jews so this is right up their alley..
Hey I've got an idea! No citizens, no problem. or put EVERYONE in jail, there's nothing safer than being behind bars.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
He pulled the strings and the /. nutters danced as he wished. The article is one giant flame bait and troll and most posts so far fall for it 100%.
Remember, journalism (well, what passes for it nowadays) is about eyeballs. And he collects a lot of them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
But this time it may not end so well.
Um, why are you stereotyping young Latino kids from Miami as criminals? Miami's 65% Latino, so it's no surprise that the middle class there is largely Latino.
Are you adequate?
Why is anyone defending these evil bastards? Does supporting open source, for their own gain, really cover that many sins?
It's about choosing the lesser evil. If IBM goes down, Microsoft will take its place as the world's largest software provider.
If it's a choice between Microsoft and Nazism, I'd gladly pledge my allegiance to the Führer.
Let's sic Sheriff Joe on the wall street bankers.
By my count you typed 642 words. At 1.5 minutes that is 428 words per minute. HOLY SHIT! And that is with NO TIME TO CRAFT OR FORMAT!
I would love to learn to type where you did.
The whole point of collaborating with the NAZIs was the idea that if we traded with them and welcomed them into the international community with open arms, it would moderate their behavior and improve world security. That worked so well we're now doing it with the communists in China....
This is my sig.
The very same IBM which made the counting machines to the concentration camps during world war 2..
Would be use that software to track the lives of mothers, and provide cash incentives for abortions to prevent criminal children from being born.
This is my sig.
This is tracking and predicting people who have already been found guilty.
Are people reading the summary up there or the article?
No one's throwing anyone's rights out. Your "rights" are forfeit once you're convicted of a crime (at least for the period of the sentence.) By accepting a probationary sentence (i.e. not having to serve the whole thing in a detention facility)--you voluntarily trade certain rights (e.g. 4th amendment search and seizure,) in exchange for the privilege of not being locked up...It's perfectly legal, and is as old as our country itself.
A spas writes an angry paranoid post rife with "it could do this, now it doesn't actually do this, but someday it could and oh boy then u best watch out!" and kdawson points to it from slashdot. Nothing to see here, move along.
This only uses a computer to screen for a human.
We have been able to predict criminal behavior for 20 or 30 years. If you have a sociopath at age seven there is still a chance to gain empathy by age ten. After that it's a time bomb ready to tick. The problem has been the expense of screening the many to find the few.
People are using a bad science fiction movie to deride good science. Minority Report is NOT what they are talking about. BTW There aren't any noises in space like Star Wars either.
What we're talking about is some children taking group therapy on the side, like what has been done for speech therapy.
And why should the government decide who goes to an specific prevention program or who doesn't based on what a computer says? The fact is that, even if the software was 99.99% accurate, there will be always an innocent person who will be F***ed. And that is exactly why we have something called due process and the presumption of innocence. That's why those things are not only in the United States Constitution, but in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights too.
Nice rant and straw man. They're not talking about throwing these kids in jail. Instead, targetting people at higher risk of following a criminal path, and giving them extra efforts to steer them from that path.
ISure. Some will argue that these juvenile delinquents were already convicted for other crimes, so hey, there's no harm. This software will help prevent further crimes. It will make all of us safer? But would it? Where's the guarantee of that? Why does the state have to assume that criminal behavior is a given?
Why would you naively assume that criminal behavior is no more likely among a population so identified than among the rest of the population? They're not just throwing allof the state's youth into the system to churn out who the "defectives" are. These are people who have a) already started down a criminal path or b) come from homes so screwed up that they had to be removed for their own safety. Statistically, both of these groups have a considerably reduced chance of a normal life. If there's a reliable means of figuring out which subset of those groups are more prone than others, and to take active steps to help them prevent it, why would you not do it? Why would you don the rose-colored glasses and pretend that they can just step out of Juvie and lead a fully normal life, when the odds are stacked against it?
Ok, I've got my flame-retardant suit on. Let's have it...
OS/2, is that you?
We all watched that right?
Isn't the Post the left leaning newspaper and the Times the right leaning? Calling bias wouldn't really work, then. Not that it matters; it was an editorial, so bias is pretty much expected.
IBM analysis has predicted:
If you live in zip code 33136, you're guilty.
as a floridian I'm offended, Matlock isn't the only show..... There's still Murder She Wrote and Dances with the Stars....
Estimation is fun. Do you have anything to contribute to the actual conversation?
Er, then why is that an overwhelming number of felons are Democrats?
Because the republicans like to make stupid ass laws that gets more americans convicted.
And if you are going to jail because of a law the republicans got passed, staying with there party is pretty stupid.
It's way too easy to get a "felon" status for the stupidess crimes these days.
And anyways, Republicans usually have their fellow republicans get them out of trouble.
Be seeing you...
Did I read that right? 8% of florida residents cannot vote due to felony convictions? what the hell did 8% do to get a felony conviction?
It's either false dichotomies, or the terrorists win, you decide.
I think this brings up more reasons to worry about the information on the census form being used to target people.
Also, IBM helping to predict delinquency is not the same as IBM software helps predict delinquency. You might as well say that Boeing helped destroy the WTC
Yes, because everything that has a wikipedia entry and a book published about it is absolutely TRUE!
Needless to say, the issue is not as black and white as the anti-IBM folks would have us believe.
Let me guess - you're a nigger, right?
I can do that without giving IBM millions of dollars.
Its called nurturing, education and providing the opportunity to succeed.
These kids are in the juenille justice system. There has been an arrest and a conviction. Whatever nuturing, education, or opportunities they had did not keep them out of the system. The only question which remains is to decide what is to be done with them now.
It was often argued that the study of murderers might enable schools to find potential murderers before they commit their crime. That is a lofty goal to pursue. However it may take quite some time to work the kinks out of such a bit of software.
Yet there are already circumstances in which not only software but almost any literate person could easily predict a correct outcome. For example picture a convict who goes to prison at 25 years of age without ever having worked at a job and gets released at the age of 60. Obviously he will have no pension. He will have no real Social Security to fall back on and he may live in a state in which welfare for single men does not exist. Mix that with no marketable job skills as well as health that will not let him work full time and anyone can see what will surely come to pass. The man will not starve and curl up dead on a side walk. Someone out there is going to be robbed. Software that suggests keeping him locked up might help a brainless parole board.
Lets actually think about this instead of just coming up with reasons to force it into are preconceived notions.
If there are a set of factors to indicate risk, then this can be a good thing.
Steps can be taken to changing factors and reduce risk.
For example: One factor could be determine by a lack of social skills. That child could be taught the normal social behaviours. Improving the child's life as an adult. No we are not talking about making everyone the same. Another example, there is a strong correlation between torturing animals and being a psychopath. If you find you child torturing animals, then you should get help for that child. Before you pound you meat stumps against the key board, I am not saying torturing animals causes it, only that it's a sign, so put away your misguided 'correlation is no causation' standard reply, it does not apply here.
I know minority report is a fun comparison, but the movies response to 'pre-crime' is nonsense. Plus that's not what we are talking about.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hocus Pocus, to be precise.
"Mrs. King, we have determined that your son Martin is statistically likely to grow up to be a troublemaker. We advise you begin Prozac treatments to curb these tendencies and allow him to live a normal life. Now please move to be back of the bus."
This sounds a bit like sci-fi cyberpunk dystopia. A bit like Gattaca. One wonders why decisions on matters that affect democracy are always taken outside parliaments at first.
Wasn't there already a film about this?
It is inevitable that systems like this will be deployed by governments. Combined with CCTV and the monitoring of network traffic they have developed the infrastructure for a perfect totalitarianism.
1770 there were quite a good number of french supporting aristocracy. in 1789 they fed up and rolled their heads off. how's that for pattern.
with ibm's crappy logic, a computer program with 'data' in 1770 would predict, and the prediction would be aristocracy was there to stay. look how it turned out.
Read radical news here
Florida is insane, in the same way that senile demented octogenarians are insane. They never think past tomorrow, because they don't know if they're going to live until tomorrow. All that matters is today, the pudding, and Matlock.
Um... isn't Florida just a massive conglomeration of individual senile, demented, octogenarians?
A regressive test run of this software predicted most IBM executives to be a future (present, actually, because it is a regressive test) threat to all humanity.
This is becoming an increasingly common ethical theme -- Can real statistical information be used to benefit society without re-enforcing stereotypes or trampling individual rights? I lean heavily in the direction of using statistical information, but recognize the need for the public to become more sophisticated about interpreting. I categorically reject the one-sided fear mongering of articles such as this. On the contrary I find the ignoring available information by public officials to be stupid and irresponsible. Note that this topic is something like the argument that Michele Bachmann has used for people to boycott the census -- Let's not give our public officials statistical information because we're afraid they might misuse it.
so? as in, who gives a shit? if you don't have an answer, don't answer..
So this is about treatment and rehab, not about proclaiming guilt. The persons in question have already been determined guilty, and whats being done here is determine the best course of action.
This is totally scientific. Basically, this is the same principle as let's punish a serial killer differently from a person convicted of second degree murder.
So this isn't some brand new evil that IBM is committing. They were already using simplistic modeling, IBM is just providing more powerful modeling.
I don't want to read
--- Ayn Rand
Are Florida plans to drop most 'biggest-future-threat'-kids off the cliff?
We outlaw drunk driving, not because there is anything wrong with drunk driving, but because it's a "reasonable" predictor of a crash. I don't think that makes predictive laws okay -- there should be nothing wrong with drunk driving unless and until you hit someone -- but the fact is that as soon as the law is a reality, you'll have the majority of people earnestly supporting it as a reasonable restraint that protects everyone else. We live in a culture of obedience that is obsessed with safety. Freedom is unimportant to most people. "The desire for security stands against every great and noble enterprise." -- Tacitus
Before we all get swept away with nightmares of a future dystopia, take some time to look into the actual facts. I'm volunteering full-time for an organization that works with inmates, ex-offenders and juvenile offenders, and I think this is a pretty great idea. We already do so much to determine risk for recidivism (which is ridiculously high; 2 out of 3 offenders re-offend within three years of release). Yes we've got much, much too high of an incarceration rate, especially since community-based detention alternatives often have more effect, but that's a result of war on drug laws put into effect in the 90s and is slowly shifting. YLSI scores help determine risk factors for youth, and while the system isn't perfect (especially for girls), its a simple practicality to determine what areas kids need help in and how much. Resources are always slim, professionals over worked, kids slip through cracks, and parents and professionals repeatedly request more emphasis on early intervention and prevention, so that we can help these kids early before life has beat them down and left them with more trauma-damaged than anyone could handle.
And stop worrying about some future government dictatorship. We don't even have enough resources to feed, house, and employ everyone right now, much less test the whole population for criminality risks and keep it all in some big database somewhere!