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The Police in UK Want AI To Stop Violent Crime Before it Happens (newscientist.com)
Police in the UK want to predict serious violent crime using artificial intelligence, New Scientist is reporting. The idea is that individuals flagged by the system will be offered interventions, such as counseling, to avert potential criminal behavior. From the report: However, one of the world's leading data science institutes has expressed serious concerns about the project after seeing a redacted version of the proposals. The system, called the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS), uses a combination of AI and statistics to try to assess the risk of someone committing or becoming a victim of gun or knife crime, as well as the likelihood of someone falling victim to modern slavery. West Midlands Police is leading the project and has until the end of March 2019 to produce a prototype. Eight other police forces, including London's Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police, are also involved. NDAS is being designed so that every police force in the UK could eventually use it. Police funding has been cut significantly over recent years, so forces need a system that can look at all individuals already known to officers, with the aim of prioritizing those who need interventions most urgently, says Iain Donnelly, the police lead on the project.
No, no, no. The pre-cogs could actually see the future (mostly). This is even worse because it's just a bunch of algorithms figuring out pre-crime. Let's just hope the "intervention" stops at counselling.
So, to teach the AI they'll basically have to feed it the minute details of every violent crime in the country. That's gonna be one really messed up AI system.
The UK staying the course toward fascism and 1984.
Any time you use 'statistical characteristics' of individuals to concentrate police efforts regardless of the actual details of said individual.
This system will justify 'racial profiling' and possibly ;'religious profiling'... After all, are conservative men who are strict followers of certain types of Islam more or less likely to commit violent crimes.
( I'm not answering the questions, but you can get a statistical answer.)
It is a far cry from 'in general' yes to 'so let's watch THAT one'.... but people do it all the time.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
until a crime is committed, a person hasn't done anything wrong and should not be harrassed
And yet, if I were to fly, I would be both harassed and treated as a criminal by the TSA even though I haven't done anything.
Unfortunately, the TSA doesn't like this argument and would of course detain me because I objected to being treated like a criminal even though I hadn't yet done anything.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
that the more you treat your population like criminals, the more they act like one.
It ends in one of two ways:
Police State
Revolution
Future headline: "NDAS under criticism for targeting minorities and muslims"
It won't be allowed to operate as intended, because it would be seen as profiling. The idea of certain groups being over represented in criminal acts is tantamount to heresy, even if it's objectively true.
But that's ok, because the point really is to acclimate people to the idea of their data that's being harvested through the surveillance state to be processed by ever more powerful machines and sophisticated algorithms, to allow for even greater monitoring and intrusion. Where there is an ever watchful eye by the state to ensure everyone is guilty of something.
Oops, you jaywalked. 50 quid automatically taken from your bank account. Have a nice day.
What do you mean 'here we come?' These kinds of systems have been in use for a few years already in use in parts of the West, inclunding the UK, parts of Germany and Chicago. There's an alright documentary about ongoing developments and these systems with the name Pre-crime from last year by German directors Matthias Heeder & Monika Hielscher. I can recommend it.
Essentially these systems are divided into 2 categories: ones using open and public data (essentially public crime statistics) that tell the police where crime is conncentrated to help them plan patrol-routes and know where the hotspots are, and the truer pre-crime breed that combines this with personal data by scouring Facebook, twitter, facial recognition, financial and criminal history information, known friends, etc to form a 'threat assessment scoreä via an unknown closed-source algorithm. This is combined with aerial and CCTV footage often to be able to locate/track individuals and cars rapidly. It's essentially exactly what China is doing, except China is slightly ahead because they've got masssive resources put into it and they never claimed to care about individual rights.
The system is Chicago is the latter breed and has a 'heat-list' of around 400 individuals (at the time of the film, probably more now) that regularly pulled aside on the street and interviewed by the cops. Not because they've done anything wrrong, but because the almighty algorithm tells the police officers they might. There's no way for anyone to see what information of theirs is in the system, what their 'threat score is', or what it's based on. There are several commercial operators in this space. My guess is in 10 to 15 years we'll start seeing Chinese 'private' (state-owned western subsidiaries) entering the market in the West. Gotta catch all the terrorists and gang members before anything bad happens, it's for Your Protection(tm), citizen! The gang excuse is the one Chicago seems to be using.
Now is the time to fight the legality of these systems in courts throughout the West as unconstitutional breaches of basic rights. The police will counter with: 'but we're only using it to track Bad People(tm)' which must be countered with 'that's the excuse of all massive surveillance states, stop reading 1984 as a manual you god damn imbeciles." Unless this is done now, unless strong legal precedent against such systems is established in the coming few years they will spread fast, and after that there is no returning, because at that point opposing the systems will be faced with: 'why are you defending criminals?" and the game will be lost. People: do not make this a partisan issue. Regardless of your country and your political leanings everyone knows that China is fucked up. It doesn't matter one bit whether you're a , a libertarian or a neo-Marxist; both sides of the political spectrum can and have in the past become authoritarian. This is not about left vs. right, this is about authoritarian vs. liberal. Unite against this BS now, or stand divided over partisan bullshit and watch these systems take over everywhere.
I'm not a communist by any stretch (I own a third of a corporation), but I am very strongly and openly a leftist individual being from Finland where the political spectrum in general (as in the whole of rest of the West in fact) is more to the left from the US, but I will happily join hands with my libertarian counterparts on the right over this. We can disagree about health care and social security spending all we want when that's the topic, but we're both in agreement that this bullshit must stop.
If you just read the above statement and your first thought is to write some variation of: 'But this is what the left wants! It's your fault!1!11!" then we've already lost the game. That's what they want us to do, so I plead you all not to fall into this bickering, these issues are too important for that..
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead