Even human beings are not always able to identify illegal activities, let alone AI.
Any given AI won’t spot general unlawfulness at this point, but they are getting designed to spot specific laws getting broken.
Perhaps I could have phrased my “in general” better.
I don't drive, so no :)
More to the point, figuring out the speed of a moving object is not an AI task- and I don't mean that in the sense of "if it works it's not AI". I mean, really, it's not something AI was ever interested in, presumably because it's not a particularly complicated calculation, given the right equipment.
Generally, AI is interested in problems that demand, how can I put it, unorthodox solutions. Or just very tricky ones.
So the kind of thing I thought you meant was identifying, say, burglars or muggers, from video feeds etc. That sort of thing is not possible yet, certainly not outside controlled conditions ("in the lab").
Reading the number plate, on the other hand…
I would be surprised if the AI in any worthwhile self driving car couldn’t detect 90% of categories of unlawful road use.
Detecting assaults may be computationlly unreasonable at this point, but there is work on generating 3D meshes which map to all human bodies in a scene, so it’s not unreasonable to draw a line from one to the other. Identifying that a theft has occurred, however, probably can’t be done yet outside carefully controlled conditions. Yet.
(I have been given one speeding ticket, but in error because I had sold the car before the incident).
Yep, that's a honest-to-god AI task :)
>> Detecting assaults may be computationlly unreasonable at this point, but there is work on generating 3D meshes which map to all human bodies in a scene, so it’s not unreasonable to draw a line from one to the other.
I think the closest analogy is pose estimation, where there's quite a bit of work (in particular, I think there's a lot of interest in learning to identify body postures that can lead to a fall, in order to reduce injuries to older people). I don't remember seeing work on identifying criminal intent in particular, though.
My intuition is that it's more than a matter of computational resources and will require some algorithmic advances. But, you never know.
>> (I have been given one speeding ticket, but in error because I had sold the car before the incident).
Automation, eh? :)
Yup. No idea how it went wrong given I only owned it for only a few weeks specially so I could sell it on behalf of my partner after she accidentally moved to America (I have a complicated reality [1]), and the DVLA sent me acknowledgment, about nine months before I got the letter from the police, that I had sold it.
[1] “And that’s how I found out that Michael Jackson works for the USAF.”