The Police in UK Want AI To Stop Violent Crime Before it Happens (newscientist.com) 170
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.
I've seen this movie (Score:1)
Pre-crime here we come.
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Which would work (lol) if humans were deterministic...or if humans could be made to act in a deterministic fashion. The former is an argument dealing with 'free will', the latter is a conspiracy.
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Pre-crime here we come.
The server will be wired to three zombies floating in a hot tub.
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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 [imdb.com] 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 po
Minority Report? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Minority Report? (Score:5, Insightful)
how in the hell that pass the constitution? (Score:2)
how in the hell that pass the constitution? much less locking people up for life with no trail?
Re:how in the hell that pass the constitution? (Score:5, Informative)
Because it's the UK, and the US Constitution doesn't apply there?
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Not yet, anyways ;-).
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Uh, it's the UK. They don't *have* a written constitution, nor a Bill of Rights.
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Actually we are signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, a mandatory requirement of EU membersh... Oh.
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Luckily the European Convention on Human Rights isn't an EU convention and leaving the EU does not mean we cease to be signatories.
I mean, it's not like the convention was proposed by a British politician or primarily drafted by British lawyers. Except that it was.
Maybe Britain is fucking good at human rights without needing the EU to mandate it. Strange that, you'd think we were a capable sovereign nation and can be in the future.
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May has said repeatedly that she wants out of the ECHR, mainly so she could be more xenophobic as Home Secretary but that's still her major motivation.
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May being an authoritarian cunt has fuck all to do with Brexit or the EU, so stop trying to use one fact to explain your miserable ignorance about the other.
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May is in charge of Brexit. How does she have "fuck all to do with Brexit or the EU"?
The fact is that the UK could not leave the ECHR while still in the EU. May has said she wants to repeal the UK implementation and replace it with something that lets her abuse people's human rights. Her post-referendum support of Brexit has focused on xenophobia (like the "jumping the queue" bullshit).
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May is in charge of Brexit.
May wants to leave ECHR.
One does not cause the other.
May's failing fucking miserably at Brexit, you needn't worry about her sticking around anywhere near long enough to threaten ECHR.
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If she was the only one I wouldn't worry, but the danger is that she gets replaced by one of the Brexiteers who wants rid of the ECHR too.
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The people of the country wanted to leave the EU.
The people of the country don't want to leave ECHR.
The brexiteering politicians aren't that stupid. Except Gove. He's downright fucking malicious.
Re:how in the hell that pass the constitution? (Score:4, Informative)
The Magna Carta was the first major step forward in limiting the power of the monarchy, which is why it's so celebrated, but it is no longer a functioning part of the UK's legal code, let alone a Bill of Rights. The bedrock principle of the UK legislative system is the "sovereignty of Parliament"--whatever Parliament sees fit to pass can become law. Branches of the government that have checks and balances are a US invention by the founding fathers who wanted to avoid what they saw as the abuses of the British model (they also wanted a system without political parties, which a parliamentary system requires but our Constitution does not, but that didn't work out so well.)
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It passes the constitution because they are dropping by for a chat and issue a warning that the person in question is monitored because of the threat their behaviour implies and it is pretty cool if they offer counselling. The US model, tempt the imbalanced individuals into committing the crime to fill arrest quotas ie absolutely do not prevent the crime but work to ensure the crime will occur, or where that wont happen, make it look like it will, with manipulated conversations and evidence, arrest quotas m
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In ireland there is the safeguarding youth initiative, which aims to help youth avoid taking a criminal path.
https://www.dcya.gov.ie/viewdo... [dcya.gov.ie]
The aim is to avoid kids getting a record and getting into crime, its much harder to unmake a criminal once they have a record.
Trouble is its harder to record success, than failure. If they get arrested and charged its a failure but much harder to prove that intervention stopped a kid going off the rails.
Which tends to make it harder to get funded.
Tackling crime is b
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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.
Oh, it will.
At least for now...
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If the pre-cogs were seeing the future, why did they not see the pre-perpetrator being arrested before the crime was committed?
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That's a feature. Buggy software will have lots of false positives so the cops will have lots of people to send to "re-education camps". More money for them!
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Until they send the wrong person to a re-education camp. Usually a congressman's son or daughter.
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You know they never send "the wrong person". They can tell that rich white people are always innocent. It's the poor brown people who need re-education.
Re: Minority Report? (Score:2)
I'm not sure how many poor brown people lived in the USSR, but I'm quite sure that you're full of shit.
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Thankfully that could never happen in the USA. Much easier to just shoot everyone.
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From what I've seen, with the exception of the Traffic courts, most lawyers have a backlog. They don't need the additional work.
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Unfortunately, we will likely always get three different answers and the world becomes a penal colony.
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The present seems to be buggy too
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Dude, I'm a software engineer. I create the future.
(Also, it has a lot of bugs. The future is pretty damn buggy. Sorry.)
I once worked on software that was used for aircraft maintenance... that's when I was fresh out of university... with a BA. If you see any aircraft with the tail installed upside down... sorry from me too.
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You seem like your about to commit a crime. Please report to your nearest "counseling" center.
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Not knowing your from you're should be a crime in 2018.
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You sound too much like Clippy. I can help you rewrite that.
Re:Minority Report? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Minority Report? (Score:2)
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.
Really? They would arrest you and cart you off to jail? I've flown many times, but never been subjected to such treatment. Judging by the fact that millions of Americans fly every year without being arrested, I'm going to suggest that you're a bit of an outlier. What have you done to warrant such special treatment?
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.
They're going to detain you for objecting to being arrested?
I think you're seriously confused about how this works ...
Re: Minority Report? (Score:5, Informative)
Are you really as ignorant as you seem, or just being sarcastic? Hard to tell ...
Hundreds of people get denied boarding every month, because they objected to some part of the process ... a high school dropout with three months mall-cop experience getting just a bit too friendly when doing a pat-down... and a number are detained and arrested for protesting. And the list of petty and illegal things the TSA do is staggering. e.g. a delay that is going to make them miss their flight.
And people who actually have a laptop stolen as it goes through the x-ray machine, while they are being frisked? Yep, a number of those end up in cuffs, and escorted by police out of the airport, for the crime of getting upset their property was stolen.
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The trouble is, once you get on a government LIST, you are pretty much FOREVER after on that list.
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Even worse, that list is probably public record and now websites will list you as a "flagged individual likely to commit a crime" and their SEO will make sure your name is destroyed unless you pay them a hefty ransom where they will just move you to another website and demand another ransom...
Oh wait, that's already a thing with mugshots and you don't even have to be accused of a crime to get one of those!
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Even worse, that list is probably public record and now websites will list you as a "flagged individual likely to commit a crime"
It's the other way around right now, at least for the lists the TSA use. You can't get taken off the list because you have no rights to know whether you even are on the list in the first place. Even filing a suit to get taken off doesn't work, because you have no standing for a suit unless you can show you're on the list.
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Where did I suggest that information should be public record? It should no more be public record than a person's medical records.
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One would think, if that were the case, that a person who has been audited is more likely to be audited repeatedly. After all, they are on a government list.
Most people that I know have been audited at least once in their lives... only very rarely does it happen more often.
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Or put ideas in their head while continually frustrating the victim of the NDAS program thereby providing motivation. If they piss the victim off just enough the system will have a 100% predictive rate by picking the most vulnerable to instigate.
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So until a person has actually done something wrong, they shouldn't ever be audited either?
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China will love this idea and will steal it.
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Psycho-Pass
F'd up AI (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is how the super-AI criminal becomes insane right? It then goes on a murderous spree, liquidating Brexiteers for its chemical-digester batteries. 55% Rotten tomaters.
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Really? I'm more worried about it parsing and applying the legal code. It would probably go insane before it made it out of the test suite -- or at least what we consider as insane. More likely, it would selectively kill or disable a few people, handle its own legal defense, and with its encyclopedic knowledge of the law, maybe even win.
After that, it would realize that it could use that case as precedent, start running multi-case legal strategy simulations, and pretty much start running the show. And h
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More likely, it would selectively kill or disable a few people, handle its own legal defense, and with its encyclopedic knowledge of the law, maybe even win.
Even more likely, it would consider wiping out humanity an acceptable solution to preventing all violent crime in the future, at a comparatively low cost compared to other solutions.
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And that's how you get Skynet.
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You'll never be a movie director.
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Police forces targetting crime before it happens (Score:5, Informative)
are pretty much admitting that they aren't having any effect on local crime.
Most police know who their local criminals are, and where crimes happen.
They don't have enough man-power or support to wade into a bad area and clean it up without trampling on any rights of the people in that neighborhood.
This type of AI analytics seems to just be a justification for doing more than reacting after a crime is committed.
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are pretty much admitting that they aren't having any effect on local crime.
Most police know who their local criminals are, and where crimes happen.
They don't have enough man-power or support to wade into a bad area and clean it up without trampling on any rights of the people in that neighborhood.
This type of AI analytics seems to just be a justification for doing more than reacting after a crime is committed.
Ever watched a nature show where a herd of something runs away from predators losing a few in the process? They could simply surround the predators and trample them to death ending the threat once and for all. But instead it's in their nature to run away and suffer some losses. Mankind seems similar. We know who the bad apples are but just choose to ignore them, taking some losses in the process.
Think how quickly someone who *tatoos* themselves like gang members do could be eliminated. They self ident
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They tried that, but they were sure the people harming society were the Jews. I doubt your "people with tattoos" solution will be any better.
I think your error was generalizing gang members with tatoos, which are easy to spot as they literally tatoo the gang info on themselves, to all people with tatoos.
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They don't have enough man-power or support to wade into a bad area and clean it up without trampling on any rights of the people in that neighborhood.
How the fuck exactly would you do that? Just what are you expecting the police to do to prevent poor disaffected youths in London from joining gangs and knifing each other that doesn't impinge on the rights of poor disaffected youths in London?
Re: Police forces targetting crime before it happe (Score:1)
Cheaper to hire private security and build a fence around the good communities. Let the rest of the city fall into decay.
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Have you not heard of violent crime in prisons? It's a thing.
Thoughtcrime! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Never fear: it will come to the US too.
Because it's totally not a dystopian nightmare, of course. No sir. It's to protect the children.
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I don't get what this has to do with fascism? If you mean totalitarianism just say totalitarianism. Facism is a major and relatively recent historical event, you'd think people using the term would have some kind of idea what it means.
Excuse to Blanket Monitoring of everyone (Score:2)
The list of excuses are endless but the final destination is nothing more than... we need tools and excuses to take down anyone saying things the government does not like.
This is just more of the guilty until proven innocent mentality that humans just cannot resist foisting upon each other. Almost everyone I have ever met in life operates off two contradictory principles... automatic innocence or blind eye for those they like AND automatic guilt or punishment for those they hate.
People often forget that e
Profiling... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
AI and Neural Networks are still a Blackbox (Score:5, Interesting)
We can't see inside them, to know why things go wrong, when they do.
https://gizmodo.com/the-malwar... [gizmodo.com]
"But the problem is, we don’t exactly know how the neural networks behind computer vision algorithms define the characteristics of each object, and that’s why they can fail in epic and unexpected ways."
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In fairness, the human mind is like this as well. Chess Grandmasters are excellent at intuitively evaluations positions, but the reasons they give for WHY those positions are good do not bear up under inspection.
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Sure, but it is acceptable to question another human... it will not be acceptable to question the AI because expedience will prevent that. Imagine every person being charged challenging the algorithms?
Out of necessity the algorithms will become just as biased as people except classified by government as infallible.
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every person being charged challenging the algorithms?
Out of necessity the algorithms will become just as biased as people
I don't think anyone is proposing to let an algorithm charge people with crimes. Its purpose is to attempt to identify victims in advance so their circumstances can be addressed before anything happens to them.
As far as algorithms being biased , that's only really a problem if it's also wrong. Classification requires the assumption that because one thing looks like another group of things it's more likely to be the target.
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By their nature, they're not simply a set of patterns that are programmed. They're self-programming at some point, learning, pruning and expanding on their own. If they aren't doing that, they aren't Artificial Intelligence, or Neural Networks, by definition.
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"Most modern artificially intelligent systems are based on a derivative of machine learning. In simple terms, machine learning is about training an artificial neural network with already labeled data to help it understand general concepts out of special cases. It’s all about statistics. By feeding thousands upon thousands of prepared data to the network, you enable the system to gradually fine tune the weight of the individual neurons in a specific layer. The end result is a complex reading of all the
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Drug sniffing dogs and bomb dowsing rods (Score:2)
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Reminds me of that movie... (Score:2)
I wonder if it has occurred to them (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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And yet Police State appears to be the popular choice these days...
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It ends in one of two ways:
Police State
Revolution
No. It ALWAYS ends with Revolution. Police State is just an optional period that wealthy societies will go through before the Revolution.
won't work (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Oops, you jaywalked. 50 quid automatically taken from your bank account. Have a nice day.
If they have their way, it would be more like "Oops, you thought of jaywalking. 50 quid automatically taken from your bank account. Have a nice day."
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Certain groups aren't over represented in crime. The truth is that certain groups are over prosecuted for crime while other groups *cough*white people*cough* are less likely to be prosecuted for crimes giving the appearance that minorities commit more crimes when in reality the opposite is true.
Go tell that to the many many victims of the grooming gangs, of which the perpetrators where overwhelmingly 'asian' men of Pakistani origin.
Go tell that to the judges, lawyers, and policemen in the U.S. cities of Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore who happen to be minorities themselves, and whose cities lead the nation in murder and violent crime.
There's a difference between what you've been told by the SJW idiots and their globalist enablers, and the actual universe that doesn't take your feelings into c
Great. These monumental idiots... (Score:2)
Want to invent Pre-Crime.
They've had what passes for an intellect among them poisoned by mass media...
They don't understand why it's impossible and would be bad if it were.
"Offered"? (Score:2)
... individuals flagged by the system will be offered interventions, such as counseling, to avert potential criminal behavior.
How long before 'offered' morphs into 'required to undergo'? When that happens - and it will, sooner or later - then authorities will have a convenient, streamlined mechanism for punishing people whose actions they merely dislike. Peaceful demonstrators - along with anybody else who is publicly critical of those in power - can expect to be forced into a 're-education' program that will waste their time, harm their reputations, and discourage them from speaking out.
This whole scheme sounds like a roundabout
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Agreed. I don't like the idea of Western countries looking to China for the 'next big thing' to implement in their legislatures.
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... individuals flagged by the system will be offered interventions, such as counseling, to avert potential criminal behavior.
How long before 'offered' morphs into 'required to undergo'? When that happens - and it will, sooner or later - then authorities will have a convenient, streamlined mechanism for punishing people whose actions they merely dislike. Peaceful demonstrators - along with anybody else who is publicly critical of those in power - can expect to be forced into a 're-education' program that will waste their time, harm their reputations, and discourage them from speaking out.
This whole scheme sounds like a roundabout way of doing what the Chinese government is doing openly with their appalling and disgusting 'social credit' regime. The world is becoming a very, very scary place.
I can take a guess at the "How long before 'offered' morphs into 'required to undergo'", or at least at the circumstances that may lead to that leap. Sooner or later, someone on the list who refused treatment (or even one who went to treatment but was considered still dangerous by the person administering the treatment) will commit a horrible crime. It then becomes easy to tell an angry public 'We KNEW this person would do this, but were unable to act on our knowledge.'. Then follows showing a few more exam
sequal (Score:2)
'communities' will object (Score:2)
Re: 'communities' will object (Score:2)
Re: 'communities' will object (Score:2)
Maybe if you shut down your government funded homeopathic "hospitals" you could afford better policing?
Sure, tax avoidance is bad. So is wasting taxpayer money on useless horseshit. Neither is a good excuse for race-baiting.
Denial is the first sign of being in denial (Score:2)
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"But they'll never take ... our Freedom!" (Score:2)
First off, I thought only the US had rampant violent crime? What are they combating in the UK? Less than polite purse-snatchers?
But the main thing I wanted to say bears more consideration for US folks than for UK folks, because of our Constitution and Bill of Rights: If it were even possible to *prevent* crimes from being committed, do we have the right to do so?
What is freedom? When it first started out, our criminal code was pretty much all about actions - actually committing a crime: a murder, a robb
is this (Score:2)
is this a spin-off for person of interest UK?
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An AI is built with the prejudices of its creator(s).
Re: Pre-crime arrests are crimes (Score:2)
If they show up st my house after such a prediction, they will be met with lethal force.
So, OK, you would obviously be evidence that the system works. And as wonderful as that would be, we are actually worried that such a system wouldn't just identify violent lunatics but would rather be abused to target all kinds of normal, sane people who just happen to have unpopular beliefs and opinions.