News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:AI is going to supercharge surveillance by thfuran on Monday January 29, 2018 @09:39AM (#16257721)
>When it becomes almost 100% reliable and some unlucky person gets convicted because of a glitch but no-one cares because they trust the system.

Wouldn't that be a massive improvement over the current state of things? Convictions are currently made on the basis of very unreliable things.

Re:AI is going to supercharge surveillance by jancsika on Monday January 29, 2018 @11:42AM (#16258527)
That would only be a massive improvement if you have a set of almost 100% perfectly just laws to accompany your near-perfect enforcement.

I've seen a lot of things on HN, but I've never seen anyone argue that the current set of state and federal laws in the U.S. are anywhere close to 100% just. So you're going to have to factor in the cost of having perfect enforcement of unjust laws.

There's also the problem of trying to curb the bad effects of perfect enforcement after the fact. Show me a politician willing to scale back some of the bad law passed post-911. That's a difficult task because nobody wants the liability of being the one who was "soft on terrorism" or whatever the claim would be.

If you take those costs seriously, you'll need to take steps to ensure that the system does not in practice attempt to do perfect enforcement. And your arguments will sound more and more counter-intuitive as the capability for perfect enforcement-- and the dollars it would bring to a municipality-- grows.

Re:AI is going to supercharge surveillance by ams6110 on Monday January 29, 2018 @10:37AM (#16258052)
Not really. The system certainly isn't perfect, but the vast majority of people convicted are actually guilty.

Is the system vulnerable to a person being targeted, evidence fabricated, and a false conviction obtained? Yes, assuming malicious intent or corruption. I'm not sure AI fixes that.

Re:AI is going to supercharge surveillance by TeMPOraL on Monday January 29, 2018 @10:49AM (#16258137)
GP is asking if a system that's almost 100% right isn't better than the current, which is somewhat, sorta right, more often than not.